Teotihuacan as World System: concerning the applicability of Wallerstein’s model
Author(s)
Price, Barbara J.
Abstract
This paper constitutes a preliminary and necessarily brief attempt to examine the model developed by Wallerstein to explain the political economy of 16th century Europe and Euro-America, in order to assess its potential applicability to a wider and more general class of phenomena. The central question involves the degree to which processes known to be implicated in the colonial expansion of a capitalist Europe can be retrodicted to a situation in which the expanding metropole is a paleotechnic, pre- or non-capitalist state. The principal “test case” will be Teotihuacan, with supplementary and comparative evidence drawn from Aztec. This paper aims to prove that appeal to higher-order, more inclusive premises or axioms can provide a deductive framework that permits descriptively distinct observations, recovered by different and in many ways noncomparable techniques, to do comparable work, to address comparable problems. Although “ground truth” has yet to be sought, the search itself must be directed theoretically for it to become productive. Thus we reject the question as to whether Teotihuacan constituted an empire in the Aztec sense, it’s irrelevant (for our purposes) as Teotihuacan, in its time and place, was a world-economy.
