Author: P. J. BakewellPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29
Book Description
Silver Mining in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Colonial Spanish America
Author: P. J. BakewellMines of Silver and Gold in the Americas
Author: Peter BakewellPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351917358
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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.
Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas 1546-1700
Author: P. J. BakewellPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521523127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
An examination of silver mining and society in Colonial Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating upon Zacatecas, the centre of the principal silver-mining region. In the first half of the book, the author describes the discovery of the mines, the establishment of the town, its role in the northward advance of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, its administration, and the sources of its supplies of essential food and materials. The remainder of the book is devoted to an analysis of the mining industry of the Zacatecas district. The author discusses techniques, labour and raw materials. He also provides statistics for silver production, suggesting reasons for their fluctuation, and explores sources of capital for the industry. Based on detailed study of archives in both Spain and Mexico, Dr Bakewell is able to provide an entirely new chronology for the development of Zacatecas and the Mexican maining industry up to 1700.
Seventeenth-Century Metallurgy on the Spanish Colonial Frontier
Author: Noah H. ThomasPublisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081653912X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 125
Book Description
A unique contribution to the archaeological literature on the Southwest, Seventeenth-Century Metallurgy on the Spanish Colonial Frontier introduces a wealth of data from one of the few known colonial metal production sites in the Southwest. Archaeologist Noah H. Thomas draws on and summarizes ten seasons of excavation from the Pueblo of Paa-ko to provide a critical analysis of archaeological features and materials related to metal production during the early colonial period (AD 1598–1680). Extrapolating from the data, Thomas provides a theoretical interpretation of these data that is grounded in theories of agency, practice, and notions of value shaped in culture. In addition to the critical analysis of archaeological features and materials, this work brings to light a little-known aspect of the colonial experience: the production of metal by indigenous Pueblo people. Using the ethnography of Pueblo peoples and seventh-century European manuals of metallurgy, Thomas addresses how the situated agency of indigenous practitioners incorporated within colonial industries shaped the metallurgy industry in the Spanish colonial period. The resulting analysis investigates how economic, technical, and social knowledge was communicated, contested, and transformed across the social and cultural boundaries present in early colonial communities. Viewing these transformations through an ethnohistorical lens, Thomas builds a social and historical context within which to understand the decisions made by colonial actors at the time.
Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas 1546-1700
Author: P. J. BakewellPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521523127
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
A study of the development of Zacatecas, centre of the principal silver-mining region in Mexico.
Mining, Money and Markets in the Early Modern Atlantic
Author: Renate PieperPublisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030238946
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
This volume documents recent efforts to track the transformation and trajectory of silver during the early modern period, from its origins in ores located on either side of the Atlantic to its use as currency in the financial centres of continental Europe. As a point of comparison, copper mining and its monetary use in the early modern Atlantic World will also be considered. Contributors rely mainly on economic and economic history methodologies, complemented by geographical and cultural history approaches. The use of novel software applications as tools to explain economic-historical episodes is also detailed.
Potosi
Author: Kris LanePublisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520383354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
"For anyone who wants to learn about the rise and decline of Potosí as a city . . . Lane’s book is the ideal place to begin."—The New York Review of Books In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the sixteenth century to its collapse in the nineteenth. Throughout, Kris Lane’s invigorating narrative offers rare details of this thriving city and its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust.
Trading Roles
Author: Jane E. ManganPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386666
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
Located in the heart of the Andes, Potosí was arguably the most important urban center in the Western Hemisphere during the colonial era. It was internationally famous for its abundant silver mines and regionally infamous for its labor draft. Set in this context of opulence and oppression associated with the silver trade, Trading Roles emphasizes daily life in the city’s streets, markets, and taverns. As Jane E. Mangan shows, food and drink transactions emerged as the most common site of interaction for Potosinos of different ethnic and class backgrounds. Within two decades of Potosí’s founding in the 1540s, the majority of the city’s inhabitants no longer produced food or alcohol for themselves; they purchased these items. Mangan presents a vibrant social history of colonial Potosí through an investigation of everyday commerce during the city’s economic heyday, between the discovery of silver in 1545 and the waning of production in the late seventeenth century. Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosí. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosí’s economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.
The Cambridge History of America and the World: Volume 1, 1500–1820
Author: Eliga GouldPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108317812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1073
Book Description
The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas.
The Origins of Globalization
Author: Pim de ZwartPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426999
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Book Description
Reveals how global trade shaped early modern economic, social and political development, and inaugurated the first era of globalization.