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Silver from Latin America and especially from Potosí is at the origin of one of the first waves of globalization. South America contributed between 1493 and 1800 supplied 85% of the world’s silver. The main goal of this book is to offer for English-language readers a comprehensive volume on Potosí and the wider world. This is realized with the collaboration of a select group of twelve scholars from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, France, Japan, Mexico, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all of them at the cutting-edge of research on Potosí. The book has a broad introduction of the Editors of the volume. The contributions are organized in three parts: the first one explores the origin of the exploitation and how silver production was conceived and described; the second part analyzes the organization of labour for almost 300 years and the third part examines the flow of silver to Europe and Asia.

Potosí (today in Bolivia) was the major supplier of silver 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[you could add here “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.

A "Silver Bank" refers to the institution that purchased silver from the producers, but also, metaphorically, to the mountain of Potosí and its economic, social and political dynamics. The documentation of the Bank or related to it, constitute a privileged window to rethink the renaissance of mining in the 18th century. The Bank emerged in the context of the previous demands of the azogueros, the chartered companies and the early Bourbon reforms. It reveals the "renaissance" of Potosí but also the heterogeneous world of production. The Bank made visible diverse actors that otherwise would have gone largely unnoticed like. The article analyzes all of them although it privileges the small and medium-sized producers. The quantitative reports of silver sold to the Bank, the diverse accounts of the k'ajchas and trapiches (independent producers), visits to artisanal mills, reports from miners and stewards, and books of daily purchases allows an approach to them. Last, but not least, I propose to rethink in the reasons and causes of the recovery of Potosí in the eighteenth century, that need to be linked to the Bourbon policies and the drive of heterogeneous sectors.

This paper focuses on the labor provision of the colonial mita, drawing on contributions from Andean historiography and recent labor history. It examines, through the analysis of the Viceroy Duque de La Palata's Reform, the coexistence of different labor regimes and their consequences. The "Arancel de jornales", which sought to equalize the labor remunerations of the mita and the minga or hired labor, while maintaining the differences in the mining centers, is examined. The "chain of coercion" of the mita is analyzed and the spaces of action of the indigenous population, the limitations of the Spanish authorities and the indigenous resistance to the extension of the mita supported by other economic and regional sectors.

Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil. In this book, French explicitly aims to give a bottom-up account of Lula’s life. Various reviews and discussions of French’s Lula biography have already been published, and therefore the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History decided to organize a broader debate, to discuss the interplay between the biographical genre and recent trends in social history, and, more in particular, global labour history. In this debate, we have asked John French and a number of colleagues from around the world to discuss the value of the social-biographical perspective for the field of global labour history.

Review and analysis of six books on mining in Latin America.