Jeffrey Cole’s book forms part of an informally cooperative boom in historical research on Potosí, which in turn grows out of earlier work and encouragement by such pioneers as Lewis Hanke in this country and Gunnar Mendoza in Bolivia. Where Peter Bakewell’s Miners of the Red Mountain (1984) concentrated on the sixteenth century and Enrique Tandeter focuses on the eighteenth, Cole’s work is sandwiched between and takes up two main themes of this fascinating history. In chapter 2, Cole presents a compact discussion of the seventeenth century “meta-morphosis” of the system of forced labor itself, and in the final three chapters he provides a careful untangling of the Hapsburg bureaucracy’s creaking attempts to adjust its administration to the changing reality of Peruvian demography and economy.
As Bakewell has already made clear, a dual work force emerged out of the Toledan reforms at Potosí. The mita was needed to force workers at miniscule wages into the dark and deepening mine shafts, while on the surface, in stamping mills and processing plants, higher wages attracted “free” workers who gathered in the spreading economic shade of the cerro rico. But as the full horror of the underground work that awaited them in Potosí became clear to the peasants of the 16 “obligated” provinces of Upper Peru, the greater became the sacrifice that they were prepared to make to escape their obligations. Many fled—some migrated to towns exempt from the labor draft, others sought refuge on haciendas. But as Cole shows, the majority clung to village agriculture and then endeavored to buy their way out of the Potosí draft with silver that they and their brothers had mined in the first place, and which was now circulating widely in the Andean economy. The money somehow put together was hauled up to Potosí, and delivered over to the mining entrepreneurs (azogueros), who could then use the coin to hire free and higher-cost workers or simply pocket it. The task of extracting and organizing what was in effect a massive ransom fell on the village leaders, and had as precedent the sixteenth-century practice whereby the corregidor levied a fine on the Curacas for every mita worker they were unable to deliver to Potosí. By mid-seventeenth century, exemption cost some 150 pesos per person, so that by 1660 some 587,000 pesos per year were gathered from the peasantry for the azogueros, while total crown receipts from the tax on silver production amounted to only 300,000 pesos. Such a development raised the obvious question of why the ransom was not sent directly to the crown, rather than have it pass through the hands of the profligate Potosí mining elite.
The second main theme in this book concerns the attempts of the Hapsburg regime to administer the mita under drastically changing circumstances, a task complicated by extraordinarily difficult communications and the high stakes of silver mining. Although Viceroy Toledo (1569-81) not only designed but also made operational the first mita, subsequent viceroys were less willing to commit themselves to reform for fear that Potosí would collapse during their term. Besides this, any policy designed to lighten the burden on Indian workers was bound to be opposed by the powerful mining guild in Potosí. Cole sorts out the different interest groups in the Andean economy, and, along the way, points out that much previous description of Potosí has come from the highly colored arguments that various factions put forth to make their case for access to Indian workers.
The patient scrutiny of archival evidence by Bakewell and now by Cole, with additional detail being filled in by several students, now begins to make clear the inner workings of the silver economy throughout the Andean region. Their research, together with that of Carlos Sempat Assadourian, has substantially altered the earlier picture of the colonial mita and raises larger questions about the impact of export economy on local society.