Potosi

A skilled raconteur, Lane mines colonial chronicles written by potosinos for anecdotes to bring the city to life. . . . What makes Lane's book important is its focus on Potosi, the city, whose importance, he shows, was greater than just the mines and refining mills. * Journal of Early Modern History * ...a valuable contribution to the study and understanding of Andean civilization and history. . . . [that] includes detailed sources and an extensive bibliography, and especially an appendix that collates the observations of selected early chroniclers of Potosi. And although Lane describes himself as a newcomer and interloper to the history of Potosi, he has delivered a marvelous work that brings together a library of writing on this fascinating topic and all under one cover. * Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina * Rollicking is not a term normally applied to books from an academic press, and it is perhaps an exaggeration, but only a slight one, to use it here. Lane includes technical, mineralogical, chemical, historical and other background, but his focus is on the stories, la comedie humaine, that played out in Potosi during the two and three-quarter centuries between the discovery of silver and Simon Bolivar's declaration of independence delivered from the Cerro Rico's peak. * Asian Review of Books * Lane builds his analysis from fragments: notarial records and other archival documents that are both amazingly rich and rather ill-suited to crafting a narrative driven by particular individuals or families. . . . by dividing each chapter into a handful of very short sections (some no more than a page long), he gives readers a sense of how historical research feels and leaves it to us to piece a fuller story together. * Times Literary Supplement * Covering the period from the discovery of silver until 1825, he uses personal stories gleaned from original sources to produce a rich and lively account that shows how elite merchants, officials and mine owners rubbed shoulders with African slaves, native residents and migrants. . . . As this beautifully written book shows, the costs and benefits of globalisation are not confined to their historical moment. * History Today * ...Lane deserves credit not only for assembling so much old and new information into a convenient form, but also for reminding us that cities have a life of their own, regardless of their national or transnational importance. . . . As he writes in his preface, the aim of his book is to 'balance the local and the global by treating Potosi-city and mountain, mines and countryside-as an example of early modern global urbanism and extraction in action.' In this he succeeds admirably. * New York Review of Books *