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Author: Peter Bakewell Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351917358 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
This volume focuses on Latin America, since it was mainly there that Europeans (or their colonial descendants) actually engaged in mining in the 16th-19th centuries; elsewhere they traded metals mined by others. The principal metals produced, and in prodigious quantities, were silver, in the Spanish colonies, and gold, mainly in Brazil in the 18th century. These articles analyse the volume and pattern of production and the forms of labour found in mining. Particular attention is given to the technologies of extraction and refining, notably the adoption of the mercury amalgamation process: this had a major impact, driving down silver production costs; because the mercury mines were a royal monopoly, it also handed control to the Spanish crown.
Author: Peter Bakewell Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351917358 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
This volume focuses on Latin America, since it was mainly there that Europeans (or their colonial descendants) actually engaged in mining in the 16th-19th centuries; elsewhere they traded metals mined by others. The principal metals produced, and in prodigious quantities, were silver, in the Spanish colonies, and gold, mainly in Brazil in the 18th century. These articles analyse the volume and pattern of production and the forms of labour found in mining. Particular attention is given to the technologies of extraction and refining, notably the adoption of the mercury amalgamation process: this had a major impact, driving down silver production costs; because the mercury mines were a royal monopoly, it also handed control to the Spanish crown.
Author: Kendall W. Brown Publisher: UNM Press ISBN: 0826351077 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
For twenty-five years, Kendall Brown studied Potosí, Spanish America's greatest silver producer and perhaps the world's most famous mining district. He read about the flood of silver that flowed from its Cerro Rico and learned of the toil of its miners. Potosí symbolized fabulous wealth and unbelievable suffering. New World bullion stimulated the formation of the first world economy but at the same time it had profound consequences for labor, as mine operators and refiners resorted to extreme forms of coercion to secure workers. In many cases the environment also suffered devastating harm. All of this occurred in the name of wealth for individual entrepreneurs, companies, and the ruling states. Yet the question remains of how much economic development mining managed to produce in Latin America and what were its social and ecological consequences. Brown's focus on the legendary mines at Potosí and comparison of its operations to those of other mines in Latin America is a well-written and accessible study that is the first to span the colonial era to the present.
Author: Leslie Bethell Publisher: CUP Archive ISBN: 9780521349246 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 484
Book Description
The complete Cambridge History of Latin America presents a large-scale, authoritative survey of Latin America's unique historical experience from the first contacts between the native American Indians and Europeans to the present day. Colonial Spanish America is a selection of chapters from volumes I and II brought together to provide a continuous history of the Spanish Empire in America from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The first three chapters deal with conquest and settlement and relations between Spain and its American Empire; the final six with urban development, mining, rural economy and society, including the formation of the hacienda, the internal economy, and the impact of Spanish rule on Indian societies. Bibliographical essays are included for all chapters. The book will be a valuable text for both students and teachers of Latin American history.
Author: John R. McNeill Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520279174 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 456
Book Description
"Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly turned to mining to produce many of their basic social and cultural objects. From cell phones to cars and roadways, metal pots to wall tile and even talcum powder, minerals products have become central to modern North American life. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and North Americans' relationship with it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, and forests leveled. The effects of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North American societies. Mining North America examines these developments. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, this book explores how mining has shaped North America over the last half millennium. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while seeking to draw mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history generally. Taken together, the authors' contributions make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Eugene L. Conrotto Publisher: Courier Corporation ISBN: 0486142051 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
Handy guide to long-lost mines, rich veins of ore, silver lodes, buried treasure, other bonanzas awaiting discovery. Descriptions of each treasure, general locale, maps, more. 96 maps, over 50 other illustrations.
Author: John J. TePaske Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004190562 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
Colonial Latin America was famed for the precious metals plundered by the conquistadores and the gold and silver extracted from its mines. Historians and economists have attempted to determine the amount of bullion produced and its impact on the colonies themselves and the emerging early-modern world economy. Using official tax and mintage records, this book provides decade-by-decade and often annual data on the amount of gold and silver officially refined and coined in the treasury and mint districts of Spanish and Portuguese America. It also places American bullion output within the context of global production and addresses the issue of contraband production and bullion smuggling. The book is thus an invaluable source for evaluating the rise of the early-modern economy.
Author: Luiz D.de Lacerda Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 3642587933 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 168
Book Description
Due to its inherent characteristics, mercury contamination from gold mining is a major environmental problem compared to past mercury contamination from industrial point sources. The worsening of social-economical conditions and increasing gold prices in the late 1970s resulted in a new rush for gold by individual entrepreneurs for whom Hg amalgamation is a cheap and easily carried out operation. Even after the present-day mining areas are exhausted, the mercury left behind will remain part of the biochemical cycle of the tropical forest. This book reviews the current information on mercury from gold mining, its cycling in the environment and its long-term ecotoxicological impact. The book is illustrated with numerous diagrams and photographs.
Author: Allison Margaret Bigelow Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469654393 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 377
Book Description
Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.
Author: William L. Silber Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691208697 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
"This is the story of silver's transformation from soft money during the nineteenth century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and by the richest man in the world, Texas oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt, during the 1970s altered the course of American and world history. FDR pumped up the price of silver to help jump start the U.S. economy during the Great Depression, but this move weakened China, which was then on the silver standard, and facilitated Japan's rise to power before World War II. Bunker Hunt went on a silver-buying spree during the 1970s to protect himself against inflation and triggered a financial crisis that left him bankrupt. Silver has been the preferred shelter against government defaults, political instability, and inflation for most people in the world because it is cheaper than gold. The white metal has been the place to hide when conventional investments sour, but it has also seduced sophisticated investors throughout the ages like a siren. This book explains how powerful figures, up to and including Warren Buffett, have come under silver's thrall, and how its history guides economic and political decisions in the twenty-first century"--Publisher's description
Author: Peter Bakewell
Author: Peter Bakewell
Author: Kendall W. Brown
Author: Leslie Bethell
Author: John R. McNeill
Author: Eugene L. Conrotto
Author: John J. TePaske
Author: MARVIN D. BERNSTEIN
Author: Luiz D.de Lacerda
Author: Allison Margaret Bigelow
Author: William L. Silber