Commodities and (Being) Good: Nahuatl Traders and Merchants.
General Merchant definition
For the Nahuatl peoples, they had an entire class of merchants named pochteca, and they sold a variety of goods. What makes it more interesting is that the Florentine Codex not only describes the trade, but the moral means of trade as well. To be specific, in Book 10: The People, the Spanish translation goes as follows:
“The merchant is often a haggler, and he knows how to earn a profit and how to loan with interest, how to make deals with buyers, and how to multiply his wealth.” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).
What is also interesting, in interest of studying not only Nahuatl forms of trade, but also their culture. To be specific, in the documents that describe merchants, vocations, and trade, there is also a good iteration and a bad variant. Following the description of a merchant, the Spanish to English translation describes the two variants:
“A good merchant takes his wares abroad, away from his land, and sells them for a moderate price, each item according to its value, just as it is, not cheating anyone with them but always fearing god. A god merchant is stingy and tight, a cheater, a talker, and arrogant; one who overprices things, a big speculator; a thief, a liar, and one whose bad conscience lurks behind everything he has and spends. And all his earnings are ill-gotten; and he is a smooth talker when making a sell. And he praises what he is selling so much that he easily swindles the buyers.” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).
This implies that within Nahuatl society, there was an emphasis on practicing what would be contemporarily called ethical capitalism. No matter what merchandise was being sold, there was a right way to do so, and what was considered honorable. This not only presents a new perspective onto how Nahuatl society functioned, and how some of the practices they implemented in their day could possibly synergize with modern conflicts and issues.
But before fixating on historical themes, the primary purpose of this paper is to document the various trade vocations worked in Nahuatl society and how this produce was traded around the empire.
Cacao Traders
Agriculture traders typically specialized in a singular product and were usually responsible for that good’s export and trade. For example, in the Florentine Codex, there is an instance in which the Cacao pod, an integral part of Nahuatl economy, traders are described and how they function (both morally and immorally). One of the most important products for the Nahuatl empire (especially once the Spanish arrived) was Cacao seeds:
“The one who trades cacao often has a great quantity of it, and he also has fields of cacao; and he takes it abroad to sell it, or he buys it wholesale to sell in single lots. A good trader of this merchandise sells seeds that are fat, firm, and selected. He separates each one when he sells them; he keeps the ones that are fat and solid in one place (…)” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).
There were also different types of cacao seeds as well, and “each kind [was] sold separately; the ones from Tochtepec, the one from Anahuac, the ones from Cuauhtemala, the one from Coatulco, the ones from Xoloteco – whether they are whitish or ashen or red.”
This commodity also has a bad trader variant as well: “A bad trader sells fake [seeds], because he boils them and even toasts them so that they look good, and sometimes he soaks them in water so that they swell. And he makes them look ashen colored or tawny to deceive [people], because these are the best seeds. And he also has this way of counterfeiting them: to make the new seeds look fat, he will often toast them in hot ashes and then cover them with clay or with wet soil, so that the seeds that looked tiny will look fat and new. He has another kind of trick: he puts inside the seed husks a black dough or black wax that looks similar to their kernels. And sometimes, they shatter avocado pits, make them round and when they are thus rounded, they put them inside the empty seed husks.” (Garcia Garagarza 2023).
It seems that with every instance in which there is a good being described, it is shortly followed with a brief description on what makes an immoral version of that merchant. It is interesting because it displays a degree of cultural responsibility/honor, and how that may have affected the Nahuatl society as a whole.
Continuing on the subject of Cacao, the product was also used to make a frothy drink that was made from grinded pods. Specifically, in Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, the drink is described as such:
"The woman who sells cacao for drinking first grinds it in this way: first, she breaks or crushes the beans; second, they are crushed a little bit more; third and finally, they are finely crushed and then mixed with cooked and washed maize kernels. And once [the beans] have been crushed and mixed in this way, they pour water on them in a cup. If they add a little water to them, they make a beautiful cacao, and if [they add] a lot [to them], they do not produce foam. And the following things are carefully done and observed in order to prepare it well: that is, it is strained, and once it is strained, it is lifted up in order to pour it; and this is how the foam rises, and then it is put aside. And sometimes it becomes too thick. It is mixed with water after it is ground. And one who knows how to prepare it well sells a beautiful cacao, such that only the lords can drink it: soft, foamy, vermillion, red and pure, and not too thick. Sometimes they add aromatic spices to it and even bee honey, or else some water mixed with flowers. And cacao that is not good is too thick and has too much water, and so it does not produce foam but only some froth."
