Lou wrote:
>The
>reality in Latin America is that pre-existing feudal societies were crushed
>and their inhabitants turned into laborers. Throughout the 16th century,
>there were steady evolutions in the form that this labor was expressed. In
>the first 3rd of the century you had encomiendas, which were an
>unsuccessful attempt to transplant Spanish forms. This was replaced by the
>repartamento, (equivalent to the 'mita', an Indian word) in the
>mid-century. But by the end of the century most Indians were WAGE LABORERS.
>Throughout the entire century, however, Indians did the same thing no
>matter how they were paid. They dug silver, which was transported on ships
>to Europe. Nowhere else in history do you have the same kind of
>socio-economic transformation. On the cusp of the capitalist dawn of
>history, you find 90 percent of the indigenous peoples (those that were not
>exterminated or killed by smallpox, etc.) turned into laborers.
The reviewer's of the following book urges a more nuanced
understanding of proletarianization ("A clear free-labor versus
forced-labor dichotomy does not correspond to reality") in the
centuries under discussion:
***** Journal of World History 10.2 (1999) 468-473
Book Review
Mines of Silver and Gold in the Americas
Mines of Silver and Gold in the Americas. Edited by Peter Bakewell.
An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450-1800,
vol. 19. Series edited by A. J. R. Russell-Wood. Brookfield, Vt.:
Ashgate/Variorum, 1997. Pp. xxiv + 396. $124.95 (cloth).
...The most important gold and silver mining areas in the world
throughout the early modern period were located in Spanish America
(although Japan was a mining powerhouse, too). Bakewell's volume
provides an excellent panorama of the evolution of Spanish American
mining and the history of technology, including two essays by Robert
C. West on precontact and early Spanish mining practices in Peru and
Mexico, but our comments will focus only on general mining trends and
certain issues surrounding new technologies and labor markets. This
permits us to concentrate attention on the international (indeed,
global) context of American mining.
An essay by Richard L. Garner provides a broad overview of Peruvian
and Mexican mining throughout the colonial period. Taking Spanish
America as a whole, silver production rates tripled during the second
half of the sixteenth century, dropped by a third during the
seventeenth century, then tripled again during the eighteenth
century. There is no doubt that Peru--really Potosí--dominated
American mine production from the mid-sixteenth century through 1620.
Peruvian output plummeted during the remainder of the seventeenth
century, while Mexican production grew. By the last quarter of the
seventeenth century, Mexico became and remained the chief silver
producer in the world. Peruvian silver production, most of which by
that time exited via Buenos Aires, surged in the late eighteenth
century (Fisher, p. 298), but Mexican silver production was vastly
greater by this time, reaching the staggering annual average of 21-24
million pesos by the end of the eighteenth century (Coatsworth, p.
266). Attempts to understand the reasons for the rise of Mexican
mining (and Peru's decline) lead to broad implications for the
general, multi-century evolution of Latin American society and its
trading partners. The literature states that Peruvian mines played
out (that is, Peruvian ore quality was poor compared with Mexican
ore), while Peru suffered higher mercury prices and state taxes than
did Mexico. The ore-quality argument is sound, but the latter two
arguments are less convincing (high taxes and high mercury prices
also prevailed during Peru's heyday, so why did not these negative
factors kill off silver production during the earlier period?).
Several essays focus on differing labor-supply systems in Mexico and
Peru. In an essay on Mexican mining in the 1590s, Bakewell argues
that "a surprising conclusion about the mining force also emerges:
free Indian wage labourers comprised almost 70% of it [the labor
force]. This finding goes far towards contradicting past assumptions
that mining labour in colonial Mexico was forced labour" (p. 172).
The Mexican mining industry is therefore characterized as having been
different from that of Peru in that Mexico presumably faced higher
labor costs (because Mexican miners had to pay free-labor wages). But
was the situation so straightforward?
The Spanish government is said to have been forced into the famous
mita draft-labor system in Peru because European diseases wiped out
the indigenous labor pool and because the mines were concentrated in
an extremely remote region; without the forced-labor mita "many mines
would not have shown any profit, even after the crown cut silver
taxes and mercury prices in the 18th century, and the treasury would
have lost revenue" (Garner, p. 250). Yet this issue becomes more
complex when Garner states on the same page that "Peru's draft-labor
system (mita) remained in effect at both Potosí and Huancavelica
until the end of the colonial period, although the majority of Peru's
workers were hired rather than drafted" (emphasis added). Moreover,
with "mine labor frequently in short supply, Potosían miners quickly
learned how to buy, sell, lease, and swap labor despite the state's
persistent efforts to regulate and allocate the supply. Potosí's
labor market became a hybrid. It was shaped but not dominated by
either coercive or the voluntary system" (Garner, p. 251).
Ann Zulawski's article on silver mine labor between 1607 and 1720 in
Oruro (Peru's second most important mining center, behind neighboring
Potosí) also paints a complex labor picture. As in the Mexican case,
mine owners in Oruro depended upon voluntary workers; inhabitants
paid tribute to the Spanish government, but there was no forced-labor
mita system, as there was in Potosí. Indian mine workers were paid
twice as much as mitayos in Potosí earned, plus workers were allowed
to take a piece of ore with them when they left the mines. Moreover,
independent miners worked mines owned by others on the weekends,
while paying Indian workers triple their normal wage before the
middle of the seventeenth century. According to Garner (p. 256),
periodic "labor shortages and the absence of a large-scale, state-run
labor system notwithstanding, wages for Mexican men and refinery
workers do not appear to have been as high as or higher than wages
for voluntary labourers in Peru."
Many essays focus to a greater or lesser extent upon implementation
of the revolutionary mercury-amalgam mining process in Spanish
America. Alan Probert's essay deals with Bartolomé de Medina's
introduction of mercury-amalgam technology in Mexico, where it was
developed on an industrial scale by the 1550s, while Bakewell's
article covers Francisco de Toledo's wildly successful implementation
of amalgam technology at Potosí in the 1570s. These important
cost-reducing innovations yielded immense profits for crown and
private entrepreneurs alike, of course, but the ensuing explosion of
mine output slowly depressed silver's world price again, and thus
mine profits. After the reforms of Viceroy Toledo, technological
innovation again came to the rescue when construction of a series of
expensive reservoirs above Potosí--to drive water mills throughout
the dry winter and spring seasons--lowered mining costs. Peruvian
silver production accordingly reached its zenith in the 1590s.
Given the importance of mercury-amalgam technology, maintenance of
reliable supplies of mercury was crucial to silver mining, the
financial backbone of both Spanish America's economy and imperial
Spain's global hegemonic ambitions. In principle, European mines in
Almadén and Idria were to satisfy the mercury requirements of Mexico,
while Peru's Huancavelica was to satisfy South American needs. In
reality, the crown diverted European mercury from Mexico to Peru up
to the 1660s, a peculiar trend during a time of declining Peruvian
silver output and rising production in Mexico. In the late
seventeenth century the government even authorized the shipment of
mercury from Peru to Mexico, "although only a few thousand quintales
of Peruvian mercury were actually delivered" (Garner, p. 246). During
the mining boom of the eighteenth century, "Almaden (and Idria)
became the chief source of mercury for both Mexico and Peru" (Garner,
p. 248), as Huancavelica could supply less than half of the Andean
requirements. Again, a point worth emphasizing is that a crucial
mining input (mercury) was transported internationally throughout the
early modern period.
The Bakewell volume offers direct and indirect evidence of
significant market influences on the American mining industry, even
in areas heavily committed to forced-labor systems. We have focused
on two general market forces. First, new technologies continually
battled a falling world price of silver (at least up to 1640 and
again through the eighteenth century); essays by John Coatsworth (pp.
263-282) and D. A. Brading (pp. 303-19) are the volume's strongest in
emphasizing how mine profits were squeezed between rising production
costs and a falling market value of silver (although no one in the
literature seems to recognize the crucial role of China's dramatic
expansion of demand for silver during the eighteenth century). When
the price of silver descended toward its cost of production, miners
always scrambled to reduce costs in one way or another. New
technologies sometimes did the trick. Sometimes the crown stimulated
output by reducing mercury prices or taxes; modern-sounding proposals
to increase total government revenues by reducing tax rates were
familiar in Habsburg Spain. Second, the government had no choice but
to recognize market realities with respect to labor markets, even
among draft laborers working under the mita system. Enrique Tandeter
tells of Indians voting with their feet, which caused a "continuous
emigration of the tax-paying Indians (tributarios) from the villages
which were compelled to carry out the tasks of the mita towards other
villages which were exempt from this obligation" (p. 135). He refers
to "records... full of references to flights and absenteeism which
suggests that in fact it was not difficult to leave the production
unit, or even the city" (p. 158). Tandeter also writes of the
practice known as "kajcheo," "based on the free access to the mines
during the weekends in order to collect ores without any control . .
. [which] originated at the end of the seventeenth century as a means
of attracting free labor to the mines of Potosí." Indian pick-men
leaders reserved particularly rich veins discovered earlier for their
own versions of weekend entrepreneurship: "the ores processed in the
[primitive] trapiches contained ten times more pure silver than those
refined in the larger works" (p. 168). The point is that although
Spaniards indeed exploited indigenous workers as much as possible,
marketplace realities forced miners to grant more or fewer
concessions to indigenous laborers, depending upon conditions at a
particular time. A clear free-labor versus forced-labor dichotomy
does not correspond to reality....
Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez
University of the Pacific
<http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/jwh/10.2flynn.html> *****
Yoshie
