Carlos Prieto, president of the well-known Compañía Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey, has published a most attractively produced, lavishly illustrated and annotated version of the address he gave during the commemorative celebrations 175 years after the foundation of Mexico’s Royal College of Mines. His aim is to sketch in general terms the progress and effects of American silver-mining during the colonial period. He argues that without both the attraction and the profit of this industry Spain’s settlement of the New World would have been much slower and more difficult. Both external trade and agricultural production in large measure depended upon the output of the silver mines. Prieto’s enthusiasm for this theme leads to the assertion that “by a mysterious historical alchemy the gold of America . . . was transmuted into imponderable essences: into the Spanish American peoples and nations” (p. 27).
A welcome feature of this essay is the attention paid to technology. Here, however, the author draws heavily upon Modesto Bargallo ’s La minería y la metalurgía en la América Española durante la época colonial, a book published under the patronage of the Compañía Fundidora. In general, Prieto offers us an extended meditation upon the scope and value of Spanish colonization. Its interest lies in the fact that the author is himself an Asturian who like so many of his compatriots and predecessors during the colony has chosen to seek his fortune in Mexico. Inevitably, therefore, a certain air of exculpatory nostalgia hangs over the work. Prieto concludes: “If Spain could not or did not know how to write adequately the last chapter in the splendid book of America, in contrast it did indeed write the most happy chapters of its history” (p. 163). Two minor errors of fact may be noted. José de la Borda died in 1778, not in 1788 (cf. illustrations p. 64-65). Antonio de Obregón y Alcocer was not a santanderino ; he was born in Pénjamo, Guanajuato (cf. p. 68).