Thinking about the Aztec Economy

Frances Berdan (California State University)

Wednesday · 10 December 2025

12 noon ET / 5 pm GMT / 10.30 pm IST

Register: https://forms.gle/WfMBevJHW8NdUAzG9

The is a free, virtual event.

When he first entered the Tlatelolco marketplace in 1519, the Spaniard Bernal Díaz wrote that he had ‘never seen such a thing before’. The abundance and variety of goods there far eclipsed the great bazaars of the Old World these exhausted sailors had only read about. How did a civilization with no cart or pack animal manage to build such a thriving site of commercial exchange?

In this lecture, Frances Berdan explores how canoes, porters and tribute knit the Aztec economic world together in a world before capitalism.

Frances F. Berdan is professor emerita of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. Her latest book is The Aztec Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

This lecture launches Money before Capitalism, a series on premodern finance—property, credit and currencies—and the worlds it might have brought into being.