A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [201]
The Spaniards had been drawn to America by the lure of gold, but what made them rich there was silver. They quickly found and exploited silver mines in Aztec Mexico, but it was in Peru, in the 1540s, that they really hit the silver jackpot – at the southern end of the Inca Empire at a mountainous place called Potosí, now in Bolivia, which quickly became known as the Silver Mountain. Within a few years of the discovery of the Potosí mines, silver from Spanish America began to pour across the Atlantic, growing from a modest 148 kilos a year in the 1520s to nearly three million kilos a year in the 1590s. In the economic history of the world, nothing on this colossal scale, or with such grave consequences, had ever happened before.
The isolated hill of Potosí sits 3,700 metres (12,000 feet) above sea level, on a high, arid and very cold plateau in the Andes – one of the most inaccessible parts of South America. Despite this remoteness, the silver mines required so much labour that by 1610 the population of this village had grown to 150,000, making it a major city by European standards of the day, and an unimaginably rich one. In 1640, a Spanish priest rhapsodized about the mine and what it was producing:
The abundance of silver ores … is so great that, if there were no other silver mines in the world, they alone would suffice to fill it with wealth. In their midst is the hill of Potosí, never sufficiently praised and admired, the treasures whereof have been distributed in generous measure to all the nations of the world.
Without Potosí, the history of sixteenth-century Europe would be very different. It was American silver that made the Spanish kings Europe’s most powerful rulers and paid for their armies and armadas. It was American silver that allowed the Spanish monarchy to fight the French and the Dutch, the English and the Turks, establishing a pattern of expenditure that was ultimately to prove ruinous. Yet for decades the flow of silver provided rock-solid credit for Spain through the direst crises and bankruptcies: it was assumed that next year there would always be another treasure fleet, and there always was. ‘In silver lies the security and strength of my monarchy,’ said King Philip IV.
The production of this wealth came at a huge cost in human life. At Potosí young native American men were conscripted and forced to labour in the mines. Conditions were brutal, indeed lethal. In 1585 one eyewitness reported:
The only relief they have from their labours is to be told they are dogs, and to be beaten on the pretext of having brought up too little metal, or taken too long, or that what they have brought is earth, or that they have stolen some metal. And less than four months ago, a mine-owner tried to chastise an Indian in this fashion, and the leader, fearful of the club with which the man wished to beat him, fled to hide in the mine, and so frightened was he that he fell and broke into a hundred thousand pieces.
In the freezing high altitude of the mountains, pneumonia was a constant danger, and mercury poisoning frequently killed those involved in the refining process. From around 1600, as the death rate soared among the local Indian communities, tens of thousands of African slaves were brought to Potosí to replace them. They proved more resilient than the local population, but they, too, died in large numbers. Forced labour in the silver mines of Potosí remains the historic symbol of Spanish colonial oppression.
Disturbingly, and to the dismay of many Bolivians, the Potosí silver mine is still a tough and unhealthy place to work. The Bolivian former head of a Potosí UNESCO project, Tuti Prado, tells us about it:
Potosí, for today’s population, is one of the poorest places in the country. Of course,