Potosí in the global silver age (16th-19th centuries)

Potosi (today Bolivia) was the major supplier for the Spanish Empire and for the world and still nowadays, boasts the world's single-richest silver deposit. This book explores the political economy of silver production and circulation illuminating a vital chapter in the history of global capitalism. It travels through geology, sacred spaces, and technical knowledge in the first section; environmental history and labor in the second section; silver flows, the heterogeneous world of mining producers, and their agency in the third; and some of the local, regional, and global impacts, in the fourth section. The main focus is on the set-up of a complex infrastructure at the site, its major changes, and the new human and environmental landscape that emerged for the production of one of the worlds major commodities: silver. Eleven authors from different countries, present their most recent research based on years of archival research providing the readers with cutting-edge scholarship. Contributors are: Julio Aguilar, James Almeida, Rossana Barragan Romano, Mariano A. Bonialian, Therese Bouysse-Cassagne, Kris Lane, Tristan Platt, Renee Raphael, Masaki Sato, Heidi V. Scott, and Paula C. Zagalsky