The Origins of Capitalism in Latin America
The legendary silver mountain of Potosi, Bolivia
One of the books that I used to recommend to students to open up their eyes to the exploitative relationship between Europe and the rest of the world was Eduardo Galeano’s , The Open Veins of Latin America. First published in 1971 it is a fierce condemnation of how over the course of five centuries the continent has been used as resource warehouse by successive generations of monarchs, merchants, and international corporations. A big chunk of the book is devoted to the history of the Bolivian city of Potosi and it’s legendary mountain rumoured to be carved out of solid silver. In the same way that Europeans cut trails through the mountains to the golden veins of Ouro Preto, so they trekked to this geological El Dorado. As news spread across the Atlantic, wave upon wave of bandit aristocrats and hungry speculators arrived to seek their fortune. By the end of the 17th century, it is estimated that Potosi was the richest city in the world boasting a population of over 200,000. Such was the wealth that flowed from the mines, that the city became legendary for its extravagant fiestas, baroque churches, and sumptuous lifestyles. In total it is estimated that between 1503 e 1660, 185 thousand kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver arrived in Europe from the Americas, flooding markets, and helping to bankroll the development of capitalism. It is a story retold by Horacio Machado Arãoz in his incendiary book Mining, the Genealogy of disaster: Extratavism in America as the Origins of Modernity.[1] His central thesis is that the dominant narrative which reads that modernity, capitalism, and the roots of the modern State originated in northern Europe, needs to be rewritten… “The first developments in modern industrial technology did not emerge in the English mills, but in the experimental geoengineering developed in the Spanish mines of America. The first modern urbanization took place not in Manchester or London, but in Potosí. The spirit of capitalism was not Calvinist, but Catholic."
Arãoz, Horácio Machado, Mineração, Genealogia do Desastre: o Extrativismo na América Como Origem da Modernidade, (Elefante: São Paulo, 2019)