Kris Lane's book, Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World, was published in 2019 and presented in Sucre, Bolivia, during that year's July meeting of the Association of Bolivian Studies. It is undoubtedly an important book for those who are interested in understanding the history of mining in Potosí and its impact on the global market from the colonial period to the present. It also succeeds, to borrow the author's words, in being a ‘concise’ one.

Lane's work is part of a new wave of research following the dense historiography of the 1970s and 80s, when a constant stream of books and articles appeared; they culminated in Enrique Tandeter's dense study of 1992 (Coacción y mercado: la minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692–1826) and the voluminous and important mining dictionary (Diccionario de términos mineros para la América española, siglos XVI–XIX) compiled by Frédérique Langue and Carmen Salazar-Soler in 1993.

Contributions to the historiography of Potosí continued to appear, but less frequently. Among the most important works is Ignacio González Casasnovas’ book on the discussions surrounding policies related to mining and forced labour, published in 2000 (Las dudas de la Corona: la política de repartimientos para la minería de Potosí (1680–1732)); Jane Mangan's study on trade, women and ethnicity in early Potosí (Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí, 2005); Paulina Numhauser's contribution on women and coca (Mujeres indias y señores de la coca: Potosí y Cuzco en el siglo XVII) in 2005; an edited volume on the cities of La Plata and Potosí compiled by Andrés Eichmann et al. in 2008 (La construcción de lo urbano en Potosí y La Plata (siglos XVI–XVII)); and works by Pablo Cruz et al. in 2008 (Mina y metalurgia en los Andes del Sur, desde la época prehispánica hasta el siglo XVII), Pascale Absi in 2009 (‘No hay que mezclar las fortunas: trabajo, género e ingresos entre las comerciantes minoristas de Potosí’, Tinkazos, 12: 26), and Nicholas Robins’ work Mercury, Mining, and Empire, that appeared in 2011.

Today, we are seeing a new wave of studies and perspectives: Raquel Gil's book, which, although not about the Cerro Rico, does cover Potosí, was published in 2014 (Ciudades efímeras. El ciclo minero de la plata en Lípez (Bolivia), siglos XVI–XIX); Clara López’ study of silver paths appeared in 2016 (La ruta de la Plata: de Potosí al Pacífico. Caminos, comercio y caravanas en los siglos XVI y XVII), while studies by Paula Zagalsky, Heidi Scott and the reviewer are all scheduled to appear within the next few years.

The question is: why today? It is likely that a conjunction of factors is at work. In Latin America, there is concern about contemporary mineral extraction. From a global historical perspective, we are reminded how connected different countries can be. The flow of American and Potosí silver is instructive because it did not merely circulate widely, it also played a key role in what is known as the first globalisation. The history of these flows and interconnections revealed the pattern by which Spanish ‘dollars’ circulated, reaching as far as China, a pattern revealed also by the presence of Chinese goods in the Americas during the colonial period. All of these topics help to situate Kris Lane's important contribution.

Lane's book is much more comprehensive than those by Peter Bakewell (Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650, 1984), Jeffrey Cole (The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes, 1985), or Tandeter, which were our previous points of reference. Its title is marked by our time: The Silver City that Changed the World tells a story in which Potosí is one of the most important actors in global history, and its silver was the nucleus and heart of the Spanish colony. It is not, however, a history of the production of silver, but rather a history of the city. The book's seven chapters navigate the fluctuations and vicissitudes of silver: from the so-called discovery of the Cerro Rico and its silver to its initial boom; the spectacular relaunch under Viceroy Francisco de Toledo; the magnitude of consumption in the city and the lives of men and women spanning the entire social hierarchy; urban calamities such as the flood of 1626 and the great mint scandal of 1649; the decadence, rebirth and changes following 1750. In its conclusions, the book refers to the paradoxes of global modernity, and to the ambivalences felt by miners today. The long epilogue that addresses the period from independence to the twenty-first century seeks to demonstrate that the Cerro continues to be exploited. It is surprising, however, that the epilogue does not mention one of the three Bolivian tin barons, Mauricio Hochschild, who applied new technology to the extraction of tin in Potosí in the early 1930s.

Lane has written a rigorous book for a wide audience, without the usual academic footnotes and historiographic debates. And yet, the author has based his work on an extensive bibliography that reveals an intimate and systematic understanding of Potosí. Lane has managed to interweave the threads in such a manner that we pass from the life of the rich mestizo bullion dealer Pedro de Mondragón, as related by Friar Diego de Ocaña, to that of the rich millionaire López de Quiroga; from a food and beverage vendor studied by Mangan to the chicha vendors analysed by Numhauser; to Catalina de Erauso, a Basque woman who escaped from a convent in Spain dressed as a man and eventually came to live in Potosí. One can also re-enact the festivals in the city, in which the sacred and the profane were almost inseparable, and admire the works of the great painter Melchor Pérez Holguín or the history of Potosí written by Bartolomé Arzans de Orsúa y Vela. That is to say, the author recounts the lives of an important number of heterogeneous actors who lived in different periods in a highly vibrant and exuberant city.

Three comments are appropriate here. First, although Lane's book covers a long period, from the sixteenth to the twentieth-first century, its principal focus is inevitably the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These chapters are exquisitely successful, because the author not only creatively synthesises various themes drawn from previous studies, but also draws on his own archival work. Secondly, in the narrative and the histories that unfold in the text the author's own contributions are not always clear, and he does not problematise issues that probably deserve greater attention. Finally, my third comment concerns the role of the k'ajchas (self-employed workers), who feature in this book, and that of the trapiches (rudimentary mills), which are less prominent. Lane maintains that the death sentences carried out on some of the k'ajchas between 1751 and 1752 explains their demographic decline. Articles published by the reviewer in 2016 and 2017, with information from the archives of Sucre, Seville and Potosí, reveal that the mills were very important after the second half of the eighteenth century (see ‘Dynamics of Continuity and Change: Shifts in Labour Relations in the Potosí Mines (1680–1812)’, International Review of Social History, 61; ‘Potosí's Silver and the Global World of Trade (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)’, in Karl Roth (ed.), On the Road to Global Labour History). The trapiches imply the existence of a small-scale artisanal mining industry. The 200 mills connected with the k'ajchas suppose the existence of technologies, processes, and above all a production method to which the historiography has not given sufficient weight, and it indicates real competition for the azogueros (refiners). The k'ajchas/trapiches complex implies a quasi-parallel circuit in which indigenous people, poor Spaniards, mestizos, mulattos, men and women, were producing 50 per cent of the silver in the second half of the eighteenth century. This magnitude forces us to change our perspective on Potosí in this period.

The result of long, sustained, meticulous, well-conceived and well-articulated labour, Lane's Potosí deserves a wide audience, and not just an academic one. It will be a point of reference for anyone interested in Potosí – as mountain and community – for a long time.