Potos In The Global Silver Age 16th 19th Centuries

The open access publication of this book has been made possible thanks to the International Institute of Social History – Amsterdam. Potosí (today Bolivia) was the major supplier 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 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. Contributors are: Julio Aguilar, James Almeida, Rossana Barragán Romano, Mariano A. Bonialian, Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, Kris Lane, Tristan Platt, Renée Raphael, Masaki Sato, Heidi V. Scott, and Paula C. Zagalsky.

"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."—The New York Review of Books In 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. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the 16th century to its collapse in the 19th. Throughout, Kris Lane’s invigorating narrative offers rare details of this thriving city and its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge 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.

In this comprehensive account of censorship of the visual arts in nineteenth-century Europe, when imagery was accessible to the illiterate in ways that print was not, specialists in the history of the major European countries trace the use of censorship by the authorities to implement their fears of the visual arts, from caricature to cinema.

In Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries, Saul Guerrero combines historical research with geology and chemistry to refute the current prevailing narrative of a primitive effort dominated by mercury and its copious emissions to the air. Based on quantitative historical data, visual records and geochemical fundamentals, Guerrero analyses the chemical and economic reasons why two refining processes had to share production, creating along the way major innovations in the chemical recipes, milling equipment, mercury recycling practice, and industrial architecture and operations. Their main environmental impact was lead fume and the depletion of woodlands from smelting, and the transformation of mercury into calomel during the patio process.

Dramatic changes during the Reformation era in Northern Europe, such as witchcraft and new global discoveries, are examined through visual culture, both prints and paintings.

Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture sheds light on women's rights advancements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century through explorations of literature and culture from this time period. With an international emphasis, contributors illuminate the range and diversity of women’s work as novelists, journalists, and short story writers and analyze the New Woman phenomenon, feminist impulse, and the diversity of the women writers. Studying writing by authors such as Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Netta Syrett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, and Jean Rhys, the contributors analyze women’s voices and works on the subject of women’s rights and the representation of the New Woman.

History and Economic Life offers students a wide-ranging introduction to both quantitative and qualitative approaches to interpreting economic history sources from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Having identified an ever-widening gap between the use of qualitative sources by cultural historians and quantitative sources by economic historians, the book aims to bridge the divide by making economic history sources more accessible to students and the wider public, and highlighting the need for a complementary rather than exclusive approach. Divided into two parts, the book begins by equipping students with a toolbox to approach economic history sources, considering the range of sources that might be of use and introducing different ways of approaching them. The second part consists of case studies that examine how economic historians use such sources, helping readers to gain a sense of context and understanding of how these sources can be used. The book thereby sheds light on important debates both within and beyond the field, and highlights the benefits gained when combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to source analysis. Introducing sources often avoided in culturally-minded history or statistically-minded economic history courses respectively, and advocating a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, it is an essential resource for students undertaking source analysis within the field.

"Vexed!" Every American's "Bitch List", "Community Capitalism"—market-driven, community-centric, entrepreneurial capitalism—lays out the problems confronting Capitalism, those threatening once again to destroy the economic well-being of the American Nation and all of its allies and associates in Western and World Civilization. From "the Stock Market" to derivatives to banks to lawyers in politics to patenting intangibles to educational failures to unions, "Community Capitalism" lays bare the issues: the internals, the problems and the illogical, human-destructive hubris of profit-before market, divine-right "Greed Capitalism." All American legislation (and that of Western Europe, too) of the past couple of decades has favored the big corporations while putting ever more insufferable demands on small businesses. At the same time, the programs of the first eight years of the century have helped to destroy American education by forcing it into what can only be called Stalinist regimentation. No one is taking responsibility for the multi-billion dollar (and euro) financial fiascos forced on the taxpayers. This has hit the American and the Greek people with taxation imposed without their consent for actions they never agreed to-the gambling that resulted in those horrendous fees. To get the world out of this condition, "Community Capitalism" proposes a basic rethinking, and redirected application of the strengths of Capitalism, to return to community-enriching, stable, progressive commerce allied with the human-centered methods of traditional, pre-"Spreadsheet-Capitalism," pre-derivative-deranged business sensibilities. The primary concept around which this is based is that of "Fiducium," a name coined to encapsulate the spirit of fiduciary responsibility, extended into all aspects of human endeavor. Eduard Qualls calls not only on his advanced business degree, but on his extensive Humanities, historical and linguistic/cultural education, heightened and honed by the experience bestowed by his almost 30 successful years within the computer science industry. Yet it was also his experience of being misused and mal-used by the mindless machinations of fatally financial-operative, mindless mega-corporate America that spurred him to organize within this volume an exposition of that damnable, destructive dysfunction he has been witnessing as it has metastasized during these past 12+ years into the consumptive calamity we must all now contend against. This book will please neither the ultra-conservative nor the ultra-liberal. But it will ring true to all those who in free and generous equanimity love their families, their neighbors and neighborhoods, their commmunities, and their Nation-indeed, all those who cherish the fond hope of a more human, more humane world of opportunity for themselves, their children, and the future of their communities. In this book Mr. Qualls gives voice to all the people in the Western World who are utterly, angrily exasperated with the way the economy and sociable life are being wrecked by wantons, gamblers and wastrels, yet who must remain quiet, silently feeding that frustration because of fear of losing their jobs if they speak out. Yes, he's "Vexed!" And you should be, too!