"Death and Taxes: Every Empire Has Its Price" by Samuel M. Wilson in "Natural History" (April 1991, pp. 22-25) "Taxation is made more shameful and burdensome," wrote Salvian the Presbyter in the fifth century, "because all do not bear the burden of all. They extort tribute from the poor man for the taxes of the rich, and the weaker carry the load for the stronger" ("The Writings of Salvian the Presbyter," Catholic University Press, 1947). Salvian was complaining of the tax burden imposed on conquered territory by the Roman Empire, but the same sentiments might have been expressed by New World peoples as they were incorporated into the expanding Spanish empire. In a large part of the New World, most notably in regions ruled by the Aztec and Inca empires, people probably grumbled about taxes long before the arrival of the Europeans. From the smallest agrarian chiefdom to empires spanning continents, governments throughout history have lived off the surplus produced by the populace, and they have engineered economies to insure that such a surplus was produced. When they conquered the most complex societies of the New World, the Spaniards substituted their own systems of taxation for those already in place. How, we may wonder, did the conquistadors come to the conclusion that New World people owed them anything? Montezuma might have pondered this as he sat under house arrest in the Spaniards' quarters in Tenochtitlan. For most early Spanish conquerors, however, it was a given. Columbus took it for granted and had a tribute system in place on Hispaniola by 1494: All the natives between the ages of fourteen and seventy years bound themselves to pay him tribute in the products of the country at so much per head, promising to fulfill their engagement. Some of the conditions of this agreement were as follows: the mountaineers of Cibao were to bring to the town every three months a specified measure filled with gold. They reckon by the moon and call the months moons. The islanders who cultivated the lands which spontaneously produced spices and cotton, were pledged to pay a fixed sum per head ["De Orbe Novo," by Peter Martyr D'Anghera. Burt Franklin, 1912]. Perhaps for sixteenth-century Europeans (as in twentieth- century conventional wisdom) taxes were one of the two inescapable things. Or perhaps Spain, in demanding tribute from conquered peoples, took Rome as its model. Gaul and Britain and Spain itself--or the peoples and lands that then constituted Spain--had paid tribute to Rome a thousand years before Columbus sailed. Within the Roman system, as in almost all tax systems, the state's objective was to extract the greatest amount of money, goods, and services for the least cost. During the period of the Roman Republic, the imposition of tribute on conquered territories was an important motivation for the conquests in the first place. Nevertheless, to subjugate the provinces completely and hold them to the letter of tribute demands was probably impossible and certainly not expedient. Conquered territories attempted to minimize their tribute burden without attracting the attention of the imperial army. The Romans, too, were eager to preserve the peace. For example, Julius Caesar's strategy for extracting tribute from the province of Gaul depended on convincing local leaders that producing tax revenues was in their interest. In Caesar's words (written in the third person): During the winter which he spent in Belgic Gaul Caesar made it his single aim to keep the tribes loyal, and to see that none had any pretext for revolt or any hope of profiting by it. The last thing he wanted was to have to fight a campaign immediately before his departure; for it would mean leaving Gaul in a state of rebellion when the time came to withdraw his army, and all the tribes would be only too willing to take up arms when they could do so without immediate risk. So he made their condition of subjection more tolerable by addressing the tribal governments in complimentary terms, refraining from the imposition of any fresh [tax] burdens, and bestowing rich presents upon the principal citizens. By these means it was easy to induce a people exhausted by so many defeats to live at peace ["The Conquest of Gaul," Penguin Books, Ltd., 1951]. Spanish tacticians also knew that much was to be gained by co-opting the local rulers. They coerced and courted them into becoming agents of the empire who would collect tribute and keep the peace. Spain's treatment of its New World territories was similar in other respects to Rome's relationship to its provinces. To generate income, Spain placed the greatest effort in areas of great return (like the gold- and silver-mining regions), just as Rome exploited Britain's mineral wealth. Spain pensioned off its soldiers with grants of New World lands and the labor of conquered people, just as Rome granted parcels of conquered land to retiring soldiers to repay them cheaply and to further subdue the provinces. And like Rome, Spain kept the cost of having an army within bounds by using the threat of force more often than force itself. As did Rome and Spain, the Inca empire in the Andes undertook its conquests with the smallest standing army possible. But their might was still adequate to subjugate unwilling populations whose traditional leadership had noting to gain and everything to lose by imperial conquest. And like the Romans, the Inca relied on the cooperation of local elites to fill the imperial coffers. The Inca policy of gentle persuasion involved taking provincial hostages to the Inca capital, Cuzco, to live in great style. These guests were steeped in the city's language and culture. Undoubtedly, it would have been impressed on them that the treatment they received depended entirely upon their participation in extracting tribute from their homelands. Garcilaso de la Vega, whose mother was a member of the Inca elite and whose father was a Spanish nobleman, described the strategy of the Inca emperor: They also carried off the leading chief and all his children to Cuzco, where they were treated with kindness and favor so that by frequenting the court they would learn not only its laws, customs, and correct speech, but also the rites, ceremonies, and superstitions of the Incas. This done, the [chief] was restored to his former dignity and authority, and the Inca, as king, ordered the vassals to serve and obey him as their natural lord. The Inca bestowed ... gifts on newly conquered Indians, so that however brutish and barbarous they had been they were subdued by affection and attached to his service by a bond so strong that no province ever dreamed of rebelling. And in order to remove all occasion for complaint and to prevent dissatisfaction from leading to rebellion, he confirmed and promulgated anew all the former laws, liberties, and statutes so that they might be more esteemed and respected, and he never changed a word of them unless they were contrary to the idolatry and laws of his empire ["Royal Commentaries of the Incas," translated by Harold Livermore, University of Texas Press, 1966]. The Aztec empire, centered in the capital city Tenochtitlan, also resembled republican Rome in its treatment of peripheral territories. In his recent book "Trade, Tribute, and Transportation" (University of Oklahoma Press), historical anthropologist Ross Hassig emphasized three correspondences in his analysis of the Aztec empire before and during the Spanish conquest: While the similarities between the Romans and the Aztecs can be overstated, they did share certain characteristics: (1) expansion of political dominance without direct territorial control, (2) a focus on the internal security of the empire by exercising influence on a limited range of activities within the client states, and (3) the achievement of such influence by generally retaining rather than replacing local officials. When the Inca and Aztec empires fell to Spain, the conquerors seemed in a good position to replace the top strata of New World bureaucratic structures, leaving lower strata intact to funnel tribute upward. But substituting tribute to Spain for tribute to Cuzco or Tenochtitlan was a disaster for several reasons. Foremost, the conquest brought massive loss of life through the introduction of Old World diseases. The indigenous economies were completely disrupted by epidemics that in many areas killed 70 to 90 percent of the population in less than a century, providing a grimly literal example of a shrinking tax base. In the New World, death and taxes were more closely linked than in the proverbial sense. Second, the expanding European empire did not merely replace the top tier of the indigenous tribute system; it short-circuited the entire structure. Under the Aztec system, for example, tribute flowed through a pyramidal series of institutions, from local governments to regional centers to provincial capitals to Tenochtitlan. With the imposition of Spanish control, these intermediate stops were bypassed; tribute went from local regions directly to Mexico City and from there to Spain. Regional centers and administrative systems withered and disappeared, undercutting the native political order. Finally, European governments and entrepreneurs were interested in forms of wealth that were tangible and transportable. Taxes in the form of labor--such as the Inca mita system, which supplied a work force for state projects--were less appealing. Thus, local groups that had previously met their obligations by working for the state from time to time were forced to pay tribute in goods. As bad as this was, the situation was still worse for those New World people who were unaccustomed to life within the sphere of tribute-demanding empires. For the, being forced to pay taxes in the form of money or goods or labor was an impossible order: little or no surplus was generated by their subsistence economies, and no tribute-collecting mechanisms were in place. As a result, most of these peoples were pushed from their lands or trampled in the course of European expansion. Today, of course, we enjoy the advantage of governing ourselves, instead of paying tribute to some foreign imperial power. And yet, as Thomas Paine observed in "Common Sense," Government even in the best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Samuel M. Wilson is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.