In Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries, Saul Guerrero combines historical research with geology and chemistry to refute the current prevailing narrative of a primitive effort dominated by mercury and its copious emissions to the air. Based on quantitative historical data, visual records and geochemical fundamentals, Guerrero analyses the chemical and economic reasons why two refining processes had to share production, creating along the way major innovations in the chemical recipes, milling equipment, mercury recycling practice, and industrial architecture and operations. Their main environmental impact was lead fume and the depletion of woodlands from smelting, and the transformation of mercury into calomel during the patio process.

In Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury Saul Guerrero presents a chemical history of the refining of silver ores in New Spain and Mexico, 16c to 19c, with a quantitative analysis of its industrial practice, and its environmental impact.

The open access publication of this book has been made possible thanks to the International Institute of Social History – Amsterdam. Potosí (today Bolivia) was the major supplier for the Spanish Empire and for the world and still today boasts the world's single-richest silver deposit. This book explores the political economy of silver production and circulation illuminating a vital chapter in the history of global capitalism. It travels through geology, sacred spaces, and technical knowledge in the first section; environmental history and labor in the second section; silver flows, the heterogeneous world of mining producers, and their agency in the third; and some of the local, regional, and global impacts of Potosí mining in the fourth section. The main focus is on the establishment of a complex infrastructure at the site, its major changes over time, and the new human and environmental landscape that emerged for the production of one of the world ́s major commodities: silver. Eleven authors from different countries present their most recent research based on years of archival research, providing the readers with cutting-edge scholarship. Contributors are: Julio Aguilar, James Almeida, Rossana Barragán Romano, Mariano A. Bonialian, Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, Kris Lane, Tristan Platt, Renée Raphael, Masaki Sato, Heidi V. Scott, and Paula C. Zagalsky.

In Mexico environmental struggles have been fought since the nineteenth century in such places as Zacatecas, where United States and European mining interests have come into open conflict with rural and city residents over water access, environmental health concerns, and disease compensation. In Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs, Rocio Gomez examines the detrimental effects of the silver mining industry on water resources and public health in the city of Zacatecas and argues that the human labor necessary to the mining industry made the worker and the mine inseparable through the land, water, and air. Tensions arose between farmers and the mining industry over water access while the city struggled with mudslides, droughts, and water source contamination. Silicosis-tuberculosis, along with accidents caused by mining technologies like jackhammers and ore-crushers, debilitated scores of miners. By emphasizing the perspective of water and public health, Gomez illustrates that the human body and the environment are not separate entities but rather in a state of constant interaction.

"Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis. This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of its 31 chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: key approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. Taken together, the Oxford Handbook of Commodities History offers insight into the directions in which commodities history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world"--

"For anyone who wants to learn about the rise and decline of Potosí as a city . . . Lane’s book is the ideal place to begin."—The New York Review of Books In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the sixteenth century to its collapse in the nineteenth. Throughout, Kris Lane’s invigorating narrative offers rare details of this thriving city and its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust.

This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out. Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitability over and over again in Mexico's mining districts. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision—a moral ecology—that defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book's breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.

Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed. Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place. This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences.

Gamboa’s World examines the changing legal landscape of eighteenth-century Mexico through the lens of the jurist Francisco Xavier de Gamboa (1717–1794). Gamboa was both a representative of legal professionals in the Spanish world and a central protagonist in major legal controversies in Mexico. Of Basque descent, Gamboa rose from an impoverished childhood in Guadalajara to the top of the judicial hierarchy in New Spain. He practiced law in Mexico City in the 1740s, represented Mexican merchants in Madrid in the late 1750s, published an authoritative commentary on mining law in 1761, and served for three decades as an Audiencia magistrate. In 1788 he became the first locally born regent, or chief justice, of the High Court of New Spain. In this important work, Christopher Albi shows how Gamboa’s forgotten career path illuminates the evolution of colonial legal culture and how his arguments about law and justice remain relevant today as Mexico debates how to strengthen the rule of law.

Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.