Book Presentation Potosí in the Global Silver Age

The new edited volume Potosí in the Global Silver Age (16th—19th Centuries), edited by IISH Research Fellow Rossana Barragán and Paula C. Zagalsky will be presented on Tuesday 25 April at the IISH.

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. The book 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.

Contributors to the volume 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.

At the presentation, Alejandra Irigoin (London School of Economics) and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (IISH) will deliver comments on the book and the relevance of historical research into the silver mining at this seminal place of global capitalism. The event will be opened by Marcel van der Linden.

The event is open to the public, but with regard to accommodation, we would like you to register, jacqueline.rutte@bb.huc.knaw.nl,