Kris Lane's interpretative history of the famed Bolivian silver city of Potosí offers a nuanced and masterfully told story of the boom, bust, and stubborn survival of a city whose existence seems to both define and defy Spanish imperial aspirations. The introduction, which offers a brief historiography of the city, summarizes the difficulty in presenting such a narrative—extant histories that address Potosí do so almost exclusively as mining histories, thus the stories told center on the economic, environmental, or health-related impacts of the industry, losing, perhaps, the story of the rise of a New World city in the process. Lane offers a comprehensive history that integrates the complex webs of commerce and community, framing the city as an exemplar of “early modern global urbanism and extraction in action” (xvi).
Though the author lists the discovery of silver ore in 1545 and the arrival of Simón Bolívar in 1825 as the...
University of California Press