Potosí
One mountain of silver financed an empire, at a human cost that is still being counted.
A city in Bolivia at four thousand metres, beneath Cerro Rico — a mountain whose silver deposits were the richest ever worked. Silver was mined here from 1545, and for a century Potosí was among the largest cities in the world.
The metallurgy that made it possible was the patio process from 1554, which extracted silver by amalgamation with mercury rather than by smelting. That removed the fuel constraint at an altitude where there is no wood, and created a mercury demand supplied from Huancavelica in Peru and Almadén in Spain.
History
Worked under the mita, a system of forced Indigenous labour adapted from an Inca institution and applied at a scale and mortality that has no defensible comparison. The death toll over the colonial period is disputed and is counted in hundreds of thousands at the low end.
Spanish silver from Potosí and Mexico entered global circulation on a scale that moved prices across Europe and Asia, and a substantial share of it ended up in China, which was monetising silver at the time.
Economic significance
It is the case that connects a material, a metallurgical process and a global economy most directly, and the one where the cost is least possible to leave out of the account. The mountain is still worked by cooperatives under conditions that remain dangerous, and Cerro Rico is subsiding.
How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.
How this connects
Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.
produces
- Silver — element · from 1545, by amalgamation with mercury after 1554, at a scale that moved prices across Europe and Asia
Sources
- Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
- Material WorldOur own writing