Mining Silver and Valuing Money in Colonial Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who seek to expand the history of silver mining and mints beyond analyses about the extraction and circulation of mineral wealth to an examination of the experiences of people who produced silver for coins, as well as those who used and valued different forms of money. This shift in perspective underlines that monetary production was intimately entangled with imperial systems of labor allocation and colonial hierarchies.

The papers explore issues related to laboring groups and their participation in the processes of making silver and using money. Labor time, exchangeability, scarcity, and other qualities influenced how people valued and used silver coins.

James Almeida argues that in policing currency production, the mint magistrates of Potosí valued silver and silver coin according to who possessed it, attempting to keep silver out of the hands of the black slaves who transformed it into coin.

Maintaining the focus on labor in Potosí, Rosanna Barragán highlights tensions in the silver extraction systems, demonstrating the emergence of an entrepreneurial and multiracial class of workers who challenged authorized silver producers by inserting themselves into the supply chain.

Investigating British Guiana, Louise Moschetta shifts the attention from production to how laborers used money, arguing that indentured workers valued metal content and protected it by converting coin into jewelry.

Focusing on the lack of small change in circulation in Mexico City, Andrew Konove examines the creation and use of unofficial (non-metallic) money, arguing that people valued money for its exchangeability.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Chair

• Tatiana Seijas, Penn State University

Individual Presentations

• Suspicious Possession: Policing Silver and Race in Colonial Potosí - James Almeida, Harvard University

• Indígenas 'Propietarios' de la plata en Potosí: K’ajchas y trapiches en el siglo XVIII - Rossana Barragán, Instituto de Historia Social

• Money as metal, metal as jewellery: Indian indentured labourers and economic agency in British Guiana, 1870-1917 - Louise Moschetta

• The Cost of Small Change: Money, Poverty, and Economic Development in Colonial Mexico - Andrew P Konove, University of Texas at San Antonio