Black, White, and Silver: Policing Money Production in Colonial Potosí

• In Event: Making and Valuing Money in the Americas, 17th – 19th centuries

Abstract

The silver mint in colonial Potosí was heavily dependent on coerced labor, largely performed by enslaved men of African descent. These workers did the heating, cutting, and hammering that transformed silver from the world’s wealthiest mine into coin that circulated across the Early Modern world. A series of escapes and robberies by these laborers over the course of the seventeenth century sheds light on the poor security controls over silver as it passed through the mint’s production processes.
In this paper I explore these cases to ask about the value of silver and the simultaneous development of racial thought. Why did Spanish officials leave coins and scrap metal in the hands of a nonwhite coerced labor force? What was the value to the “criminals” and what to the “victims?” A social history of economic processes, this work suggests that silver served as a bargaining tool for both sides. Slaves and convict laborers claimed access to unsecured silver and used it to alleviate the miserable conditions of daily life. The Spanish mint simultaneously used these losses to place blame on nonwhite laborers for their own graft. Silver’s symbolic value was cast and recast based on who possessed it and the political climate. Re-examining the silver economy helps us see the embedded social contexts of Colonial Latin America that economic histories have sometimes erased.

Author

• James Almeida, Harvard University