In recent years there has been renewed interest in history of early modern mining stimulated particularly by historians of science and their turn toward scientific practice and materials. Orlando Bentancor’s very rich and dense study adds a new perspective to the history of colonial mining and underlines the potential of intellectual history. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru brings together the traditionally separated fields of Spanish political theory and imperial science and shows the common Scholastic basis and interactions of these two bodies of literature.

Bentancor demonstrates how after the conquest of the New World the Spanish Crown tried to justify the exploitation of mineral resources and of indigenous population in systems of forced labor (mita). Aristotelian metaphysical instrumentalism provided the theological and philosophical framework for justifying this whole colonial enterprise. The neo-Scholastic appropriation of Aristotelian metaphysics is described as a “metaphysics of handiwork” where a preexisting idea is imprinted on a passive material form. By analyzing sixteenth-century debates on Spanish sovereignty in the Americas and natural philosophical writings from 1520 to 1640, the author argues that Thomist Scholasticism formed the metaphysical basis of both imperial ideology and the instrumental manipulation of mineral matter.

After a very dense introduction, which requires full expertise in Aristotelian metaphysics and sends the reader on an intellectual journey from neo-Scholasticism to Heidegger and Marx, the author unfolds his analytical approach in five chapters. Chapter 1 discusses Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis (1539), stressing the importance of the Thomist notions matter and technē to justify the conquest and colonization of the New World. The polemics between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas which took place in Valladolid in 1550–51 are the focus of chapter 2. In Thomist tradition, Sepúlveda conceived the Americas and their inhabitants as passive and imperfect matter which had to be modeled toward a superior end. Although las Casas understood the Amerindians as autonomous, self-sufficient communities, the distinction between matter and form proves to be a common ground between both authors. After these very detailed explanations on early political writings and natural law, chapter 3 is dedicated to the Jesuit José de Acosta and turns toward the realm our mining and natural philosophy. Bentancor’s investigation of De procuranda Indorum salute (1588) and the Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) shows that Acosta does not only use metaphysical instrumentalism to justify the Spanish presence and, with regards to mining, the policy of the mita. Far more, he uses the subordination of matter to form to legitimize the extraction and appropriation of metals in the New World and to frame the metals as possessing inherent value and as the basis of an imperial common good. Chapter 4 turns toward Francisco de Toledo and explores the ideological frameworks behind the reforms he implemented as Viceroy of Peru: organizing the indigenous peoples in the reducciones (forced settlements) and establishing the mita policy of forced labor. José Luis Capoche’s Relación general de la villa imperial de Potosí provides a justification of Toledo’s reforms by depicting the mita as a necessary evil for technological as well as imperial advance. Chapter 5 concludes with Juan de Solórzano Pereira’s treatise Política indiana (1648), the last great defense of the Spanish government written in a time of political and economic crises of the Spanish Empire. Bentancor connects the imperial metaphysical conception of mining and imperial wealth to Andean beliefs on the self-reproductive capacity of metals and shows that Andean vitalism is not the indigenous alterity to Western instrumentalism; far more, it should be considered as instrumentalism turned against itself.

The originality of Bentancor’s book lies in the laudable attempt to bridge the gap between socioeconomic and intellectual history. Unfortunately, this attempt is often undermined by the presentation itself. The framing of the book as an in-depth study of a network of metaphysical concepts (and, to a lesser degree, of the individuals who use them to argue their case) will make it difficult for anyone who is not already a specialist in the history of (Spanish) political thought to fully appreciate the author’s argument. There is much to learn from this book. Yet I believe that a more accessible introduction and more concise chapters would have made it easier to absorb its important and timely story of how metaphysics were used to further tangible material interests.