POTOSI INTRODUCTION. THE SILVER AGE

Introduction The Age of Silver Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky “I am the rich Potosí, I am the treasure of the world, I am the king of the mountains and the envy of kings”. Legend of the first coat of arms of Potosí, granted by Charles V on January 28, 1547. … “If I were to pay you, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “according to what the greatness and quality of this remedy deserves, the treasure of Venice and the mines of Potosí would be too little to pay you; you take the tact of what you carry of mine, and set the price at every whip.” miguel de cervantes saavedra, Don Quixote de la Mancha, 1605. ∵ Potosí—the treasure of the world and envy of kings since the sixteenth century—was the maximum expression of fortune, although insufficient for Sancho’s invaluable services to Don Quixote.1 The name of Potosí originally designated the imposing red, pyramid-shaped mountain at an altitude of 4,090 meters above sea level (see Figure 0.1); its mines allowed the development of the city of Potosí, which extended from the foot of the mountain, to become an important industrial center with a population as large as London or Paris. Its wealth, which has become almost legendary, contrasts with its conditions of exploitation, which continue to this day. 1 The metaphor of a Golden Age is frequently used for different periods. For Spanish America, the metaphor of a Silver Age could be useful for the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, although the production of gold was also important. Richard Von Glahn spoke also of a “silver century” in the early sixteenth due to the importance of Japanese silver. See Richard Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 114. We thank our reviewers for their valuable comments. We are very grateful to Carlos Contreras, Ad Knotter, Carlos Marichal, Filipa Ribeiro Da Silva and MarieJose Spreunwerg for their reading and fruitful insights. We are responsible for the text. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 © Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky, 2023 Downloaded | doi:10.1163/9789004528680_002 from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM This is an open access chapter distributed under the of the CCaccess BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. via Open Access. Thisterms is an open chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 2 Barragán R. and Zagalsky figure 0.1 Potosí today photograph taken in june 2008 from the rooftops of the san francisco church by paula c. zagalsky The silver from Potosí and Spanish America was central to the birth of longdistance world trade and the first wave of globalization.2 Between 1500 and 1800, Spanish America contributed approximately 150,000 tons of silver to the world. Some have even estimated that it supplied 85% of the world’s silver and 71% of its gold.3 Over this extended period, both minerals were crucial in exchanges between Europe, Africa, and Asia.4 Gunder Frank as well as Flynn 2 See Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–21; Bernd Hausberger, Historia mí­ nima de la globalización temprana (México: El Colegio de México, 2018). 3 See these estimations in Rossana Barragán R., “Potosí’s Silver and the Global World of Trade (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” in On the Road to Global Labour History, ed. H. Roth (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2017). Overall, Gunder Frank estimated that Spanish America produced 17,000 tons of silver in the sixteenth century, 42,000 tons in the seventeenth century, and 74,000 tons in the eighteenth century. Gunder Frank, ReOrient, Maps 2.1 and 3.1; see Rossana Barragán, “Potosí’s Silver,” 78. Following Cross, the percentage of world production was 68.5% in 1600, 84.4 in 1700, and 89.5 in 1800. Harry E. Cross, “South American Bullion Production and Export, 1550–1750,” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. J. F. Richards (Durham: North Carolina University Press, 1983), 403. 4 Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: China, American Silver and Global Markets during the Early Modern Period” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam: Faculty of Humanities, 1999), 31–32; Ward Barrett, “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 3 and Giráldez have highlighted the importance of Asia, and particularly China, in the global flow of silver.5 Gunder Frank’s book ReOrient claimed the existence of a single global economy in which “the wheels of this global market … [were] oiled by the worldwide flow of silver.”6 The result was that all continents participated in a continuous direct and indirect exchange of goods on a scale that left a deep and lasting impact. Potosí has been one of the main axes of this world economy since 1545, intensely mined for at least two and a half centuries. Potosí was in the Audiencia de Charcas, first as part of the viceroyalty of Peru, with its center in Lima, and since 1776 as part of the viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, with its center in Buenos Aires. Potosí contributed 61% of the silver produced in southern Hispanic America from 1545 to 1810.7 The peak of its production was between 1580 and 1630, when Potosí produced 81% of the official silver of the viceroyalty of Peru and up to 60% of global production.8 Potosí recovered in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially from 1730 onwards (Figure 0.2).9 5 6 7 8 9 University Press, 1990), 224; Richard L. Garner, “Long-term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 898–935; Alejandra Irigoin, “Global Silver: Bullion or Specie? Supply and Demand in the Making of the Early Modern Global Economy.” lse Economic History Working Paper Series 285 (2018a); Alejandra Irigoin, “The New World and the Global Silver Economy,” in Global Economic History, ed. Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 271–86; Artur Attman, “American Bullion in the European World Trade: 1600–1800,” Acta Regiae Societatis Scientiartis et Litterarum Gothoburgensis–Humaniora 26 (Göteborg: Kungl, 1986); William S. Atwell, “International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy circa 1530– 1650,” Past & Present 95 (1982): 68–90; Kirti N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune; Dennis O. Flynn, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’”; Carlos Marichal, Steven Topik, and Zephyr L. Frank, From Silver to Cocaine: Five Centuries of Latin American Economic History, 1500–2000 (México: El Colegio de México, 2017). See particularly Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity Through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391– 427; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, World Silver and Monetary History in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 30, 52, 55. Calculated from data extracted from: TePaske, A New World of Gold and Silver (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 142–212. Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’,” 201–21, 209. Garner, “Long-term Silver Mining Trends”; Tandeter, Coacción y mercado: la minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692–1826 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1992); TePaske, A New World, 142–212; Barragán R., “Potosí’s Silver and the Global World of Trade.” It should be noted that during the period of the first Potosí boom (1580–1630), silver production from some nearby mines was counted as coming from Potosí as it was registered at the same royal treasury, especially before the creation of the Caja Real de Oruro in 1607. See María Concepción Gavira Márquez, Población indígena, sublevación y minería en Carangas (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2008). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1545-1550 1551-1560 1561-1570 1571-80 1581-90 1591-1600 1601-10 1611-20 1621-30 1631-40 1641-50 1651-60 1661-70 1671-80 1681-90 1691-1700 1701-10 1711-20 1721-30 1731-40 1741-50 1751-60 1761-70 1771-80 1781-90 1791-1800 1801-10 Millions of pesos Barragán R. and Zagalsky figure 0.2 Silver production in Potosí, 1545–1810 (in millions of pesos of 272 maravedíes) source: Barragán and Zagalsky based on data extracted from tepaske, a new world, 142– 212 Silver became so ubiquitous that the word “dollar” traces its origins to this time: the thaler referred to the silver coins minted in Jáchymov (Joachimsthal) since 1520 and to the Spanish coin of eight reales known as the Spanish dollar. Irigoin has asserted that the peso was the most successful world currency, known in France as the piaster; the duro or “hard” peso in Spain; and in the English world, it was referred to as a royal and/or Spanish dollar.10 Flows of silver across the world are part of the narratives of globalization’s early history. The complex ways in which different resources were put to work in the mining centers of production, however, do not have the same visibility— somehow it is still assumed that circulation is global but production is merely local. This book, Potosí in the Global Silver Age (16th–19th Centuries) seeks to 10 “In the Early modern period, a coin of silver made in the New World was the base on which prices and exchange rates were established in far distant places as Leghorn (Livorno) … Bourbon Island, Surat, Manila, Macao, Cadiz, Havana.” See Alejandra Irigoin, “Rise and Demise of the Global Silver Standard,” Handbook of the History of Money and Currency, ed. S. Battilossi et al. (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 2. The author underlined that this currency lasted more than two centuries before a gold standard came to define the classic economic globalization of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the British pound and the US dollar. See also Carlos Marichal, “El peso o real de a ocho: moneda universal de España y América, siglos xvi–xviii,” in El camino hacia al euro: el real, el escudo y la peseta (Madrid: Banco España, 2001) and particularly Carlos Marichal, “The Spanish-American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and Global Money of the Ancien Regime, 1550–1800,” in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000, ed. Carlos Marichal, Steven Topik, and Zephir L. Frank (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006); Elena María García Guerra, “Itinerarios mundiales de una moneda supra nacional: el real de a ocho o peso durante la edad moderna,” Studia Historica: Historia Moderna 28 (2006): 241–57. The success of the Spanish peso was also based on the quality of the coins minted over more than three centuries. Marichal, Topik, and Zephyr, From Silver to Cocaine, 39–40. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 5 foreground the entangled infrastructure and political economy that configured a new human and environmental landscape. We refer to the following dynamic processes: 1) the use of local knowledge, but also the adoption and innovation necessary to achieve the important transformations that took place; 2) the intervention (agency) and interests of different actors (workers, entrepreneurs, and authorities); and 3) the articulation and interrelation of different spaces. This volume also seeks to reunite production and circulation, while at the same time underlining the changes over the past 300 years that allowed for important economic changes and the emergence of capitalism. To analyze this center of the global world between the late sixteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, in 2019, eleven scholars from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, the United States, France, Japan, and Great Britain came together in Sucre, Bolivia, to discuss their most recent research published now in this volume. In the first section, the reader travels through geology, sacred spaces, and technical knowledge; through environmental history and labor in the second section; flows, heterogeneous producers, and their agency in the third; and local, regional, and global impacts in the fourth section. The mountain of Potosí was linked to the ancestors and the cult of the Sun, being part of a vast sacred space that had been exploited long before the Hispanic conquest. The knowledge of its geology was interwoven with labor policies and technical practices and innovations were registered in administrative colonial texts (see the first section). Silver production was made possible through an impressive hydraulic infrastructure built by Indigenous workers, artisans, and authorities, while the minted coinage was based in enslaved and coerced labor, although with some margins for negotiations (second section). The silver flows to Asia in the early period were in part in the hands of Peruvian merchants and traders, while its production was held by a diverse group of entrepreneurs who received quota assignments of coerced workers (mitayos). In the eighteenth century, the heterogeneous world of producers included small and artisanal mining and traders (see the third section). The local, regional, and global impacts of the mint fraud of the seventeenth century are carefully analyzed, while the sourcing of mercury in the first half of the nineteenth century reveals the important continuities but also changes introduced after the dissolution of the Spanish Empire (fourth section). Each of these contributions situates Potosí as a hub with local, regional, and global connections.11 11 There are certainly a multitude of topics that have not yet been explored on the city of Potosí, such as the history of justice; art production such as painting, theater, literature and architecture, ritual and festival life; and demography. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 6 Barragán R. and Zagalsky In this introduction for an English-speaking audience, we present an overview of how different actors of diverse empires and regions participated in the silver flows, trying to overcome the “methodological nationalism.” We aim to show the linkages between the Potosí highlands and the lowland coast, as well as the Pacific and Atlantic worlds, allowing a better comprehension of what we call the “Silver Age.” This complex global web is captured in this quote: In the Atlantic so vast … the Carrera of Indias was the umbilical cord that united the Old and the New World for more than three centuries … Let us think in Potosí, an unlikely city far from the sea breeze, which supplies silver to Europe by means of the ships of the Carrera receiving the most precious fabrics from Brabant, Rouen and Florence. We could also think in Damascus, where its governor asks a Sevillian pilgrim if the fleet arrived late, as the lack of currency in the East is accused. The seas, without the inland to order them, are little more than water.12 We begin this history with the shipment of “treasures” of silver and gold from America to Spain, focusing on the global, regional, local, and micro levels. In the following section, Vale un Potosí [to be worth a Potosí],13 we provide a historiographical overview of the mountain and city since 1545, focusing on silver production. Finally, we introduce the work of our guest scholars, whose recent research contributes with diverse perspectives, new questions, and approaches to understanding Potosí in global history. 1 Silver Connections and Trans-imperial Involvement Silver allowed multiple connections: between different spaces and scales (continents, kingdoms, and states) and between different actors (states and private individuals). But how much silver was produced? How much silver arrived in Europe or China? How much silver stayed in Spanish America? There is no simple answer, and this was also the result of the participation of other European powers. The Spanish Crown could not assure that all the minerals produced were registered; it could likewise not ensure its monopoly on the routes and transportation between America and Spain (through the Carrera de Indias), and neither 12 13 Sergio Rodríguez Lorenzo, La Carrera de Indias (La ruta, los hombres, las mercancías) (Madrid: Esles de Cayón, 2015), 11. Expression coined by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in Don Quixote to refer to something of extraordinary and inexhaustible wealth. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 7 could it ensure that trade was only in the hands of its subjects.14 Hence, after presenting different estimates of the so-called American treasures (mostly composed of silver and, to a lesser extent, of gold), we will refer to the involvement of merchants from different European monarchies (whether they were traders, “pirates,” or “buccaneers”) and from Peru itself. In the seventeenth century, we highlight the silver flows outside official circuits, particularly to Asia, that became even more important in the eighteenth century with broad and intensive merchandise exchanges. Non-Spanish merchants, as well as merchandise from other monarchies and regions, became prominent in this period. Finally, we mention briefly the slave trade that linked monarchies and commodities. 1.1 Treasure Shipments, “Piracy” and Trade Shipments of metals were reconstructed in the early and extensive works of Earl and Gladys D. Hamilton, published in 1930 for the period 1501–1650, and Pierre and Huguette Chaunu’s 1955 to 1960 volumes covered the period 1581– 1660. These works, together with those of other authors (see Annex Table 0.1), refined the estimates. These evaluations of American silver and gold transports to Spain distinguish three stages: the first, of ascent, occurred between 1504 and 1610; the second, of recession, between 1610 and 1720, was characterized by the loss of control over this traffic by the Casa de Contratación in Seville; and, finally, that of growth from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth.15 The idea of a deep crisis in the seventeenth century (a recurring theme since the 1960s) was radically questioned by Michel Morineau, who used diverse sources—gazettes, consular reports, among others—to assert that there was not a continuous decline but rather repeated oscillations, revealing the problems faced by the Spanish Crown’s monopoly over intercontinental flows. From 1611 to 1700, undervaluation and smuggling were widespread (Figure 0.3) and, for example, in 1643, more silver arrived in Spain unrecorded than recorded.16 It is clear that the different estimates hide important unresolved issues, such as the amount of silver not registered, problems 14 15 16 García-Baquero pointed out that there should be an “absolute monopoly of commercial exchanges with the colonies … by virtue of the right … acquired by … discovery and conquest” as well as the mercantilist theories and practices that wealth consisted of precious metals (our translation of the quote). See Andalucía y la Carrera de Indias: Estudio Prelimi­ nar de Carlos Martínez Shaw (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2002), 31–32 and 35. García-Baquero, Andalucía y la Carrera de Indias, 12–17. See Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Sevilla y los hombres del comercio (1700–1800) (Sevilla: Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas, 1989). Michel Morineau, recalling Chaunu, pointed out that the practice of shipping silver without a detailed record, noting instead “to be recorded,” opened the door to concealment and fraud. Morineau, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux. Les retours des trésors Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 8 Barragán R. and Zagalsky with sources, and the prominence of smuggling. Annex Table 0.1 reveals the difficulties and gaps in the task of reconstructing the transatlantic flows. John TePaske’s data are based on the record of the quinto and diezmo tax (20% and 10% of officially recorded silver) and tend to be taken as low estimates. The “treasures” of the shipments that circulated were under the administration of the Casa de Contratación, founded in 1503 for the Carrera de Indias and the Flota de Indias or “Spanish Treasure Fleet” of the Atlantic circuit. Morineau described the Carrera de Indias as an immense affair that put on the brink half of Europe from Genes to Hamburg … In 1686 … a fleet from New Spain bring … about 5 million piastres; the Gallions of Tierra Firme … 9 million piasters … On the basis of an alternation of convoys … the merchandises value rose to a total of 21 million of livres tournois or 7 million piasters … To fix the size … of this traffic, it is worth to mention that it equaled two fifths of all the imports from Amsterdam in 1667–1668 and a little less than two thirds of its exports.17 The American “treasures” were shipped from Havana—where the New Spain fleet converged with the Tierra Firme galleons that were loaded with the silver produced in Potosí and transported to Callao, and from there to New Granada, Panama, and Portobelo.18 (Map 0.1) There were also connections to Asia.19 Bonialian and Hausberger thus use the concept, coined by Braudel, of 17 18 19 américains d’après les gazettes hollandaises (xvi–xviii siècles) (Paris: Maison Sciences de l’Homme, 1985), 243–46. In the annual shipments of precious metals used by Marichal based on Morineau, there is a continuous rise, and the second stage of the crisis disappeared. Marichal, “The Spanish-American Silver Peso,” 33. Michel Morineau, Incroyables gazettes, 263. Tierra Firme was the generic name given by European cartographers and bureaucrats in the early colonial period to the coastal territories of northern South America. By extension, this name applied to the territory of South America, including Peru. For the connection between the Americas and Asia, see William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (University of California, 1915); Woodrow W. Borah, Early Colonial Trade and Navigation Between Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); Woodrow W. Borah, Silk Raising in Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943); Antonio Miguel Bernal, “La Carrera del Pacífico: Filipinas en el sistema colonial de la Carrera de Indias,” in España y el Pacífico, Legaspi, ed. Leoncio Cabrero, 485–525 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2004); Marina Alfonso Mola and Carlos Martínez Shaw, “La era de la plata española en Extremo Oriente,” Revista Española del Pacífico 17 (2004): 33–53; Salvador Bernabéu Albert and Carlos Martínez Shaw, eds., Un océano de seda y plata: el universo económico del Galeón de Manila (Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2013); Carmen Yuste, Emporios transpacíficos: comerciantes mexicanos en Manila, 1710–1815 (Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007); Margarita Suárez, “Lima and the Introduction of Peru into the Global Trade of the 16th Century,” in A Companion to Early Modern Lima, ed. Emily A. Engel, 171– 95 (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Mariano Bonialian, El Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 9 map 0.1 Global silver connections: major locations Introduction: The Age of Silver Pacífico Hispanoamericano: política y comercio asiático en el imperio español, 1680–1784, la centralidad de lo marginal (México: Colegio deBarragán México, 2012). Rossana R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 10 Barragán R. and Zagalsky geo-historical axis, which differentiates a transatlantic novo-Hispanic axis; a South American transatlantic axis that linked Spain, Portobelo, and Lima through the Pacific, arriving by land to the Atlantic via Buenos Aires; the transpacific axis of the Manila galleons, from Mexico to the Philippines and from there to Canton (China); and, finally, the transpacific axis between El Callao, the Philippines, and Canton, which operated in some specific periods (1580– 1600 and 1695–1718).20 Given the difficulty in controlling the vast circulation of goods, “piracy” and trade flourished.21 Between 1575 and 1594, there were four English expeditions in the Pacific: those of John Oxenham (1576), Francis Drake (1577–1580), Thomas Cavendish (1586–1588), and Richard Hawkins (1593–1594). From the Spanish point of view, all foreign agents were considered pirates—that is, intruders, robbers, and criminals. Privateers conducted wartime raids under license from a monarch (or other governing body) while smugglers were wellarmed merchants.22 English privateer attacks and plundering of Spanish ships and ports in the Americas increased in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.23 Between 1570 and 1648, the presence of the Dutch in American waters was important, combining war, trade, and piracy.24 Among them was merchant Jacques de Clerck (also known as Jacques l’Hermite), who served in the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or voc), which in 1624 blockaded and attacked the port of Callao, in Lima.25 The seventeenth century was the era of the buccaneers (English, French, Dutch, Danish) that ravaged the Caribbean Sea. Towards the 1680s, many buccaneers abandoned the Caribbean, which explains why between 1683 and 1694, incursions in the Spanish Pacific intensified. The legal and political context of the eighteenth 20 21 22 23 24 25 Mariano Bonialian and Bernd Hausberger, “Consideraciones sobre el comercio y el papel de la plata hispanoamericana en la temprana globalización, siglos xvi–xix,” Historia Mexicana 68, no. 1 (2018): 203–7. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder 1530–1630 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Kenneth R. Andrews, English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies 1588–1595 (New York: Kraus reprint, 1986); Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Piratas, bucaneros, filibusteros y corsarios en América (Madrid: mapfre, 1992); Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500–1750 (New York: Routledge, [1998] 2016), 29–56. Lane, Pillaging the Empire. Roxana Nakashima, “La presencia inglesa en las costas de la Mar del Sur durante las últimas décadas del siglo xvi: ¿una amenaza espiritual en América?” in Conocer el Pacífico: exploraciones, imágenes y formación de sociedades oceánicas, ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert, María del Carmen Mena García and Emilio José Luque Azcona (Seville: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, 2015), 121–48. Some of the most prominent Dutch pirates were Jacob Mahu, Oliver van Noort, Joris van Spielbergen, Wilhelm von Schoutten, Jakob Le Mayre, and Pieter Pieterszoon Heyn; see Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 57–88. Lucena Salmoral, Piratas, bucaneros, filibusteros y corsarios. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 11 Introduction: The Age of Silver table 0.2 Distribution of treasuries in millions of pesos, 1580–1620 Years For the king 1580 1581 1584 1586 1595 1603 1606 1607 1608 1609 1610 1611 1612 1613 1614 1615 1616 1617 1618 1619 1620 2,887,500 1,650,000 2,657,577 1,100,000 7,759,969 2,504,392 1,688,416 1,476,425 2,841,331 2,530,201 2,684,000 2,058,000 3,504,657 2,811,000 3,028,892 2,305,710 2,252,459 1,504,793 1,622,736 1,256,558 476,342 % For individuals % Total 27.27 24.47 4.97 40.00 31.90 23.41 24.83 37.19 28.96 25.21 33.33 26.20 37.50 33.25 31.69 29.03 26.02 22.01 13.25 10.75 10.00 7,700,000 5,094,151 50,762,040 1,650,000 16,569,518 8,193,090 5,112,650 2,493,210 6,970,103 7,507,015 5,369,000 5,796,000 5,841,038 5,644,000 6,528,816 5,638,137 6,405,473 5,331,406 10,623,736 10,431,282 4,288,210 72.73 75.53 95.03 60.00 68.10 76.59 75.17 62.81 71.04 74.79 66.67 73.80 62.50 66.75 68.31 70.97 73.98 77.99 86.75 89.25 90.00 10,587,500 6,744,151 53,419,617 2,750,000 2,4329,487 10,697,482 6,801,066 3,969,635 9,811,434 10,037,216 8,053,000 7,854,000 9,345,695 8,455,000 9,557,708 7,943,847 8,657,932 6,836,199 12,246,472 11,687,840 4,764,552 source: morineau, incroyables gazettes, 102, table 9 century was notoriously more hostile to pirates (known at the time as “freebooters,” mostly of Anglo-American origin).26 The Silver Coveted: Bankers and Merchants 1.2 If the control of silver was difficult, it was also hard to keep the trade in the hands of subjects of the Spanish monarchy. Non-Spanish merchants managed to insert themselves into the mercantile networks through the silver destined 26 Spain’s long-standing fight against pirates was joined by other kingdoms: between 1716– 1726, an English extermination campaign put them on trial and executed some 500 pirates. Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 4. See also Roxana Nakashima, “‘Contra los corsarios, al servicio de su Majestad.’ Expediciones inglesas por el Mar del Sur (1576–1594) en las informaciones de méritos y servicios de los vasallos del rey,” in Felipe ii y Almazarrón: la Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 12 table 0.3 Barragán R. and Zagalsky Structure of Tierra Firme trade in millions of pounds in 1686 Countries Tissus Wools Silks Haber- Wax dashery France Flanders Great Britain Netherlands Hamburg Genoa Spain Total 6,329 210 230 1,540 225 2,505 450 1,243 1,565 8,462 5,835 790 1,945 1,340 491 3,283 1,060 800 5,323 5,026 Utensils Divers Total % 10,854 39.79 1,855 6.80 3,892 14.27 666 333 135 1,329 800 3,253 1,283 4,543 11.92 4.70 16.65 5.87 27,280 63.04 source: morineau, incroyables gazettes, 267, table 44 for the Crown (from the taxes on production), which represented a third part, and the silver destined for private individuals, which was quantitively the most significant (Table 0.2). The money destined for the Crown generally paid off debts. Although the Fuggers, bankers of Emperor Charles V, only monopolized a fifth of the loans, they received privileged treatment until at least 1640. They managed the mercury mines of Almadén, a monopoly of the Crown, which, because of its importance for the amalgamation process used in the mining of American silver, gave them a strategic position. Since the end of the fifteenth century, they also had access to silver from Eastern Europe, selling silver and copper to Venice, the hub of German trade with its links to the east, the west (Lisbon), and the north (Antwerp).27 Antwerp also played a key role in the Portuguese-led transcontinental trade in spices and in the export of textiles thanks to expanding German silver production between 1526 and 1535, in which the Fuggers were also involved.28 Later, in the seventeenth century, the merchants and bankers linked to the Crown were mainly Italians (73%) and Germans (26%).29 The silver of private individuals, on the other hand, paid for merchandise from different parts of Europe. Table 0.3 shows that in 1686, products from 27 28 29 construcción local de un Imperio global, ed. María Martínez Alcalde and José Javier Ruíz Ibáñez (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2014), 311–29. Mark Haberlen, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 95, 38, 49, 53. Herman Van Der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Century), T. 3 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 125, 131, 138. Carlos Álvarez Nogal, Los Banqueros de Felipe iv y los metales preciosos americanos (1621– 1665) (España: Banco de España, 1997),Rossana 24. OnBarragán Antwerp,R.seeand VanPaula Der Wee, The Growth of C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 the Antwerp. Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 13 France accounted for almost 40%, with those from Genoa, Flanders, and the Netherlands also being important. This is why Spain was sometimes considered a “silver bridge.”30 In addition to these global data, some microhistories are illustrative. Flemish Pedro de Colaert, who settled in Cadiz in 1638–1639, accumulated a fortune having his own galleon.31 He and his network had transactions between Andalusia and Amsterdam, carrying merchandise from Europe (Lille, Ghent, Rouen, Lyon, Cantabria, Brabant, Brittany, and Lorraine). They also had representatives in New Spain, Cartagena de Indias, and Buenos Aires.32 They carried out transactions with several people in the Indies who generally occupied important political positions, which explains part of their success.33 The Colaert sons became even more involved by bringing iron and nails to Portobelo and Peru, in community with several merchants from the Basque country. 1.3 Smuggling and Merchants’ Connivance The poor control of the route of the Carrera de Indias meant the leaking of silver from very early on, particularly towards Asia through the Pacific. Garner estimated the silver that flowed through this route at around 56.8 and 34.8 million pesos (officially and unofficially) for the period 1581–1645.34 Chuan Hang Sheng estimated this trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including smuggling, at 2 to 4 million pesos of silver annually (although there are much higher estimates).35 Legal flows of Peruvian and Mexican silver in 30 31 32 33 34 35 Marina Alfonso and Carlos Martínez Shaw, “La era de la plata española en Extremo Oriente,” Revista Española del Pacífico 17 (2004): 37. Manuel Bustos Rodríguez, Burguesía de negocios y capitalismo en Cádiz: los Colarte 1650– 1750 (Cádiz: Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1991), 69. Bustos Rodríguez, Burguesía de negocios, 70–73. They also had direct connections with America: in 1680 they sent a person to Potosí to collect more than 304,000 silver reales for products that had been shipped seventeen years earlier. Bustos Rodríguez, Burguesía de negocios, 54. Richard L. Garner, “Where Did All the Silver Go? Bullion Outflows 1570–1650: A Review of the Numbers and Absence of Numbers (2006),” accessed May 1, 2022, 16, 18, https://www .insidemydesk.com/pnp/silvergo.pdf. The figure of 56.8 million pesos is taken from Engel Sluiter, The Gold and Silver of Spanish America (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California, 1998). The total of 34.8 million pesos comes from the sum of official silver records with Hamilton data from John J. TePaske, “New World Silver, Castile and the Philippines, 1590–1800,” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds. ed. J. F. Richards (Durham: North Carolina University Press, 1983), 425–45. Chuan Hang-Sheng, “Trade between China, the Philippines and the Americas during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Metals and Monies in an Emerging Global Economy, ed. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), 845– 85. Flynn and Giráldez proposed much higher estimates: 5.5 million pesos annually for the period 1581–1700—see Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “China and the Manila Galleons,” in Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy, ed. A. J. H. Latham and Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Heita Kawakatsu (New York: Routledge, 1999), 71–Downloaded 90. from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 14 Barragán R. and Zagalsky the eighteenth century have been appraised at an annual average of 800,000 pesos, although there are higher estimates.36 Bonialian and Hausberger conclude that the direct circulation of silver between America and China through the Pacific axis would have reached considerable dimensions, threatening, at specific junctures, shipments of silver to Europe through the main transatlantic axis.37 Mariano Bonialian states in this volume that between 1590 and 1630, 2 to 3 million pesos per year were shipped directly from Peru to China; between 30% and 50% of that was from Potosí. The port of Buenos Aires has also played a fundamental role in non-legal flows since its foundation in 1580, linking Potosí and the inland market. In addition to the role of non-Spanish merchants, that of Peruvian merchants was particularly important. Margarita Suárez followed the itineraries, strategies, and global connections of a prominent group of them in Lima.38 The Pacific route to and from the Philippines supplied the continent with Asian goods at low prices, allowing high profit margins in short time spans, as opposed to the Atlantic circuits governed by the long terms of the fleet and galleon system (the return on Atlantic investments took between five and six years).39 The Peruvian merchants bought the Asian products in Portobelo, sold them in Lima, and could therefore exert greater control over the production and export of silver, to the detriment of the interests of the metropolitan companies, particularly the Consulate of Seville.40 The ships went from the ports of the “South Sea” (Pacific) to the north loaded with cocoa, wine, vinegar, and silver, returning to Peru with Asian and European merchandise (acquired in Mexico City) and local products (tar, wood, indigo, Mexican silks, and balsam and Campeche wood). Peruvian merchants maintained trade with the Philippines, where they had their agents, known as peruleros.41 36 37 38 39 40 41 The sum of 800,000 pesos derives from Barrett’s estimate of an annual export of 15– 21 tons of silver averaged by year from figures offered by Humboldt (Barrett, “World Bullion Flows,” Table 7.6, 248–49). Carmen Yuste estimated an annual average per galleon of 30–33 tons: Carmen Yuste, El comercio de la Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590–1785 (México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1984). Bonialian and Hausberger, “Consideraciones sobre el comercio,” 218. Margarita Suárez, Comercio y fraude en el Perú colonial: las estrategias mercantiles de un ban­ quero (Lima: iep Ediciones, 1995); Margarita Suárez, Desafíos transatlánticos: mercaderes, ban­ queros y el Estado en el Perú virreinal, 1600–1700 (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica-Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos-Instituto Riva-Agüero, 2001); Margarita Suárez, “El Perú en el mundo atlántico (1520–1739),” in Compendio de historia económica del Perú ii: Economía del período colonial temprano, ed. Carlos Contreras (Lima: bcrp iep, 2009), 229–311. Suárez, “El Perú en el mundo atlántico,” 258–69; Richard L. Garner, “Where Did All the Silver Go?” 27–28. Suárez, “El Perú en el mundo atlántico,” 241. Mariano Bonialian, “Peruleros en Filipinas y en el Oriente, 1580–1610,” Illes i Imperis 23 (2021): 185–211. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 15 Peruvian merchants were able to combine Atlantic and Pacific trade along with land and sea traffic (with the ownership of ships), a pattern that continued until the eighteenth century.42 Credit was key and the constitution of seven banks in Lima in the first half of the seventeenth century reveals the formation of powerful mercantile, productive, and financial consortiums.43 Mariano Bonialian argues, in this volume, that these peruleros were global agents moving across the European and Southeast Asian markets. One of the interesting cases he presents is that of Juan Núñez de Anaya, a wealthy merchant from Potosí on his way to the Philippines. If trade and routes went north and towards Asia through the Pacific, the silver from Potosí also went to Buenos Aires, in the south, opening to the Atlantic. Here, the so-called legal navíos de registro were much less numerous than other non-legal vessels. Between 1648 and 1702, only thirty-four registered ships arrived while 200 vessels traded illegally. Zacarías Moutoukias has argued that the mechanisms, circuits, men, and goods involved were part of the same phenomenon of simultaneous legal and illegal trade.44 France encouraged the settlement of Pacific islands at the end of the seventeenth century, with the prospect of increasing trade with Chile and Peru, outside the system of fleets and galleons. The French also tried to sell their products directly to the Peruvian coasts in exchange for Potosí’s silver.45 The rise of the Bourbons and the authorization of the trade of African slaves in favor of France in 1701 facilitated its presence in the region. In this context, between 1660 and 1700, smuggling helps explain the different estimates of American silver as shown in Figure 0.3: unofficial records (gazettes in blue) show more silver than official records (registered silver output in orange). In the eighteenth century, the share of metals was still high in relation to other commodities: between 1715 and 1778, silver accounted for 76% of trade 42 43 44 45 Mariano Bonialian, La América española. Entre el Pacífico y el Atlántico. Globalización mer­ cantil y economía política, 1580–1840 (México: El Colegio de México, 2019); Cristina Ana Mazzeo, El comercio libre en el Perú: Las estrategias de un comerciante criollo, José Antonio de Lavalle y Cortés, 1777–1815 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1994); Suárez, “El Perú en el mundo atlántico.” Baltazar de Lorca, Juan Vidal, Juan López de Altopica, Diego de Morales, Juan de la Plaza, Bernardo de Villegas and Juan de la Cueva are some of the names of the most powerful Lima merchants (Suárez, “El Perú en el mundo atlántico,” 248–49). Zacarías Moutoukias, “Burocracia, contrabando y autotransformación de las élites: Buenos Aires en el siglo xvii,” Anuario iehs: Instituto de Estudios histórico sociales 3 (1988): 213–48. Carlos Malamud, Cádiz y Saint Malo en el comercio colonial peruano (1698–1725) (Cádiz: Diputación provincial de Cádiz, 1986). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 16 Barragán R. and Zagalsky Millions of pesos 500 400 300 200 100 1801–1805 1791–1800 1781–1790 1771–1780 1761–1770 1751–1760 1741–1750 1731–1740 1721–1730 1711–1720 1691-1700 GAZETTES. Unofficial Records 1701–1710 1681-1690 1671-1680 1661-1670 1651-1660 1641-1650 1631-1640 1621-1630 1611-1620 1601-1610 1591-1600 1581-1590 0 OUTPUT Registered Silver figure 0.3 Gazette bullion shipments and registered silver output, 1581–1805, by decade in millions of pesos of 272 maravedíes source: tepaske, a new world, 315. the data on the gazettes are from morineau but have been taken from tepaske while other products made up 13% and gold 10%.46 Another estimation established that between 1747 and 1796, bullion accounted for 71.9% and other products for 28.1%.47 Legal and illegal trade in the Hispanic ports of the Caribbean Sea intensified, and there was also an increase in silver production, particularly in Mexico. Despite this, Peruvian silver—mainly from Potosí—was still significant. TePaske claimed it represented 30% (501.01 million pesos of 272 maravedíes) of total shipments, Cross cited 32.5%, and Morineau 40%.48 Official silver records themselves likewise increased; TePaske and Brown underlined the role of the Bourbon administration49 in that process, while Rossana Barragán R. explains this resurgence through her analysis of the silver bank established in Potosí. However, smuggling continued. The Colonia do Sacramento, a Portuguese enclave on Spanish soil, called the Jamaica of South America, was one of the 46 47 48 49 Barragán R., “Potosí’s Silver and the Global World of Trade,” 75, based on Fernando Jumar’s “Le commerce Atlantique au Río de la Plata, 1680–1778” (PhD diss., Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2000), 248. Antonio García-Baquero, “American Gold and Silver in the Eighteenth Century: From Fascination to Accounting,” in Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800, ed. Dennis O. Flynn, A. Giráldez, and R. von Glahn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003), 120. TePaske, A New World, 112; Cross, “South American Bullion,” 403; Morineau, Incroyables gazettes, 417, Table 61. TePaske, A New World, 309–11. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 17 privileged centers for silver from Potosí to Lisbon and key to British interests.50 Fernando Jumar reconstructed the legal return cargo (with metals and other “fruits” or merchandise) from Río de la Plata to Spain. His estimate, based on 256 ships between 1715 and 1778, is higher than García-Baquero’s: a total of 58,050,395 pesos in contrast to 45,882,020 for Río de la Plata.51 The rise in silver and gold production in the eighteenth century intensified flows to Asia. An average of 150 ships departed annually from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Midelburg for the Levant and Cadiz. Gaastra and Israel underlined the role of silver in the voc’s purchases of goods.52 Silver and gold circulated from Batavia, one of the centers of the voc, to Ceylon, Bengal, and Coromandel. Vries stated that 35% of silver flowed through the Cape route, consisting of an exchange of silver exports for commodity imports with around 150 tons of silver every year. In direct trade between Asia and the Dutch Republic, silver represented between 50% and 63% of imports between 1713 and 1790.53 In this period, Amsterdam, Paris, and London became the main financial cores, while Cadiz was the commercial geostrategic center that connected the Mediterranean Sea—Atlantic Ocean—North Sea—Baltic Sea maritime route through the Strait of Gibraltar.54 In the mid-eighteenth century, Spanish merchants trading with the Spanish-American colonies represented 59% of all merchants, but they earned only 17.5% of the income. Foreign merchants 50 51 52 53 54 Jumar, “Le commerce Atlantique,” 54, 240. See Jumar, “Le commerce Atlantique,” 248 and 670. The totals obtained by Jumar are different from the totals obtained for the same period by García-Baquero, Morineau, and other authors. Jumar presented a careful analysis of the reasons for this divergence: The application of different monetary units and the evaluation of non-minted metals. See Barragán R., “Potosí’s Silver and the Global World of Trade,” 74. Femme Gaastra, “The Exports of Precious Metals from Europe to Asia by the Dutch East India Company, 1602–1795,” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. J. Richards (Durham: North Carolina University Press, 1983); Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585–1740 (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1989). For the Dutch–Asiatic Trade: Kristoff Glamann, Dutch­Asiatic Trade 1620–1740 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff S-Gravenahage, 1981). See also Herman Van Der Wee, “World Production and Trade in Gold, Silver, and Copper in the Low Countries, 1450–1700,” in Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion, ed. Hermann Kellenbenz (Stutgart: Klet-Cotta, 1981), 79–86. Peer Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape Route Trade, 1497–1795,” in Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800, ed. Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez and Richard Von Glahn (London: Ashgate, 2003), 80–81. Pilar Nogues Marco, “The Microeconomics of Bullionism: Arbitrage, Smuggling and Silver Outflows in Spain in the Early 18th Century: Working Papers in Economic History,” Universidad Carlos iii, 2011, http://www.uc3m.es/uc3m/dpto/HISEC/working_papers/ working_papers_general.html, 6 and 19. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 18 Barragán R. and Zagalsky (French, Italian, German, Damascene, Swedish, Prussian, Irish, English, and Flemish) represented 41% and earned 82.5% of the total income. The French were the most important in Cadiz, representing just one quarter but earning half of all merchants’ total annual net income.55 One of the main merchants was the Roux House, which had vast geographical activities in 360 cities in Europe, Levant, the Barbary Coast in North Africa, and the Antilles, with nearly 2,000 correspondents and eleven merchant houses.56 Between 1765 and 1789, navigation and trade finally opened between different points of the Spanish Empire and peninsular ports. According to John Fisher, trade between 1782 and 1796 grew by more than 300% for exports in relation to 1778 and by more than 1,000% for imports. García-Baquero has questioned these figures, but this period was the most important for the transatlantic connections between Spain and America.57 The share of Spanish and foreign products shows the importance of the latter, which amounted to more than 50% (Table 0.4). Cadiz accounted for 94.5% of this trade in 1795.58 Although estimates of silver smuggling from Cadiz to Europe are difficult to establish, it may have been from 14% to 50% in the sixteenth century, up to 85% in the seventeenth century, and 50% in the eighteenth century.59 1.4 The Slave Trade Finally, it is important to mention the trade of enslaved people between Europe, America, and West Africa, one of the most “complex economic enterprises known to the pre-industrial world and the largest transoceanic migration.”60 55 56 57 58 59 60 Nogues-Marco, “The Microeconomics of Bullionism,” 8; Ana Crespo Solana, Comunidades Transnacionales. Colonias de mercaderes extranjeros en el Mundo Atlántico (1500–1830) (Madrid: Ed. Doce Calles, 2010), 87; Irigoin, “The New World and the Global Silver Economy,” 278. For the relations between Amsterdam and Cádiz, see Ana Crespo Solana, El comercio marítimo entre Amsterdam y Cadiz (1713–1778) (España: Banco de España, 2000) and “La Ruta del Levante: Cádiz en el tráfico neerlandés con sus mercados mediterráneo y orientales en los siglos xv y xviii,” in Ponencia presentada en Encuentro de Historia y Arqueología 13 (Cádiz: CSIC, 1997); Albert Girard, El comercio francés en Sevilla y Cádiz en tiempo de los Habsburgo. Contribución al estudio del comercio extranjero en la España de los siglos xvi al xvii [1932] (Cádiz: Editorial Renacimiento, 2006). Nogues-Marco, “The Microeconomics of Bullionism,” 8 and 11. Arnaud Bartolomei, Les Marchands français de Cadiz et la crise de la Carrera de Indias (1778–1828) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2017) 16, 18–19. Bartolomei, Les Marchands français, 20–21. Nogues-Marco, “The Microeconomics of Bullionism,” 5–8. Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 75. See also Johanes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 19 Introduction: The Age of Silver table 0.4 Commodities shipped to America in pesos, 1784–1796 Year Spanish prod. % Foreign prod. Total 1784 1785 1786 1787 1788 1789 1790 1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 9,794,268 16,863,330 11,478,223 18,211,400 10,300,000 7,627,000 9,028,000 9,909,100 11,457,600 8,947,800 6,171,400 11,390,800 9,392,200 45.05 43.96 52.74 43.96 50.88 44.13 51.72 49.37 50.39 54.45 50.84 55.78 57.07 11,946,161 21,499,109 10,285,920 23,220,000 9,944,800 9,656,400 8,428,400 10,161,200 11,282,000 7,485,400 5,968,000 9,030,000 7,064,200 21,740,429 38,362,439 21,764,143 41,431,400 20,244,800 17,283,400 17,456,400 20,070,300 22,739,600 16,433,200 12,139,400 20,420,800 16,456,400 Totals differing but shown in source 20,644,800 17,436,400 16,432,200 17,656,400 source: morineau, incroyables gazettes. the last column presents different totals that are in the same source The ports in Europe were mainly those of Seville and Lisbon, while in Africa there were those of Santiago on Cape Verde Island, Sao Tome, and Sao Paulo de Loanda in Angola.61 Since 1518, the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English were involved through the so-called monopolio and asientos: contracts to carry slaves to the American colonies in exchange for amounts of money and taxes. Portugal had the asiento over the slave trade granted by the Spanish Crown until 1640 in exchange for 100,000 to 150,000 ducats, with the obligation to introduce 4,000 enslaved people annually.62 61 62 Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Aspectos Sociales en América Colonial (Bogotá: Universidad de Bogotá, 2001),160 and also her work Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, [1977] 2014). Reyes Fernández Durán, La Corona Española y el tráfico de negros: del Monopolio al libre comercio (Madrid: plubidisa, 2011) 25; see also Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 78. These contracts could be in the hands of those who lent silver to the Crown (Domingo Grillo and Ambrosio Lomelin) and linked to the Genoese bankers who financed King Philip iv; Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 20 Barragán R. and Zagalsky Some of the contracts were agreements between the monarchies. The asiento of 1701 was established between the “Catholic and Christian Majesties of Spain” and the Royal Guinea Company, established in the Kingdom of France, to deliver, over ten years, 48,000 enslaved people or “pieces of Indians” and loans to Philip v of 600,000 pounds of tourneois currency of France, equivalent to 200,000 pesos escudos.63 A few years later, an asiento was established with the British South Sea Company focused on South America,64 in exchange for 200,000 escudos pesos for which they received the authorization to take to the Indies, once a year, a ship of 500 tons with merchandise to be sold in the annual fairs in Portobelo and Veracruz.65 New studies are reevaluating the scale and significance of the slave trade to the Spanish America, receiving 1.5 million between 1520 and 1867.66 The traffic of African enslaved people grew exponentially in the eighteenth century due to the plantation economies in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the North American colonies, which produced cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Although slaves played a more prominent role in mining during the eighteenth century, specifically in gold production (mainly in New Granada and Brazil), in Potosí their number was small because the silver mining labor continued to be carried out almost entirely by Indigenous people. 1.5 Vale un Potosí [To Be Worth a Potosí]: Labor in the Mountain We have examined the flows of silver throughout the world and the share of different imperial powers. We now focus on the mining historiography of 63 64 65 66 see Fernández Durán, La Corona Española y el tráfico de negros, 26. They agreed in 1662 to supply the Spanish colonies with 24,000 enslaved people during the next seven years. See Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 33. The Dutch West India Company (in English, wic) held an important role in the supply of slaves; cf. Fernández Durán, La Corona Española y el tráfico de negros, 28. See also Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 26, 30. wic shipped approximately 273,000 enslaved people from Africa from 1621 until 1803. The Dutch ranked fourth in the Atlantic slave trade while Great Britain, Portugal (in combination with Brazil), and France transported almost 90% of the total; see Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 294–96, 306. Fernández Durán, La Corona Española y el tráfico de negros, 16, 48, 57. This company was dominated by financiers Crozat, Thomé, Hubert Hubrecht (of Flemish origin). It was established that the company could introduce around 4,800 “piezas de indias” (enslaved people) in total, being able to take 1,200 to Buenos Aires each year in four ships, of which 800 could remain in Buenos Aires and 400 could be taken to Chile and the northern provinces—what is now Bolivia. Fernández Durán, La Corona Española y el tráfico de negros, 139–42. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, David Wheat, eds., From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 2-3. Michael Zeuske, Esclavitud. Una historia de la humanidad (Pamplona: Katakrak, 2018). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 21 Potosí’s impact on the world. Three topics in particular are explored in this volume: the world of workers and labor; engineering, technology and knowledge; and regional power relations. It should be noted, first, that stories, legends, and graphic representations have long associated Potosí’s wealth with the legend of “El Dorado.”67 The fame of Potosí’s wealth reached Asia in writings, paintings, and engravings.68 Around the same time, the most vivid depiction of Indigenous labor and exploitation inside the mines of Potosí was the engraving, based on a written description, issued by the successful De Bry family of publishers.69 The consequences of the “world” in the Potosí mines have been at the heart of social and political reflections and research since the second half of the twentieth century. Potosí was, for example, central to Eduardo Galeano’s narrative in his historical journalism book, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage in Latin America, published in Spanish in 1971 and subsequently in multiple editions and translations in several languages. Galeano asserted, without historical evidence and somewhat reminiscent of the victims of the Holocaust, that in three centuries Potosí´s Cerro Rico would have consumed 8 million indigenous lives.70 In some way, De Bry and Galeano have each shaped the image and representation of Potosí to this day. Potosí also played a key role in dependency theory: it constituted the paradigm of unequal exchange and how, simultaneously, capitalism produced development in some areas and underdevelopment in others.71 In the framework of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, Potosí was presented 67 68 69 70 71 The most outstanding chronicles correspond to Pedro Cieza de León, Agustín Zárate, Luis Capoche, José de Acosta, Diego de Ocaña, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Martín de Murúa, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Bartolomé Arzans de Ursúa y Vela. The example of Iraqi traveler Elias al-Mawsili is particularly interesting: not only did he travel through much of Spanish America, but he also visited Potosí in the seventeenth century. See Roberto Marín Guzmán, Un viaje poco conocido: la visita de Elias al­Mawsili: sa­ cerdote caldeo iraquí, a la América Colonial (1669?–1680) (Costa Rica: Editorial ucr, 2009). See Rossana Barragán R., Potosí Global: Traveling with its First Images (1550–1650) (La Paz: Plural, 2019). Between 1590 and 1634, Theodor de Bry and his sons edited twentyseven volumes dedicated to the East and West Indies, including superb engravings. Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 40. The idea of the Holocaust has been mentioned by Kris Lane, Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World (California: University of California Press, 2019), 181–82. On dependency theory, see Joseph Love, “The Origins of Dependency Analysis,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22, no. 1 (1990), 45, 158–9, 165; Celso Furtado, Economic Formation of Brazil (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959); Celso Furtado, Desemvolvimento e subdesenvolvimento (Rio de Janeiro: Fundo de Cultura, 1961). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 22 Barragán R. and Zagalsky as a classic case of a peripheral supplier of raw materials to an industrialized center.72 Steve Stern criticized the determinism of the world-system approach: “historical explanation that reduces patterns of labor and economy in the periphery to a reaction of the capitalist world-system is one-dimensional and misleading, even for silver, the early world-system’s most valued American treasure.”73 The historiography, whether linked to those general questions or not, focused on the enormous task of establishing silver production and reconstructed the labor system, technology, and consequences of production in the mines. John TePaske, Herbert Klein, and Richard Garner have each demonstrated that Potosí was the largest silver producer in Peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and although there were other important silver mining centers, they never reached Potosí’s production levels.74 Abandoning perspectives that see mining sites as just enclave economies for the export of resources, Carlos S. Assadourian argued that Potosí articulated a broad region, proposing the concept of “Peruvian colonial space” (which included present-day Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay) with highly interconnected relationships between its different parts.75 It was an internal market, with Potosí as the economic center of the production of silver and Lima as the political center and connection with the metropolis. Labor in the mines has long received the most topical attention. Alberto Crespo Rodas gave one of the first detailed descriptions of mita work of preHispanic origin in 1956,76 a picture enriched and completed through the years. Established by Viceroy Toledo in 1573 (with reformulations in 1575 and 1578), 72 73 74 75 76 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World­System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World­Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 829–72. Oruro, Carangas, San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo, Hualgayoc, Cerro de Pasco, Chachapoyas, Cailloma, Huantajaya, among others. TePaske, A New World, 141–212; Herbert Klein and John TePaske, Excel Alto Perú, https://realhacienda.colmex.mx; Richard Garner, SpanishAmerican Silver Registrations, SpAmSilverOutputex, at http://www.insidemydesk.com/ hdd.html. Carlos S. Assadourian, “La producción de la mercancía dinero en la formación del mercado interno colonial,” in Ensayos Sobre el Desarrollo Económico de México y América Latina (1500–1975), ed. Enrique Florescano, 223–92 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979); C. S. Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial: mercado interno, regiones y espacio económico (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1982), 14 and 111. Alberto Crespo Rodas, La “mita” de Potosí (Potosí: Universidad Tomás Frías, 1956). Gabriel René Moreno, Últimos días coloniales en el Alto Perú (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes, 1896 and 1901). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 23 the system involved the forced temporary migration of 14,000 men from eighteen to fifty years old from a total population of approximately 91,000 tributaries from sixteen provinces (corregimientos) in the region between the south of Cuzco and the south of present-day Bolivia for a period of one year. The routes of this forced migration reached—in some cases—more than 1,000 kilometers and up to twenty days on the road. Once in Potosí, the annual contingents of mitayos were divided into three groups. Each of these thirds was required to work for one week and to “rest” for the following two. The weekly shift of the mita theoretically ran from Monday to Saturday, with Sunday being a day off.77 Peter Bakewell and Jeffrey A. Cole have contributed decisively to the study of labor in Potosí.78 The former underlined that the labor system consisted of mita workers but also another important group of “free workers,” the mingas, who obtained triple the wages of the mitayos.79 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the mitayos constituted 30% of the mining labor force, while the mingas constituted 70%.80 Cole focused on the seventeenth century and delineated the main changes of the mita—its “metamorphosis”—because from 1606–1608, at least 20% to 25% and perhaps up to 50% of the mita was paid in cash rather than in labor by the Indigenous groups. These were the “deliveries in silver” and the sums paid were considerable.81 In parallel and over a long period of time, there was significant defection of mita workers: they were reduced from 14,000 mitayos—as established by Toledo in 1573–1578—to no more than 4,000 at the end of the seventeenth century (a decline of more than 70%). At the same time, the fall in silver production implied a bigger 77 78 79 80 81 For descriptions of the mita system, see Peter J. Bakewell, Mineros de la Montaña Roja: el trabajo de los indios en Potosí, 1545–1650 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, [1984] 1989), 78–89; Paula C. Zagalsky, “La mita de Potosí: una imposición colonial invariable en un contexto de múltiples transformaciones (siglos xvi–xvii; Charcas, virreinato del Perú),” Chungará 46, no. 3 (2014): 375–95; Rossana Barragán, “Dynamics of Continuity and Change: Shifts in Labour Relations in the Potosí Mines (1680–1812),” International Review of Social History 61, S24 (2016): 93–114; “Working Silver for the World: Mining Labor and Popular Economy in Colonial Potosí,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 2 (2017): 193–222. Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1985); Bakewell, Mineros de la montaña roja. Bakewell also published the only history of a colonial Potosí entrepreneur, P. J. Bakewell, in Antonio López de Quiroga (industrial minero del Potosí colonial) (Potosí: Universidad Boliviana Tomás Frías, 1973). The “free” condition of salaried workers is placed in quotation marks to differentiate it from the contemporary characteristics of free labor. The biggest difference between the free (minga) and the forced (mita) laborers lay in the higher wages paid to the former and, in some cases, the type of work. Assadourian, “La producción de la mercancía dinero,” 257. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 37–38, 57. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 24 map 0.2 Barragán R. and Zagalsky Potosí and the south of the viceroyalty of Peru demand on the remaining mitayos. For Cole, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, the azogueros also limited Indigenous participation in the profits they had previously made, imposing quotas of minerals to be delivered. Ethnohistorians have introduced important aspects to consider. Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne demonstrated that behind the organization of the colonial mita (and its “captaincies” of mita) lay the reformulated pre-Hispanic spatial Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 25 and symbolic organization.82 Thierry Saignes analyzed Indigenous strategies of accommodation and even success in confronting colonial policies and its participation in the market, while authors such as Wachtel have emphasized the destructuration of Andean societies and Assadourian and Sánchez Albornoz have stressed the magnitude of migration caused by the mita.83 Assadourian, analyzing the production of monetary commodities, pointed out the “subsidy of [the] peasant economy” to the production of the great world silver supply center. The mitayos received a wage that has been estimated to be 90% destined to pay tribute.84 This meant that the mitayo workers had to have other income to live on while working: the income from their ayllus (agrarian communities) “subsidized” colonial mining production through the reproduction of workers and their families. This analysis is at odds with recent assertions that workers in Potosí were the best paid in the world.85 The insufficient wage for the reproduction of the labor force is a constant reference in different primary sources, but also in different historiographic publications. Enrique Tandeter even suggested that there was unlimited exploitation of the forced laborers—worse than in the case of slaves, given that their super-exploitation did not risk any employers’ investment.86 Enrique Tandeter, who studied eighteenth-century Potosí, placed unfree/free workers at the center of his analysis. He argued that the mita or coerced labor allowed the profit of Potosí’s mining production during the last boom of the eighteenth century, despite the higher number of free mine workers or min­ gas.87 He proposed the concept of mita-rent (renta mitaya) as essential for the mining entrepreneurs and owners to obtain profits and lower operating costs. The mita-rent meant a production relationship based on the assignment of 82 83 84 85 86 87 Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, “L’espace aymara: urco et uma.” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 33, no. 5–6 (1978). Thierry Saignes, Caciques,Tribute and Migration in the Southern Andes. Indian Society and the 17th Century Colonial Order (Audiencia de Charcas). (London: University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies Occasional Papers, 1985). Assadourian, “La producción de la mercancía dinero,” 257–68. Leticia Arroyo Abad, Elwyn Davies B, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Between Conquest and Independence: Real Wages and Demographic Change in Spanish America, 1530–1820,” Explorations in Economic History 49, no. 2 (2012), 149–66. Enrique Tandeter, Trabajo forzado y trabajo libre en el Potosí colonial tardío (Buenos Aires: Estudios cedes, 1980). Rose Marie Buechler, Gobierno, minería y sociedad. Potosí y el “Renacimiento” borbónico, 1776–1810 (La Paz: Biblioteca Minera Boliviana, 1989); Tandeter, Coacción y mercado: la mine­ ría de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692–1826 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1992); Enrique Tandeter, “Forced and Free Labor in Late Colonial Potosí,” Past & Present 93 (1981). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 26 Barragán R. and Zagalsky fixed quotas and demanded continuous work that did not respect any of the established norms.88 More recent studies are reexamining the dual system of free and unfree workers. On the one hand, this rigid dichotomy is somehow being questioned, contextualizing the varying historical meanings of freedom, and pointing out that forced laborers were not quite slaves, nor were free laborers truly free. Socalled “free” systems included elements of coercion to establish and reproduce themselves. On the other hand, the relation between mitayo unfree workers and free workers or mingas has been scrutinized. In the historiography, both are mainly conceived as distinct laboring groups, although some authors have noted cases of mitayos working as mingas.89 Recently, Paula Zagalsky drew attention to this, analyzing the mita commutations proposing the polyvalence of mitayos’ situation and the need to consider the requirements of specialized labor.90 In 2014, Barragan proposed a single system of work, the mita–minga system, instead of two separate and opposing categories of laborers. The same people could work as unfree workers or mitayos for one week and as free workers or minga for two weeks after that. The ensemble as a whole could thus be understood as a system that combined low-wage corvée or mita with the wellpaid minga work.91 The close connection among different workers92 requires us to consider the type of labor and their daily wages: from the specialized pickmen (barreteros) who worked in mines to those who worked mixing ores with mercury (repa­ siris), the mitayos that transported the materials inside the mines (apiris), and from the mines to the silver refining plant (chacaneadores and cumuris).93 88 89 90 91 92 93 Tandeter, Trabajo forzado y trabajo libre. For example, see Bakewell, Mineros de la montaña roja. P. C. Zagalsky, “Trabajadores indígenas mineros en el Cerro Rico de Potosí: tras los rastros de sus prácticas laborales (siglos xvi y xvii),” Revista Mundos do Trabalho 6, no. 12 (2014): 55–82; P. C. Zagalsky and Isabel M. Povea Moreno, “Un mundo diverso: una panorámica sobre los trabajadores mineros coloniales a partir del análisis de casos en los virreinatos de Nueva España y del Perú,” in Trabajo y Trabajadores en América Latina (siglos xvi–xxi), ed. Rossana Barragán R., 245–80 (La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2019). Rossana Barragán, “Kajchas, trapiches y plata en el cerro de Potosí,” Anuario de Estudios Bolivianos, Archivísticos y Bibliográficos 20 (2014): 273–320, 291–92; Rossana Barragán, “Dynamics of Continuity and Change,” 95, 98–9; and Rossana Barragán, “Working Silver for the World,” 194–95, 217. Transmission of specialized knowledge between mitayos and mingas have been explored by Zagalsky, “Trabajadores indígenas mineros.” Zagalsky, “La mita de Potosí,” 386–88. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 27 The world of mining labor tended to be more varied during the eighteenth century, including mulattoes, mestizos, and even poor Spaniards. Beginning in the 1730s, the presence of k’ajchas, the self-employed workers who remained in the mines on weekends to extract ore for themselves, became more visible and important. Along with the works of Tandeter and Abercrombie, Barragán R. has taken up the subject again in recent years.94 She has argued that k’ajchas and trapiches (rudimentary ore mills) should be considered together. She also highlighted the key role of women in refining and trading ores, which challenges standard gender assumptions about mining labor. The importance of the k’aj­ chas and k’achjeo suggests the existence of a mining wage plus, allowed since the last quarter of the sixteenth century (the corpa), that can be compared with the existence of the partido in some novo-Hispanic mining centers.95 The phenomenon was not new, but, in the eighteenth century in Potosí, it acquired not only public notoriety but also relevance in political and social public life. An important issue to be explored is the system of justice that regulated mining labor relations in Potosí—affecting both mitayos and mingas—and was established, according to Zagalsky, as an oral and express system by Viceroy Toledo to avoid lengthy lawsuits that could put a brake on production.96 It is clear from this brief overview that the Indigenous labor force in the mines was crucial. This is why the contributions, in this volume, of Julio Aguilar and James Almeida are particularly important. Aguilar centers mita workers and their knowledge for building the impressive water infrastructure required for ore processing. Moreover, Almeida’s analysis is key to understanding the role and importance of a small group of enslaved people who worked in the mint house of Potosí, along with a diversity of other workers.97 94 95 96 97 Enrique Tandeter, “La producción como actividad popular. Ladrones de minas en Potosí,” Nova Americana 4 (1981): 43–65; Thomas Abercrombie, “Q’aqchas and La Plebe in Rebellion: Carnival vs. Lent in 18th Century Potosí,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2, no. 1 (1996): 62–111; Rossana Barragán R., “¿Ladrones, pequeños empresarios o trabajadores independientes? K’ajchas, trapiches y plata en el cerro de Potosí en el siglo xviii,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2015); Barragán, “Working Silver for the World.” Zagalsky and Povea Moreno, “Un mundo diverso.” See also Rossana Barragán R. in this volume. Paula C. Zagalsky, “Trabajo indígena, conflictos y justicia en la Villa Imperial de Potosí y su Cerro Rico, una aproximación: Virreinato del Perú, siglos xvi–xvii,” Historia y Justicia Journal 9 (2017). Other works on the analysis of labor systems: María Concepción Gavira Márquez, Población indígena; Raquel Gil Montero, Ciudades efímeras: El ciclo minero de la plata en Lípez (Bolivia), siglos xvi–xix (Lima: ifea y Plural Editores, 2015); and Paola A. Revilla Orías, Entangled Coercion: African and Indigenous Labour in Charcas (16th–17th Century), (Berlin De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021). Afro-descendants (enslaved people and free enslaved people) constituted a small fraction of the workforce in silver mining (unlike gold mining) and always worked on the surface, Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 28 Barragán R. and Zagalsky Labor was also present in several discourses. Ignacio González Casasnovas focused on the Crown’s labor policy for Potosí, revealing extensive debates during the seventeenth century that included proposals to abolish the mita. The mita continued, although with a reduced number of workers during the eighteenth century.98 More recently, Orlando Betancor examined the philosophical principles of the apologists for Hispanic rule and for the material exploitation of the Indigenous population in Potosí.99 Allison Bigelow, at the intersection of philology and history, scrutinized the language that condensed the links between colonial mining, Indigenous knowledge, and racialized thought.100 If the world of labor and its workers have been at the center of several studies, the world of the owners of mining concessions and mills is less well known. Silver mines were considered eminent property of the Crown, which granted them to the concessionaires in exchange for a tax consisting of one fifth of the production (20% until 1736 in Peru).101 Although a list of the concessionaries of veins in 1580–1585 is available, there is no information on their size, working 98 99 100 101 never underground. Among the tasks linked to mining was their work in the smelters or refineries, as artisans (carpenters, toolmakers), and, in a few cases, they served mine owners as stewards and managers. On the coins, see Carmen Salazar-Soler, “Minería y moneda en la época colonial temprana,” in Compendio de historia económica del Perú ii: Economía del período colonial temprano, ed. Carlos Contreras, 109–228 (Lima: bcrp-iep, 2009). Ignacio Gonzáles Casasnovas, Las dudas de la Corona: la política de repartimientos para la minería de Potosí (1680–1732) (Madrid: csic), 2000. Orlando Bentancor, The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Allison M. Bigelow, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In line with these studies, Heidi Scott’s chapter analyzes the world of knowledge linked to mining and power relations. In New Spain from 1548 and throughout the colonial period, the royal tax was 10%. Another direct tax on silver production in Peru was the assay duty or “Cobos” (initially 1%, later increased to 1.5%). With respect to mercury, the mines and transportation of this mineral were also granted in concession, but the sale was a royal monopoly. Within the historiography on Huancavelica, the main American mercury-producing center, the following works stand out: Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Las minas de Huancavelica en los siglos xvi y xvii [1949] (Lima: pucp, 1999); Carlos Contreras, La ciudad del mer­ curio, Huancavelica, 1570–1700 (Lima: iep, 1982); Nicholas Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011); Adrian J. Pearce, “Huancavelica 1563– 1824: History and Historiography,” Colonial Latin American Review 22, no. 3 (2013): 422–40; Isabel M. Povea Moreno, Minería y reformismo borbónico en el Perú: Estado, empresa y tra­ bajadores en Huancavelica, 1784–1814 (Lima: iep /bcrp, 2014); Kendall W. Brown, Minería e imperio en Hispanoamérica colonial: producción, mercados y trabajo (Lima: bcrp-iep, 2015). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 29 conditions, and evolution in the long term. We still know little about the concessions’ changes over time, whether they were concentrated in a few hands, and who the major beneficiaries were. We do not know about the dependency relationships, agreements, and integration between the mine concessionaires and mill owners. This is why the chapters on the world of producers in the late sixteenth century (Zagalsky) and in the second half of the eighteenth century (Barragán R.) are relevant. The links between the mine producers and the merchants are important topics for future research. In exchange for the money advanced to producers, the merchants received uncoined and unminted refined silver at a price well below the market. These merchants became ransom collectors of silver bars and frequently paid for transport of the bars for minting, even paying the tax on the fifth.102 This credit system matured and an internal hierarchy was formed, with the “silver merchants” at the top, although we still know little about them despite Bakewell’s study and some cases analyzed by Tandeter and Buechler. In this volume, Mariano Bonialian introduces the merchants perule­ ros in Potosí, opening a new dimension of analysis on the world of merchants. Engineering, technology, and knowledge together form a broad and important aspect of mining. The rich ores from the top of the mountain would have been extracted with Inca techniques alongside two innovations: the steel points on the tools and the excavation of horizontal galleries (socavones) to intercept the seams at deeper levels and facilitate extraction, drainage, and ventilation.103 The traditional smelting furnaces (huayrachinas) in Indigenous hands have been analyzed by several authors,104 although we do not know who in the first decades owned them or what arrangements existed between those who legitimately (or not) accessed the minerals from the mountain (mostly Spaniards) and those who smelted the silver (mainly Indigenous people). The construction of mills and the resources used in the so-called Rivera of Potosí since the 1570s merits further research. Minerals were pulverized in these mills to proceed with mercury amalgamation. Assadourian has argued that the establishment of the “quicksilver era” of the 1570s led to the almost 102 103 104 Bakewell, Mineros de la montaña roja; Frédérique Langue and Carmen Salazar-Soler, Diccionario de términos mineros para la América española, siglos xvi–xix (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1993). Carmen Salazar-Soler has established that these conditions were comparable to contemporary practices, for example, in the silver mines of Neuenberg (Sainte-Marie-Aux Mines, Upper Rhine), although the dimensions of the tunnels in Potosí were bigger. SalazarSoler, “Minería y moneda,” 115. Pablo Cruz and Jean Vacher, Mina y metalurgia en los Andes del Sur: Desde la época prehis­ pánica hasta el siglo xviii (Sucre: ird-ifea, 2008). Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 30 Barragán R. and Zagalsky total concentration of the social means of production into Spanish hands, the exceptional expansion of production, and an increased demand for labor.105 But the Indigenous population was not totally marginalized during the entire colonial period.106 The “alchemy” of amalgamation is known but one wonders about the continuous innovations that took place. Tristan Platt, in this volume, shows us the complexity of the mercury trade and the main changes introduced in the nineteenth century. Nicholas Robins’s work on the pollution in Potosí and Huancavelica has also opened an important field: the harmful effects of mining production within the framework of environmental history.107 The structures of power within Potosí and its broader region are key to comprehension the dynamic of mining in this center and city. In this sense, analysis of the government and management of Potosí within the Audiencia de Charcas and the viceroyalty of Peru is essential.108 Masaki Sato contributes, in this volume, to understanding the close relationships between Potosí and the highest authorities of the Audiencia de Charcas in the case of the mint fraud of the midseventeenth century. Kris Lane focuses on how the consequences of this fraud were felt all over the world. The mines and the city at the foot of the mountain have attracted some edited volumes. An early book, in 2000, by Juan Marchena gathered several authors working at that moment on Potosí, and in 2008, Andrés Eichmann and Marcela Inch edited a collection about the city of Potosí and La Plata.109 Other authors have studied its cultural production,110 legal culture, civic rituals 105 106 107 108 109 110 Other similar systems of forced recruitment of mining labor functioned in New Spain and Peru, each with their own specificities, but the mita system of Potosí was the largest and most extensive. See Rossana Barragán “¿Ladrones, pequeños empresarios o trabajadores independientes?” Nicholas A. Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire; Nicholas A. Robins, Santa Barbara’s Legacy: An Environmental History of Huancavelica, Peru (Leiden: Brill, 2017). See also Saúl Guerrero, Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Eugenia Bridikhina, Theatrum mundi: entramados del poder en Charcas colonial (La Paz: Plural editores, 2007); M. C. Gavira Márquez, “Política minera y conflictos entre Potosí y Oruro a principios del siglo. xvii,” Anuario de Estudios Bolivianos, Archivísticos y Bibliográficos 16 (2010): 215–44. Juan Marchena Fernández, and María José Villa Rodríguez, Potosí, Plata para Europa (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, Fundación El Monte) 2000; Andrés Eichmann and Marcela Inch, La construcción de lo urbano en Potosí y La Plata (siglos xvi–xvii) (Sucre: Ministerio de Cultura de España, fcbcb, abnb, 2008.) The importance of the city of Potosí as a major center produced an important historiography on architecture and painting: Mario Chacón Torres, Arte virreinal en Potosí: Fuentes para su historia (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1973); Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 31 of political life, and its public celebrations and fiestas, revealing not only the multidimensionality of Potosí but also the multiple themes for investigation.111 Under the imprint of global history, Kris Lane has published a recent pivotal synthesis of the history of the city of Potosí.112 The studies in this volume reveal a complex of three simultaneous actors and processes: the Crown through its viceregal, regional and local authorities; the workers themselves; and the technological changes and knowledge. All of them are present in the four sections of this book: Geology, Sacred Spaces and Technical Knowledge (First Section), with Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, Heidi Scott, and Renée Raphael; Environmental History and Labor (Second Section), with Julio Aguilar and James Almeida; Flows, Heterogeneous Producers and Agency (Third Section), with Mariano Bonialian, Paula C. Zagalsky, and Rossana Barragán R.; and Local, Regional and Global Impacts (Fourth Section), with Kris Lane, Masaki Sato, and Tristan Platt. 2 The Chapters The importance of Potosí as one of the centers of silver production for more than two and a half centuries, and one of the driving forces of globalization, has brought together eleven authors from different countries. Although they are all archival researchers, each of them has his or her own background and imprint, from ethnohistory and linguistics to the history of science, the construction of knowledge, political economy and political geology, historical 111 112 Teresa Gisbert, Iconografía y Mitos Indígenas en el Arte (La Paz: Editorial Gisbert, 1980); T. Gisbert, Potosí Catálogo de su Patrimonio (La Paz: inpaav, ibc, oas and unesco, 1990); Pedro Querejazu and Elizabeth Ferrer, eds., Potosí: Colonial Treasures and the Bolivian City of Silver (New York: Americas Society, 1997); T. Gisbert, Historia del Arte en Bolivia (La Paz: Editorial Gisbert, 2012). Other processes were also explored, like trade—see Jane Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Duke University Press, 2005); Paulina Numhauser, Mujeres indias y señores de la coca: Potosí y Cuzco en el siglo xvi (Madrid: Cátedra, 2005). Clara López Beltrán, La Ruta de la Plata: de Potosí al Pacífico: Caminos, comercio y carava­ nas en los siglos xvi y xix (La Paz: Plural editores, 2016); Renzo Honores, “Una sociedad legalista: Abogados, procuradores de causas y la creación de una cultura legal colonial en Lima y Potosí, 1540–1670” (PhD diss., Florida International University, 2007); Bridikhina, Theatrum mundi; Lisa Voigt, Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). Kris Lane, Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World. In his chapter in this volume, Lane presents a detailed analysis of an important aspect: the great fraud of the Potosí mint during the seventeenth century and its global repercussions. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 32 Barragán R. and Zagalsky anthropology, political history, social history, labor history, and global history. Each of them presents their most recent research in ways that provide readers with a body of work at the cutting edge of the fields they explore. The chapters in this volume cover a long period of analysis, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The opening contribution, by Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, stresses Potosí’s geology and suggests that the site was already known in the pre-Hispanic period and has been exploited since 1000 ad, thus associating it with one of the first population layers in the region, that of the Collas with their Pukina language. The author argues that the name of Potosí is of Pukina origin, relating the mountain to the soul and force that engendered its wealth. She reminds us that the Andean mountains are places of memory tied with divinities and ancestors through time. Potosí was part of an extensive sacred space of gods and part of a vast landscape and topography, from the south of Cuzco to the area of Lake Titicaca, the Desaguadero River, the salt flats, and the territory of Potosí with its mountain and city, including the region towards the Pacific coast to the west and the inter-Andean valleys to the east. This chapter also tours through the religiosity and cults, showing us Potosí’s insertion in this space. Heidi Scott traces the “geological foundations” of the debates over mining between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. She asserts that these knowledges were shaped by economy, labor, and moral discussions, showing how these entanglements can enrich our understanding of labor and governance in Potosí. In other words, knowledge, representations, and politics greatly influenced how the Earth was perceived. This also means that geological knowledge should not be confined to the history of science alone. Renée Raphael, on the other hand, reveals the technological experimentation for the reduction of mercury used in the silver process. It was the political authorities who were involved in technical refining improvements that lessened refining costs, as the author shows us. She analyzes the administrative protocols of the visits and interrogation of witnesses, through which these experiments became known. The author argues that rather than being transmitters of knowledge, they all aimed to shape viceregal policy by seeking its approval. In other words, the technical viewpoints cannot be “disentangled” from the political, the legal, or the administrative. Even so, the experiments of 1587 contain critical and detailed information on the origin of the ores, the mercury that was put in each trial box, the salt, and the iron, among other data. The section on environmental history and labor contains the contributions of Julio Aguilar and James Almeida. The first author addresses a topic less analyzed in the empires: the public works and complex hydraulic infrastructure developed to ensure the magnitude of Potosí’s silver production. In “Water for Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 33 the Monarchy of the World,” Julio Aguilar opens a vital research topic, as the use of water linked to mining and to the largest cities of that time. This was one of the main changes in the Andean environment: a complex hydraulic and engineering infrastructure from reservoirs built in the mountains and whose waters were conducted through tunnels, aqueducts, and canals to establish the Ribera de Potosí, where the mills operated to process silver. It is likewise just as important, if not more so, to demonstrate that this work was carried out by the Indigenous mitayos, artisans (maestros), and authorities such as corregidor Pedro Osores de Ulloa, each with their own knowledge in this radical transformation. From these workers, we move to James Almeida’s contribution and to the mint and its diverse workers: yanaconas, slaves, convicts who lived “together but not mixed.” While the yanaconas lived outside the mint, melting the bars with the correct mix of metals to produce thin silver rails for coining as well as loading and unloaded the furnaces, slave workers living in the mint hammered out rough coin shapes. The author analyzes one of the links in the commodity chain of silver and forced labor, inside the Potosí mint house, showing us the division of their labor while at the same time uniting them in this labor site, in which each and all negotiated the small freedoms that shaped their lives. We then go to the third section, to a counterpoint between circulation and production, linking two spheres that are generally analyzed separately. Mariano Bonialian’s chapter introduces the “beat and pumping of one the hearts of early globalization,” recapitulating the silver exports to reevaluate its early flows. The author, who has contributed to thinking beyond the “Atlantic,” takes us to Mexico, to the Pacific world, and to the connection with China. The author considers the South American lands on three flanks: the direct export to New Spain and China through the Pacific, the connection to Seville through Portobelo, and the connection of Buenos Aires, on the Atlantic, through which silver also flowed to Brazil. He argues that the circuits from Potosí to the eastern lands and China in fact threatened Peru’s transatlantic flows and relations with Seville. Finally, he speaks of the peruleros, Peruvian merchants who specialized in these flows and who were key global agents of silver. Paula C. Zagalsky, on the other hand, introduces us to the lords of the mines and mills in Potosí’s boom period (1580–1630). The author shows us the complexity of the “universe of the miners,” exploring the meanings of this term and others, which named people with different positions in silver’s productive structure. With her careful approach, she unravels who were miners, “soldiers,” and azogueros, with a diversity of socioeconomic situations. The “soldiers” (soldados), for example, were “loose” people who exploited silver as mine owners or lessees, but they did not have mills or ingenios and were of medium and Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 34 Barragán R. and Zagalsky low social extraction. At the top of the social ladder were the lords of mines and mills, who were privileged to receive delegations of mitayo workers, 70% of whom were assigned to the mills. Finally, Zagalsky shows us that there were a few women and Indigenous mill owners involved in production. By focusing on the creation of a bank to purchase silver in a global context in the period between 1740 and 1790, Rossana Barragán R. shows how the higher prices paid made visible a heterogeneous world of small producers and silver rescuers alongside the traditional azogueros producers. The case analyzed also reveals the success of the bank, in the context of the Bourbon Reforms, to better control silver production, favored also paradoxically, subaltern and marginal actors. At the same time, the author explains the rise of production in this late period, shedding light, too, on the amount of silver that was smuggled before the creation of the bank. The debasement of the silver levels in the coins and the way in which this counterfeiting silver was confronted by local and regional authorities in the Audiencia de Charcas constitutes the subject of analysis of Masaki Sato, while Kris Lane takes us through the world between 1650 and 1675 with what he calls “the hangover”—that is, the consequences of the great silver coin fraud in this period. Their contributions are an example of the potent interrelationship sought in this volume between global dynamics and regional and local relations. Sato examines the mint fraud—that is, the increasing amount of copper in the silver bars that was allowed, showing us, in great detail, the role of the most important political authorities in the Audiencia de Charcas as well as the attempts to find the culprits for most of ten years. Through his analysis, he unveils the links between Audiencia officials and Potosí’s elites, along with the enormous fiscal support that some of them meant for the Crown. This situation helps to explain the long process of investigation on this fraud but also the radical and soft measures taken towards different people involved. Lane focuses, instead, on the hangover that produced this fraud all over the world, as well as the global tide of panic and distrust created. His research shows the consequences of the fraud, from Batavia’s market to the total recall in 1650 ordered by King Philip iv, the panic in Seville, Cordoba or Granada, Genova, Flanders, and the Baltic. The book ends with the chapter by Tristan Platt and the analysis of mercury, one of the most important inputs for refining by amalgamation. The author analyzes a key moment for many transformations—the end of the colonial period and the first decades of the republican period in the nineteenth century—showing us the shifts but also the continuities that occurred. During this politically turbulent period, mercury came from Almaden (and not from the Huancavelica mines that supplied Potosí for more than 200 years). By Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 35 1831, there were neo-Bourbonic efforts to sell mercury at cost, but by then the supply depended on bankers and merchants in France and England. In 1835, the London Rothschilds contracted with Spain to market the production of Almaden. During the first decades of independence, a number of institutions carried over from the colonial period: the refiners’ guild, the Royal Mining Bank of San Carlos and the Royal Mint, renamed the National Mining Bank and the National Mint in the new prefecture of Potosí. Taken together, these chapters contribute to three fundamental aspects of Potosí: 1) the flows and linkages between the local and the global and how these spheres were co-constituted, including the direct agency and involvement of actors; 2) the ways of thinking about the mountain and knowledge in Potosí; and, finally, 3) how the different theoretical and methodological approaches enrich our analysis of the complexity of a global mining center. Silver flows reveal the interconnections between different parts of the world, and the chapters by Bonialian and Lane are most demonstrative in this regard. Less visible, but equally important, are the confluence of diverse traditions in Potosí in many other aspects. Aguilar shows, for example, how the construction of a great hydraulic work united diverse actors and their knowledges: first, the expertise of the Indigenous communities that had a long history of water management in the highland ecology; second, the political authority of Potosí, who had been in the battle of Lepanto as a military builder and had worked on tunnels in Huancavelica and roads and dams in Potosí. Finally, there was the involvement of specialists (maestros) and technicians. Different influences are also present in the eighteenth century in the refiners’ company (Compañía de Azogueros) and in the bank to buy silver (Banco de Rescates) as seen in Barragán R.’s contribution. The fame and success of the companies of the Netherlands and Great Britain, but also the cocoa company established between Caracas and Spain, are glimpsed within the initiatives and policies that shaped mining throughout this century. The interplay of diverse traditions from the Old and New World are also very clear in contemporary European understandings of mineralogy and theories about the Cerro Rico that are explored in the chapter by Heidi Scott, whose work contributes to a rich historiography that can be linked to Carmen Salazar-Soler’s pioneering work. The agency and initiative that different actors could take in the global system were evident in the peruleros, the traders who, with the silver from Potosí and Peru, became independent from the merchants of Seville and Spain. These global agents managed, according to Mariano Bonialian, to open their own silk road to Asian markets, showcasing not only the flow of silver but also the Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 36 Barragán R. and Zagalsky consumption that existed in Peru of ordinary and fine silk, porcelain, ivory, and other products. The multiple practices and negotiations over “freedoms” amid workers in the mint house are one of Almeida’s main contributions. These negotiations meant concrete exchanges of cash for labor, choice of lodging and affective life. Various actors’ significant agency can also be glimpsed in the reports of how they took advantage of the mining resources for themselves, particularly the group of so-called k’ajchas and trapicheros who were able to insert themselves as producers and buyers of silver and became a concern for the authorities and for many azogueros of Potosí. Another important area explored in the book is the construction and role of knowledge and how this is intertwined with forces of power and politics. Such topics rose to prominence with the works of Michel Foucault and Peter Burke’s social history of knowledge, as well as cultural studies, particularly present in the United States, and reflections on and questioning the division between nature and society. Raphael analyzes the ways in which archival documents and sources have communicated technical knowledge and scientific “inventions” and experimentation, claiming that these were permeated by prevailing administrative, legal, and political protocols. In dialogue with research on science, the author argues that knowledge does not exist separately from other societal spheres, so that historical records, rather than being sources of culture and knowledge, should instead be considered performances of scientific and technical culture. Heidi Scott, on the other hand, resorting to the concept of “political geology,” analyzes geological knowledge shaped by the economy, labor, moral debates, logics, and hierarchies of government. Knowledge about the mountain should then be situated as geological arguments by different authors who proposed, promoted, and debated policies on the government of the mines and on labor policies. In other words, such knowledge and representations influenced the governance practices and debates that took place around the labor of the mita. She argues that knowledge of the physical earth and human politics are not only intertwined but also co-constituted. Regarding the imprints of the particular training and theoreticalmethodological approaches of their authors, we will focus on three examples. First, ethnohistorian Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne argues for the need to account for different fields of analysis in understanding the pre-Hispanic period of Potosí. The author draws not only on multiple and diverse historical sources but also on linguistic analyses of various terms. This allows her to reestablish the religious cartography of the region as well as the geology in a long-term perspective. Heidi Scott, whose background is in historical geography and Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction: The Age of Silver 37 anthropology, and Renée Raphael, with her background in the history of science, contribute to thinking about the close links between fields generally conceived as distinct spheres, such as the production of historical sources, mining experimentation, and knowledge of the land. Both authors lead us to reflect on the connections between knowledge, power, and politics from particular angles: first, from political geology and, second, from reflecting on the formats and protocols of historical sources that permeate the regime of knowledge production. Bouysse-Cassagne, Scott, and Raphael make us realize that a mining site is more than just the exploitation of minerals: it is also a center and landscape imbued with conceptions of the world and wealth. It is also a place where the political economy influences knowledge and debates, whether in matters of technical experimentation, labor policies, or reports on the hill. Several of the chapters, through their meticulous approaches, allow perspectives on Potosí that go beyond stereotypical visions, raising issues of the environmental history of mining and social and labor history, as in the case of Julio Aguilar, Paula C. Zagalsky, James Almeida, and Rossana Barragán R. These contributions invite us to break the dichotomy of workers versus owners as monolithic and uniform entities, as well as to consider the networks of relationships between activities and groups. Zagalsky shows us that socioeconomic differences existed between “the owners of the means of production”—the group that held the concessions and ownership of mines and mills. Members of the privileged elite were very different, for example, from the so-called soldiers. Barragán, moreover, reveals how people who did not have mines in the hills managed to appropriate, process, and sell minerals, opening up important labor spaces for different groups. Women as owners of mines (see Zagalsky), rudimentary mills, or silver sellers (see Barragán R.) de-masculinize mining spaces. James Almeida shows, on the other hand, how workers of different statuses coexisted in the Casa de la Moneda, but above all how each group was in charge of specific and particular tasks, distributed according to their differences, while roles of oversight and watchmen were frequently fulfilled by enslaved men who were then placed above non-slave workers. Finally, as Aguilar points out, the formation of the Potosí mining landscape should be understood not as a result of silver world demands but as part of the convergence between the Spanish Empire, regional and local societies, and the interconnections between groups within the constraints of colonial domination. Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ newgenrtpdf 38 Annex table 0.1 Decade Hamilton (1503–1660 Chaunu (1584–1653) Morineau (1581–1805) TePaske (1581–1810) Dominguez Ortíz García Fuentes García-Baquero (1621–1670) (1651–1700) (1717–1778) 42 110 92 92 92 86 135 135 101 42 1 110 99 Barragán R. and Zagalsky Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 1501–1510 1511–1520 1521–1530 1531–1540 1541–1550 1551–1560 1561–1570 1571–1580 1581–1590 1591–1600 1601–1610 1611–1620 1621–1630 1631–1640 1641–1650 1651–1660 1661–1670 Estimates of bullion shipments from the Indies to Europe 1501–1805 (by decade in millions of pesos of 272 maravedís) newgenrtpdf Chaunu (1584–1653) Morineau (1581–1805) TePaske (1581–1810) Dominguez Ortíz García Fuentes García-Baquero (1621–1670) (1651–1700) (1717–1778) 101 145 741 246 249 170 148 2,891 187 230 257 265 262 321 344 393 362 4,256 189 247 740 source: tepaske, a new world, 314– 15. information about dominguez ortíz extracted from garcía- baquero, andalucía y la carrera de indias, table 0.1 39 Rossana Barragán R. and Paula C. Zagalsky - 9789004528680 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/18/2024 01:55:11PM via Open Access. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 1671–1680 1681–1690 1691–1700 1701–1710 1711–1720 1721–1730 1731–1740 1741–1750 1751–1760 1761–1770 1771–1780 1781–1790 1791–1800 1801–1805 Total Hamilton (1503–1660 Introduction: The Age of Silver Decade 40 Barragán R. and Zagalsky Bibliography Abercrombie, Thomas. “Q’aqchas and La Plebe in Rebellion: Carnival vs. Lent in 18th Century Potosí.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2, no. 1 (1996): 62–111. Alfonso, Marina, and Carlos Martínez Shaw. “La era de la plata española en Extremo Oriente.” Revista Española del Pacífico 17 (2004): 17–35. Andrews, Kenneth R. The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder 1530–1630. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Andrews, Kenneth R. English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies 1588–1595. New York: Kraus reprint, 1986. 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