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.
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 *