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Potosi

The Silver City That Changed the World

Kris Lane

$54.95

Hardback

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English
University of California Press
28 May 2019
"""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.""—New York Review of BooksIn 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. From Potosí’s startling emergence in the sixteenth century to its collapse in the nineteenth, Kris Lane tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation. Lane’s invigorating narrative offers rare details of this thriving city and its promise of prosperity. A new world—native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents living alongside elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials—emerges 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."

By:  
Imprint:   University of California Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Volume:   27
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   635g
ISBN:   9780520280847
ISBN 10:   0520280849
Series:   California World History Library
Pages:   272
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface Timeline Introduction 1 • Bonanza 2 • Age of Wind, Age of Iron 3 • The Viceroy’s Great Machine 4 • An Improbable Global City 5 • Secret Judgments of God 6 • Decadence and Rebirth 7 • From Revival to Revolution 8 • Summing Up Epilogue: Potosí since Independence Appendix: Voices Glossary Notes Bibliographical Essay Select Bibliography Index

Kris Lane holds the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University. He is author of Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires, Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition, and Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500–1750.  

Reviews for Potosi: The Silver City That Changed the World

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 *


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