PERIODICAL: COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW

This special issue spans the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries to reconsider the cultural and economic impact of mining and coin production in the early Americas. The geographic scope of the articles—the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru and the British Caribbean—underscores the hemispheric circulation of mining and minting knowledge and the movement of coins. The authors primarily present regional case studies but taken together these essays present a trans-imperial perspective on the significance of mining and minting in the Americas, specifically silver, the most heavily trafficked precious metal in the early modern period. This hemispheric scope highlights similarities in the ways Indigenous people, colonists, forced migrants, and others accorded cultural and economic value to silver at different moments of its life cycle. The broad reach prioritizes formerly ignored topics and perspectives, ranging from that of African-descended men who labored in the mint at Potosí, to those of women from India who made jewelry from their silver coin wages.

The articulation of a New Mining and Minting History as a subfield follows a historiographical tradition that names scholarly trends to crystalize their intellectual aims and analytical promise. Titling the issue ‘Recent research on silver mining and mints in the Americas' would imply that the articles simply pursue the topics and questions of a well-established body of scholarship. Mining and minting have indeed piqued scholars' interests since the earliest years of the field of Latin American history. Newer works on mining and minting, however, point to a twenty-first-century revival that has a different orientation than previous scholarship. The NMMH is actively producing new ways of thinking about the history of metals, which includes an emphasis on the ways historical actors mined and minted metals and the value and significance they placed on the same.

The terminology and conceptual framework of the NMMH are directly influenced by the recent work of scholars who have marked historiographical turns or subfields concerned with Native American history, including the New Mission History, the New Philology, and the New Conquest History (Jackson 1995; Restall 2003, 2012). Others eschew monikers, but have nonetheless gestured towards ‘new currents,' such as in Borderlands History (Levin Rojo and Radding 2019, 15). Scholars who have articulated the rise of these new schools and currents all emphasize the use of overlooked sources (like Indigenous-language manuscripts and non-written materials) to arrive at pioneering histories that center Indigenous peoples and their perspectives. The NMMH is a parallel cultural, linguistic, and material turn concerned with the diverse people who were engaged in connected enterprises: the making and holding of metal wealth.

 

The NMMH has four identifiable hallmarks. A summary reference to some previous key studies on mining and minting alongside new scholarship testifies to some of the ways that this historiographical turn has moved beyond traditional concerns. Studies in NMMH, primarily published in the last ten years, serve as foundational work for this growing subfield. Scholars writing NMMH cover a wide geographic scope and focus on a variety of elemental metals like mercury and lead. This special issue focuses on silver and copper and on Spanish and British America.

 

Introduction: a new mining and minting history for the Americas
Tatiana Seijas et al.

‘To search and claim': indigenous prospectors, silver mining, and legal practices in Spanish America, 1530–1600
Dana Velasco Murillo

Ingenios and ingenuity: rethinking Indigenous histories of silver in the colonial Andean mining industry
Allison Bigelow & Pablo Cruz

Suspicious possession: policing silver and making race in colonial Potosí
James Almeida

Bits, shillings, and dollars: slavery, indenture, and circulating silver in British Guiana, 1800s–1900s
Louise Moschetta

In search of a decent coin: the value of small change in Bourbon Spanish America
Andrew Konove

Afterword: mining, minting, and money – from within and from below
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert

For more information, or to order, see:
Colonial Latin American Review, Volume 30, Issue 4 (2021) (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ccla20/current)

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