 Hello my name is Chris Lane I'm a professor of history here at Tulane University. I've been here since 2011. I taught previously at the College of William & Mary in Virginia for 14 years and before that at the University of Miami in Florida for one year. I did my PhD at the University of Minnesota and my undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado Boulder. My most recent book is called Potosi the Silver City that changed the world published by the University of California Press in 2019 and this is my first foray into a book about a city specifically although I've written about Quito Ecuador more about the region surrounding Quito than the city itself and I've written about Emeralds in Columbia. So most of my work has been focused on the Andes region of South America. It took me a while to get to Potosi as a scholar but it was a place that interested me from the time when I was an undergraduate. Turns out Potosi was the world's most concentrated and productive silver deposit or mining region between its discovery in 1545 and about the year 1650. It continued to produce silver after that and it is still producing silver today. I visit Potosi when travel is possible about every year or every other year and I have been going back there to work in the archives and also to talk to local folks many times. There's also a great deal of information about Potosi in archives in Spain and some in archives in the UK and the US and France and Germany as well. What brought me to write this book really was an interest in globalizing Latin American history. As you know the Stone Center for Latin American Studies here at Tulane is one of the largest in the country. The reason that I came to Tulane was to want to be a part of that large and really incredibly diverse gathering of people working on Latin America from every possible disciplinary angle. But also to globalize the story of Latin America in the early modern period. So the time of Columbus to about the time of Simon Bolivar or their abouts. We sometimes think of that as the colonial period or the early modern period. Either way it's often assumed that Latin America was on the receiving end of globalization. It was not an agent of globalization and although it produced products like silver in the case of Potosi or gold in the case of Columbia or emeralds or pearls. But these things were sugar in the case of Brazil that these things really didn't alter the Latin American societies in the way that other places were altered by globalization. And I try to argue basically the opposite and to say that the situation of Potosi and the way that it changed the world was not simply by supplying a raw material in this case precious metals on a very large scale and unforeseen scale. But but also Potosi was a place of transformation social transformation and self realization. It's it's kind of a tricky story to tell as a global history because the city itself is fascinating in its own right and very well documented. The Spanish were very interested in silver production and so they kept pretty careful records here. And as much as they tried to control silver production they really couldn't it was always slipping out of their hands. So there are stories of indigenous mine workers doing their own thing. Certainly many of them suffering tremendously and being abused. It's not a pretty story. There are many enslaved Africans brought mostly from West Central Africa from Congo and Angola by a Buenos Aires who end up in Potosi and their story has not been told. I try to tell that at least in a in a nutshell in this book. The stories of women who become very powerful in the city as owners of mines and refineries but also as religious women and market vendors. So there's there's really a space for everyone in this crazy boom town a kind of dead wood south. A very violent place. So a part of the story is is to take on the myth and truth about the frontier violence of Potosi. It was a place where people challenged each other to duels pretty regularly. People were poisoning each other. There's there's lots of history of violence in this place and I try not to to overdo it but also to show that one of the curious things about mining towns whether it's Potosi or could be Central City Colorado or you know somewhere in the Comstock load in Nevada or even dead wood South Dakota. One of the curious things about mining towns is that in spite of their reputation for being out of control, super violent, lawless even, people figure out a way to to enforce rules and even though they're fighting over mining claims and you know access to merchandise and land and all sorts of other things. Lots of social stratification and fighting. There's also plenty of evidence of people cooperating. And so what I see is a story of tension more than a story of exploitation and destruction. All of that is the sob story, the sad story of Potosi has been told and I didn't want to just add another chapter to that. I wanted to look for evidence of people making the most of a tough situation not to be overly optimistic about it because clearly when you look at the environmental part of the story which is another factor in the book another feature that I'm trying to to bring up to date because the history has become much richer or more textured to show that environmentally Potosi is a disaster. There's nothing positive about it. Mining itself is poisoning the water, refining silver with mercury and and other types of solvents is clearly adding all sorts of toxic substances to the water and the soil and the air and people complain about it at the time they talk about Potosi is a dangerous place even even in the 16th and 17th centuries it's a place where you can't drink the water where food is very expensive where nasty smoke is spewing into the air there's all sorts of sound pollution because of the the mills in town crushing ore all night long all day long and and much more working in mines of course exposing workers to cave-ins and the list goes on. So in some ways it's also kind of a harbinger of an industrial world to come. Potosi is industrial before industry was cool and it's a place where as I said in spite of all of the the bad things that happen all of the negatives that we associate with mining and with the Spanish conquest and all of that we also find extraordinary ingenuity. So another part of the story and this is the last one I'll mention now is technological savvy. The usual image of the Spanish is that they were always behind the rest of Europe when it came to technology and science and what we find in Potosi is that they're actually at the forefront. There are certainly certain people who are coming up with radically new ways of refining ore and developing a sense of chemistry that's pretty sophisticated in a time when alchemy was king and also the creation of some pretty alarmingly large-scale engineering projects mostly to control the flow of water into the city to use for water-powered crushing mills to to to refine silver ore into silver and I guess the last thing I should say is there's there's some stories in here about fraud which is my current project how it is that the king's mint the king's money factory is taken over by local very savvy people some of them officials and some of them private individuals and it shows again the tension between government and private enterprise and neither comes out looking too good but that's the story of Potosi the silver city that changed the world thank you