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"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.
Potosí, a mining center in what is now Bolivia, was the most productive source of silver in the Spanish American Empire between the mid-1500's and the late seventeenth century. Much of this success was attributable, at least initially, to the mita, a system of draft Indian labor instituted by Viceroy Francisco do Toledo in 1573 for the working of the silver mines and refineries. Bitter debate swirled around the mita during most of its 250-year history. It was assailed by its enemies as a form of servitude worse than slavery and accused of depopulating the provinces subject to it, yet it was supported by many, however reluctantly, who believed that the Spanish Empire depended on Potosí silver for its survival. The author traces the evolution of the mita from its inception to the end of the Hapsburg epoch in 1700. The primary focus is on the metamorphosis of the mita under the pressures of changing production realities at Potosí and demographic developments in the provinces from which the Indians were drafted. The author describes the role of native headmen (kurakas) in the system, the means used by Indians to evade service, and the efforts of the mining guild to tailor the mita to its needs. The secondary focus is on the Hapsburg government's administration of the mita, especially those factors that prevented the Crown or its viceroys from being fully effective.
In 1719, a deadly and highly contagious disease took hold of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a silver mining metropolis in what is now Bolivia. Within a year, the pathogen had killed some 22,000 people, just over a third of the city’s residents. Victims collapsed with fever, body aches, and effusions of blood from the nose and mouth. Most died within days. The great Andean pandemic of 1717–22 was likely the most destructive disease to strike South America since the days of the Spanish conquest. Pandemic in Potosí features the single longest narrative of this nearly forgotten period, penned by local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, along with shorter treatments of the disease’s ravages in Cuzco, Arequipa, and the outskirts of Lima. The “Gran Peste,” as it was called, was a pivotal event about which Arzáns wrote at length because he lived through it, but also because it was believed to have cosmic significance. Kris Lane translates and contextualizes Arzáns’s account, which is rich in local detail that sheds light on a range of topics—from therapeutics, devotional life, class relations, gender, and race to conceptions of illness, sin, and human will and responsibility during a major public health crisis. Original narratives of the pandemic, translated here for the first time, help readers see commonalities and differences between past and present disease encounters. Designed for use in courses on Latin American history, this concise work will also interest scholars and students of the history of religion, history of medicine, urban studies, and epidemiology.
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.
From the 16th century, the mines of Potosí, perched high in the Andes, bankrolled the Spanish empire. During those years immense wealth allowed the city to grow larger than London at the time and the mountain was quickly given the epithet Cerro Rico – the 'rich mountain'. But today, Potosí’s inhabitants are some of the poorest in South America while the mountain itself has been so greedily plundered that its summit is on the verge of collapsing. So many people have died in the mines that the Cerro Rico is now called the 'mountain that eats men’. In this captivating, moving tale of harrowing bravery and wistful beauty Ander Izagirre tells the story of the mountain and those who risk their lives in its shadow through the eyes of Alicia – a 14-year-old girl working in the dark, dangerous mines to support her family. Through her eyes we can come to know the story of postcolonial Bolivia.
The open access publication of this book has been made possible thanks to the International Institute of Social History – Amsterdam. Potosí (today Bolivia) was the major supplier for the Spanish Empire and for the world and still today 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 of Potosí mining in the fourth section. The main focus is on the establishment of a complex infrastructure at the site, its major changes over time, and the new human and environmental landscape that emerged for the production of one of the world ́s 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 Barragán Romano, Mariano A. Bonialian, Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, Kris Lane, Tristan Platt, Renée Raphael, Masaki Sato, Heidi V. Scott, and Paula C. Zagalsky.
This book traces the history of mining and geology from the 1500's in the valuable silver mines of the Erzgebirge Mts of eastern Germany to the rich silver mines of Bolivia, including Potosi. With emphasis on the famous first mining geologist/engineer, Georgius Agricola who wrote his treatise on mining and smelting techniques, De Re Metallica, during the Renaissance and the contributions of some well-known geologists whose theories proliferated during the Industrial Revolution, the close connection between society and the natural sciences is examined. A major section on the engineering application of mapping at a large Canadian open pit mine demonstrates modern geological and geotechnical thinking. The powerful tools of both the miners and the geologists, dialectical and historical materialism are explained in detail in their relation to the earth's processes, the mining cycle and social redress. The environmental movement and the struggle of the miners for better working conditions and a more humane social system are discussed as is the comparison between the equitable Inca mit'a labour system and the corrupted mit'a of the Conquistadores. Richly illustrated, with 74 figures, and images of the famous scientists and maps and photographs to explain technical points make it highly readable.