Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico 1763-1810


Book Description

The aim of this study is to define that distinctive blend of enlightened despotism and entrepreneurial talent which created Bourbon Mexico. The period 1763-1810 was a crucial and distinctive stage in the colonial history of Mexico. Jose de Gálvez, the dynamic minister of the Indies, transformed the system of government and restructured the economy. The ensuing 'golden age', far from being the culmination of two hundred years of steady development, sprang rather from a profound regeneration of the New World's Hispanic society. The chief success of Gálvez's policy was the unprecedented mining boom which made Mexico the world's chief silver producer. It was this silver boom which largely financed the revival of the political and economic power of the Spanish monarchy and, in Mexico itself, created a new aristocracy of merchant capitalists and silver millionaires.




Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia


Book Description

The inhabitants of the department of Antioquía in north-central Colombia have played a unique role in that country’s economic history. During the colonial period Antioqueño placer miners supplied a substantial portion of New Granada’s gold exports. Their nineteenth-century descendants pioneered investments in lode mining, colonization, international commerce, banking, stock raising, tobacco, and coffee. In the twentieth century, Antioqueños initiated the industrialization of the regional capital, Medellín. Many theories have been set forth to account for the special energy and initiative of Antioqueños. They range from ethnic and psychological interpretations (Antioqueños are descended from Jews or Basques; they are driven to succeed because of status deprivation) to historical explanations that emphasize their geographic isolation, mining heritage, or the coffee-export economy. In Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia, Ann Twinam critiques these theories and sets forth her own revisionist interpretation of Antioqueño enterprise. Rather than emphasize the alien or deviant in Antioqueño psychology or culture, Twinam re-creates the region’s late colonial economic and social structure and attributes the origins of Antioqueño enterprise to a particular mix of human and natural resources that directed the region’s development toward capital accumulation and reinvestment. Although the existing limitations of their colonial environment may have forced Antioqueños along enterprising pathways initially, the continuation of Antioqueño investments to the present day suggests that their adaptation to a specific economic reality became a way of life transcending the historical conditions that created it.




Mexico's Merchant Elite, 1590-1660


Book Description

Combining social, political, and economic history, Louisa Schell Hoberman examines a neglected period in Mexico's colonial past, providing the first book-length study of the period's merchant elite and its impact on the evolution of Mexico. Through extensive archival research, Hoberman brings to light new data that illuminate the formation, behavior, and power of the merchant class in New Spain. She documents sources and uses of merchant wealth, tracing the relative importance of mining, agriculture, trade, and public office. By delving into biographical information on prominent families, Hoberman also reveals much about the longevity of the first generation's social and economic achievements. The author's broad analysis situates her study in the overall environment in which the merchants thrived. Among the topics discussed are the mining and operation of the mint, Mexico's political position vis-a-vis Spain, and the question of an economic depression in the seventeenth century.




Spaniards in the Colonial Empire


Book Description

Spaniards in the Colonial Empire traces the privileges, prejudices, and conflicts between American-born and European-born Spaniards, within the Spanish colonies in the Americas from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Covers three centuries of Spanish colonial power, beginning in the sixteenth century Explores social tension between creole and peninsular factions, connecting this friction with later colonial bids for independence Draws on recent research by Spanish and Spanish-American historians as well as Anglophone scholars Includes some coverage of Brazil and British colonies




Theater of a Thousand Wonders


Book Description

The great many shrines of New Spain have become long-lived sites of shared devotion and contestation across social groups. They have provided a lasting sense of enchantment, of divine immanence in the present, and a hunger for epiphanies in daily life. This is a story of consolidation and growth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than one of rise and decline in the face of early stages of modernization. Based on research in a wide array of manuscript and printed primary sources, and informed by recent scholarship in art history, religious studies, anthropology, and history, this is the first comprehensive study of shrines and miraculous images in any part of early modern Latin America.







The Independence of Spanish America


Book Description

This book provides a new interpretation of Spanish American independence, emphasising political processes.




Mining North America


Book Description

"Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly turned to mining to produce many of their basic social and cultural objects. From cell phones to cars and roadways, metal pots to wall tile and even talcum powder, minerals products have become central to modern North American life. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and North Americans' relationship with it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, and forests leveled. The effects of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North American societies. Mining North America examines these developments. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, this book explores how mining has shaped North America over the last half millennium. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while seeking to draw mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history generally. Taken together, the authors' contributions make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies"--Provided by publisher.




Haciendas and Economic Development


Book Description

Agriculture, commerce, and mining were the engines that drove New Spain, and past historians have treated these economic categories as sociological phenomena as well. For these historians, society in eighteenth-century New Spain was comprised, on the one hand, of creoles, feudalistic land barons who were natives of the New World, and, on the other, of peninsulars, progressive, urban merchants born on the Iberian peninsula. In their view, creole-peninsular resentment ultimately led to the wars for independence that took place in the American hemisphere in the early nineteenth century. Richard B. Lindley’s study of Guadalajara’s wealthy citizens on the eve of independence contradicts this view, clearly demonstrating that landowners, merchants, creoles, and peninsulars, through intermarriage, formed large family enterprises with mixed agricultural, commercial, and mining interests. These family enterprises subdued potential conflicts of interest between Spaniards and Americans, making partners of potential competitors. When the wars for national independence began in 1810, Spain’s ability to protect its colonies from outside influence was destroyed. The resultant influx of British trade goods and finance shook the structure of colonial society, as abundant British capital quickly reduced the capital shortage that had been the main reason for large-scale, diversified family businesses. Elite family enterprises survived, but became less traditional and more specialized institutions. This transformation from traditional, personalized community relations to modern, anonymous corporations, with all that it implied for government and productivity, constitutes the real revolution that began in 1810.




Mines of Silver and Gold in the Americas


Book Description

This volume focuses on Latin America, since it was mainly there that Europeans (or their colonial descendants) actually engaged in mining in the 16th-19th centuries; elsewhere they traded metals mined by others. The principal metals produced, and in prodigious quantities, were silver, in the Spanish colonies, and gold, mainly in Brazil in the 18th century. These articles analyse the volume and pattern of production and the forms of labour found in mining. Particular attention is given to the technologies of extraction and refining, notably the adoption of the mercury amalgamation process: this had a major impact, driving down silver production costs; because the mercury mines were a royal monopoly, it also handed control to the Spanish crown.