Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World (Video)
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- Hello, my name is Kris Lane. I'm a Professor of History here at Tulane University.
- I've been here since 2011. I taught previously at the College of William and Mary in Virginia
- for 14 years and before that at the University of Miami in Florida for one year.
- I did my PhD at the University of Minnesota and my undergraduate degree
- at the University of Colorado Boulder. My most recent book is called, Potosí:
- The Silver City that Changed the World, published by the University of California Press in 2019.
- And this is my first foray into a book about a city specifically, although I've written about
- Quito, Ecuador; more about the region surrounding Quito then the city itself. And
- I've written about emeralds in Colombia. So most of my work has been focused on the Andes region of
- South America. It took me a while to get to Potosí as a scholar, but it was a place that interested
- me from the time when I was an undergraduate. It turns out Potosí was the world's most
- concentrated and productive silver deposit, or mining region, between its discovery in 1545 and
- about the year 1650. It continued to produce silver after that and it is still producing
- silver today. I visit Potosí when travel is possible, about every year or every other year.
- And I've been going back there to work in the archives and also to talk to
- local folks many times. There's also a great deal of information about Potosí
- in archives in Spain, and some in archives in the UK, and the US, and France, and Germany as well.
- What brought me to write this book really was an interest in globalizing Latin American history.
- As you know, the Stone Center for Latin American Studies here at Tulane is one of the largest in
- the country. The reason that I came to Tulane was to want to be a part of that large, really incredibly
- diverse gathering of people working on Latin America from every possible disciplinary angle.
- But also to to globalize the story of Latin America in the early modern period, so the time
- of Columbus to about the time of Simón Bolívar or thereabouts. We sometimes think of that as the
- colonial period or the early modern period. Either way, it's often assumed that Latin America was on
- the receiving end of globalization, it was not an agent of globalization and although it produced
- products like silver in the case of Potosí, or gold in the case of Columbia, or emeralds, or pearls,
- but these things were sugar in the case of Brazil; that these things really didn't alter
- the Latin American societies in the way that other places were altered by globalization. And
- I try to argue basically the opposite, and to say that the situation of Potosí and the way that it
- changed the world was not simply by supplying a raw material, in this case precious metals,
- on a very large scale, an unforeseen scale, but also Potosí was a place of transformation, social
- transformation and self-realization. It's kind of a tricky story to tell as a global history
- because the city itself is fascinating in its own right and very well documented. The Spanish were
- very interested in silver production and so they kept pretty careful records here. And as
- much as they tried to control silver production they really couldn't. It was always slipping out
- of their hands. So there are stories of indigenous mine workers doing their own thing. Certainly many
- of them suffering tremendously and being abused; it's not a pretty story. There are many enslaved
- Africans brought mostly from West Central Africa, from Congo and Angola by Buenos Aires who end up
- in Potosí and their story has not been told. I try to tell that at least in a nutshell in this
- book. The stories of women who become very powerful in the city as owners of mines and refineries but
- also as religious women and market vendors. So there's really a space for everyone in
- this crazy boom town, a kind of Deadwood South, a very violent place. So a part of the story is
- is to take on the myth and truth about the frontier violence of Potosí. It was a place where
- people challenged each other to duels pretty regularly, people were poisoning each other.
- There's lots of history of violence in this place and I try not to overdo it.
- But also to show that one of the curious things about mining towns, whether it's Potosí,
- or could be Central City Colorado, or, you know, somewhere in the Comstock Lode in Nevada,
- or even Deadwood, South Dakota, one of the curious things about mining towns is that
- in spite of their reputation for being out of control, super violent, lawless even,
- people figure out a way to to enforce rules. And even though they're fighting over mining claims
- and, you know, access to merchandise, and land, and all sorts of other things; there's lots
- of social stratification and fighting. There's also plenty of evidence of people cooperating.
- And so what I see is a story of tension more then a story of exploitation and destruction.
- All of that is the sob story- the sad story of Potosí has been told and I didn't want to
- just add another chapter to that. I wanted to look for evidence of people making the most of a tough
- situation, not to be overly optimistic about it. Because clearly, when you look at the environmental
- part of the story, which is another factor in the book, another feature that I'm trying to bring
- up to date because the history has become much richer more textured- to show that environmentally
- Potosí is a disaster, there's nothing positive about it, it's mining itself is poisoning the water,
- refining silver with mercury and other types of solvents is clearly adding
- all sorts of toxic substances to the water and the soil and the air. And people complain
- about it at the time, they talk about Potosí as a dangerous place even in the 16th and 17th
- centuries. It's a place where you can't drink the water, where food is very expensive, where
- nasty smoke is spewing into the air. There's all sorts of sound pollution because of the mills
- in town crushing ore all night long, all day long, and much more. Working in mines of course
- exposing workers to cave-ins and the list goes on. So in some ways it's also a kind of a harbinger of
- an industrial world to come. Potosí is industrial before industry was cool. And it's
- a place where, as I said, in spite of all of the bad things that happen, all of
- the negatives that we associate with mining and with the Spanish conquest and all of that,
- we also find extraordinary ingenuity. So another part of the story, you know, this is the last one
- I'll mention now, is technological savvy. The usual image of the Spanish is that they were
- always behind the rest of Europe when it came to technology and science,
- and what we find in Potosí is that they're actually at the forefront. There's certainly
- certain people who are coming up with radically new ways of refining ore, and
- developing a sense of chemistry that's pretty sophisticated in a time when alchemy was king, and
- also the creation of some pretty alarmingly large-scale engineering projects, mostly to control
- the flow of water into the city to use for water powered crushing mills to refine silver ore
- into silver. And I guess the last thing I should say is there's a- there's some stories in here
- about fraud, which is my current project. How it is that the king's mint, the king's money factory, is
- taken over by local, very savvy people, some of them officials and some of them private individuals. And
- it shows again the tension between government and private enterprise and neither comes out
- looking too good, but that's the story of Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World. Thank you.
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