100 Books Like Potosí Global

Mangan’s work completely changed the way that I thought about the colonial mining industry and the complexities of Andean gender systems. Through careful case studies and historical scholarship, Mangan gives voice and texture to the lives of Andean market women, artisans, and ordinary miners who filled the streets of Potosí and its surrounding communities. Trading Roles translates global histories of credit, market capitalization, and urbanization into intimate details of family and community life, and in so doing makes it clear that gender was – and is – a central part of Andean mining history. Readers interested in the interactions of gender, commerce, and Indigenous politics in urban spaces will be well-served by Mangan’s work.

What Mangan’s work does for the Andes, Velasco Murillo’s scholarship does for Mexico. The book covers an astounding historical range, taking readers through the first silver strikes in Zacatecas under colonial rule until the edge of early nation-statehood. In telling this 250-year history of Zacatecas, Velasco Murillo demonstrates how Indigenous mining communities, their labor, and the capital they generated were critical to shaping – and were shaped by – emerging ideas of mestizo citizenship. It does so, moreover, by centering women and Indigenous miners in ways that other social histories of mining had not yet accomplished. Velasco Murillo shows definitively that the history of silver is not just underground – it is a story of women who prepare food, raise children, and form a political and economic community is life-giving, meaning-making ways across urban geographies and remote mining spaces. Readers looking for new ways to understand mining and revolution in… show more.

Kris Lane’s new work on Potosí does in words what Barragán does in images. Lane manages to tell a story that is at once global and comprehensive yet still rooted in local details of mineral extraction, assay, and coining. This book takes us from underground tunnels, adits, and galleys into refineries and, especially, the mint of Potosí. Readers seeking a big-picture view of the importance of Latin American mining and metallurgy to the story of the Spanish empire, and one told in vivid detail and readable prose, will find a lot to like here.

Although mining in the colonial period has lasting implications for contemporary public policy, extractive industries, and science and technology, few books can tell this 500-year history in the detail it requires. Kendall Brown’s History of Mining in Latin America is one of those few. In vivid prose, Brown explains key aspects of economic, technological, and labor history that shaped mining and metallurgical industries in the major mining zones of Mexico, Brazil, and the Andes, as well as less-studied regions like the Caribbean and Nueva Granada. Readers looking for a comprehensive regional synthesis that shows change over time will learn a lot from Brown’s book.

Weavers of Revolution is still my favorite "history from below” book to use in classes about Latin American revolutions.

It reads like a novel, bringing readers into the story by focusing on the workers of Chile’s largest cotton mill and highlighting their activities before and during the socialist Salvador Allende regime (1970-73). The Lebanese Yarur family used ethnic networks to build a successful economic enterprise that endured for many decades, but when the socialist Allende was elected, workers rejected paternalism and took over the factory to run it themselves.

Winn, building on interviews with workers as well as Allende regime officials, beautifully communicates the complexities of the era. Allende and his advisors urged workers to wait for gradual change—also urging rural workers who were seizing plantations to await formal land reform—but urban and rural workers executed factory take-overs and land occupations, radicalizing the revolution from below.

Weavers of Revolution joins… show more.

This was a really amazing book to read with students in my graduate course on the social history of commodities.

It contributes some really original theory about power and race, the peasantry, politics, and other major topics that those more inclined towards sociology or political science would appreciate. It is a little like the Dominican Republic version of Jeff Gould’s To Lead as Equals on Nicaragua or Gladys McCormick’s The Logic of Compromise: Authoritarianism, Betrayal, and Revolution in Rural Mexico, 1935-1965.

I am constantly telling students and colleagues about the fascinating arguments presented in Foundations of Despotism, which echoes Gould’s evidence that dictators cannot remain in power through violence, alone.

Turits’ interviews with peasants and letters that he found in the Dominican national archives from humble rural peoples show that after first coming to power in the early 1930s—ostensibly purely because of US support—the Trujillo regime built a rural base… show more.

Eduardo Galeano examines Simón Bolivar’s famous question of whether Latin America will ever know happiness by documenting how exploitation has led to social inequities and political instability. Another question I have grappled with is just as complex to answer, but Galeano does it. Why has Latin America suffered so many military dictatorships?

Recent political developments in the United States resemble the instability and unprincipled rhetoric that caused democracies to fall all over the southern continent. 

The author spent many years in Brazil and Peru, editing the Americas’ section of The Economist and knows the region well. He does a great job of providing the reader with a broad, contemporary view of modern-day Central and South America, weaving together their many historical threads. If you want an insider’s account of Latin America by someone who thoroughly knows the area, then this is the book for you.

This sprawling, two-volume collection of essays approaches the history of political economy in Latin America not as a chapter of intellectual history, but rather as an extension of the practices of state-building pursued in the continent.

The first volume, Republics of the Possible, covers the period from the early days of independence to the turbulent 1930s, touching on subjects as diverse as militarization, fiscal systems, educational institutions, national statistics, and ideological disputes.

The second volume, The Rise and Fall of the Developmental State, explores the 20th-century Latin American experiment on state-led development: its ideological underpinnings, the design of appropriate institutions, and the ambiguous aftermath of the developmental era in different national settings.

A third volume is still in the works to complete this state-of-the-art trilogy.

You think academics don’t have guts? You haven’t met Dana Frank.

She left her perfect little Santa Cruz campus behind to travel into the violent world of labor organizing in Central America. The fearless women she follows never give up as they take on American global corporations, corrupt politicians, ruthless landowners and bosses, and male chauvinism at home, on the job, and in the union.

Against great odds, the banana women forge a region-wide union of men and women committed to gender justice, economic fairness, and political democracy. Thank you Dana Frank for knowing this story had to be told – and for telling it with such flair and wisdom.