Potosí’s colonial historiography is rich and varied, but generally recent. Between the 1940s and 1960s, historians Gwendolin Cobb, Lewis Hanke, Gunnar Mendoza, and Alberto Crespo began publishing important work on interregional trade and social conflict in early colonial Potosí. Although their studies were somewhat narrowly focused, Cobb and Crespo relied on primary sources to build their narratives. Cobb used published sources, such as Juan de Matienzo’s c.1570 Gobierno del Peru and Roberto Levillier’s massive collections of materials relating to Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, and Crespo worked with items in the Bolivian National Archive in Sucre sorted and annotated by Gunnar Mendoza, and then with items from the Archive of the Indies. Another key part of the Potosí puzzle was largely figured out by Peruvian historian Guillermo Lohmann Villena, whose 1949 history of the mercury mines of Huancavelica – Potosí’s lifeblood – remains standard.

In 1956, the North American historian Lewis Hanke pointed to potential lines of inquiry in a short book. He pursued a few of these lines in brief articles in subsequent years, but mostly he devoted his energies to publishing manuscript sources. In 1959, Hanke and Mendoza collaborated on an annotated transcription of Luis Capoche’s 1585 description of the mountain, city, and hinterland (heavily cited in this book). Published in the popular Biblioteca de Autores Españoles series, this volume was followed by another in 1965 including fragmentary descriptions of Potosí from the Archivo General de Indias and other Spanish archives. It was also in 1965 that Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza published the massive, 3-volume Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, ending centuries of mystery but also prompting new questions about historical veracity.

Also in the early 1960s, Argentinian historian Carlos Sempat Assadourian was pursuing Potosí’s trade linkages to Buenos Aires via Córdoba, an important Atlantic-interior South American corridor by 1590 and also to Santiago de Chile. He was already formulating his theory of mining-centered colonial development, a counterpoint to then-fashionable models of underdevelopment derived from dependency theory. The Brazilian historian Alice Canabrava and French historian Marie Helmer were also working out Potosí’s South Atlantic connections, illuminating Luso-Brazilian trade ties and developing aspirations following the 1580 Luso-Hispanic union. Inge Wolff offered an early look at Potosí’s enslaved African population.

The English historian Charles Boxer also approached the Cerro Rico from Brazilian territory with his extraordinary biography of Rio de Janeiro Governor Salvador Correia de Sá e Benavides (1952). Economic historians were also at work, inspired by Earl Hamilton’s seminal studies of Spain’s early modern price revolution. U.S.-born Brazilianist Bailey Diffie was among the first to attempt a summing up of early Potosí silver production using smeltery ledgers housed in Seville, a task carried forward in Potosí’s own archives and other repositories by Peter Bakewell, whose figures are now standard. Potosí mine and mint output has been treated on a larger scale by John J. TePaske, Herbert Klein, Kendall Brown, Ward Barrett, Engel Sluiter, and others – taken to the global sphere by Arturo Giráldez and Dennis Flynn. We know much about registered silver production and its relation to global trends thanks to these scholars.

Hanke and Mendoza’s monumental 1965 publication of Arzáns’s c.1736 History of the Imperial Villa of Potosí perhaps epitomizes the first great wave of scholarship, focused as it was on getting important raw material and basic facts published while also sketching the general contours of Potosí’s heyday in a regional if not quite global context. R.C. Padden was inspired by the huge 1965 three-volume Arzáns set to translate and annotate some of his most picturesque stories in 1979 under the title Tales of Potosí. The cultural and literary history of Potosí seemed to be budding, but there were as yet few takers. Stephanie Merrim and Lisa Voigt have recently revived this line of inquiry. Voigt (2016) uses Arzáns and corroborating sources to illuminate the Imperial Villa’s die-hard festival culture, comparing it with the near-namesake Vila Rica in Minas Gerais, Brazil.

In the next wave of historical studies (1970s-80s), Peter Bakewell, Mario Chacón Torres, Jeffrey Cole, Enrique Tandeter, Josep Barnadas, and Rosemarie Buechler published landmark studies based on extensive archival research. Bakewell and Cole focused on the Habsburg-era mita, and Tandeter and Buechler examined this infamous labor draft, kajcheo, and other economic matters in the Bourbon era, when the mines underwent a substantial revival. Chacón, an art historian, mined Potosí’s notary books for the first time. Bakewell used Luis Capoche as a key source for how mining and refining were carried out by free as well as drafted indigenous workers and traders in the early years, whereas Cole examined the huge volume of polemical literature surrounding the mita for insights into Habsburg colonial governance.

The key players in Cole’s narrative were not the Andean workers or the “activist” viceroys (nor the priests) who routinely claimed to seek their protection, but rather the refiners, or azogueros. Soon after the arrival of Viceroy Toledo in 1572, Potosí’s silver refiners came to constitute a new and powerful class, one that persisted to the end of colonial times. The other institution established by Toledo, the Potosi mint, was first studied in depth by Arnaldo Cunietti-Ferrando although various numismatists before him had written about it. He set a standard for numismatic studies based on archival materials as well as printed matter. Meanwhile, historian Clara López Beltrán opened a new kind of historical geography with Potosí at center.

Labor and bureaucracy were indeed not the only things of interest in Potosí, and in 1987 Peter Bakewell published a biography of seventeenth-century mining and commercial magnate Antonio López de Quiroga. The thrust of Bakewell’s work was colonial entrepreneurship, another counterpoint to dependency theorists’ claims of underdevelopment and backwardness at the so-called periphery of the modern world-system. Meanwhile, Sempat Assadourian continued to use studies of commerce and innovation in Potosí to challenge claims of underdevelopment throughout the Andes and eventually much of colonial Spanish America. He argued that silver mining was a reliable motor for economic development.

In treating the indigenous world, one of the most significant contributions to the history of Potosí was the collaborative work of Tristan Platt, Olivia Harris, and Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne: Qaraqara Charka. These authors built on years of fieldwork and archival work to offer an alternative history of the entire region, placing the Cerro Rico and Imperial Villa in a new context. Also key in this vital endeavor were Thierry Saignes, Xavier Albó, Tom Abercrombie, Luis Miguel Glave, Ricardo Godoy, and Carmen Salazar Soler, among others. For the city and Cerro Rico, the work of ethnographer Pascale Absi is now essential.

Aside from the work of art historians such as Teresa Gisbert, José Mesa, Mario Chacón, and a few numismatists, no monographic study of colonial Potosí appeared until 2005, when historian Jane Mangan published a breakthrough book on small-scale trade and food production in the Habsburg era. It was the first book-length work since Chacón’s study of artisans to exploit Potosí’s own notary records in depth, and also the first to go beyond the “tall tales” of Arzáns in treating the history of women. Mangan brought to life a city whose majority indigenous population pulsed with commercial activity, much of it involving the trading of raw silver ore for maize beer as well as bread, soup, and other victuals. Women of indigenous and mixed background fed the laboring masses, but also made strides toward capital accumulation as entrepreneurs and social advance as members of religious confraternities.

Another monumental contribution to the history of Baroque Potosí is Ignacio Gonzalez Casasnovas’s Las dudas de la corona (2000), in some ways a sequel to the 1980s studies of Bakewell and Cole, tracing the evolution of the mita as well as the city’s azoguero elite in the later seventeenth century. In the realm of cultural history, a superb 2008 volume of essays edited by Andrés Eichmann and Marcela Inch compares urban society in Potosí and nearby La Plata (today Sucre). Studies of the latter city’s elites has always made the work of Ana María Presta vitally important to anyone interested in colonial Potosí. In a similar vein, the voluminous and innovative work of Rossana Barragán, Raquel Gil-Montero, Sergio Serulnikov, Paula Zagalsky, and Eugenia Bridhikina has amplified our knowledge of indigenous as well as African-descended protagonists. They represent the abiding and growing interest of Argentine scholars in several disciplines in the colonial history of Potosí.

Despite this considerable body of work, supplemented recently by Kenneth Mills, Kendall Brown, Consuelo Varela, Alan Craig, Nicholas Robins, Emma Sordo, and David Dressing, there remains a general ignorance of the basic history of Potosí – a chronological narrative to compare with the fanciful work of Arzáns. This is hardly the fault of the several generations of historians and other scholars just listed, and I urge readers to consult their invaluable work for the “real” story. As a newcomer and interloper, I stand on their shoulders.

It may come as no surprise that fictional works on colonial Potosí often trace their genesis to Arzáns as well. I have mentioned the “Andean gothic” works of Juana Manuela Gorriti, Vicente Quesada, and Ricardo Palma, to which we should add the Bolivian writer “Brocha Gorda” (J.L. Jaimes) and the great Potosí compiler of history and folklore Modesto Omiste. A mid-twentieth century novel set during the 1620s war of Basques and Vicuñas is José Enrique Viaña’s vivid Cuando vibraba la entraña de plata (1948).¹ Viaña lamented the shortage of “real” histories of Potosí, relying on the fragmentary portions of Arzáns then available. Bolivian writer Ramón Rocha Monroy mined the expanded Arzáns in his novella Potosí 1600 (2002). American writer Annamaria Alfieri set a mystery in seventeenth-century Potosí, City of Silver (2009), also inspired by Arzáns.² With respect to these authors, I recommend Arzáns.

Working Bibliography