Trading roles : gender, ethnicity, and the urban economy in colonial Potosí
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Trading roles : gender, ethnicity, and the urban economy in colonial Potosí
（Latin America otherwise）
Duke University Press, 2005
- : cloth
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-266) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Located in the heart of the Andes, Potosi was arguably the most important urban center in the Western Hemisphere during the colonial era. It was internationally famous for its abundant silver mines and regionally infamous for its labor draft. Set in this context of opulence and oppression associated with the silver trade, Trading Roles emphasizes daily life in the city's streets, markets, and taverns. As Jane E. Mangan shows, food and drink transactions emerged as the most common site of interaction for Potosinos of different ethnic and class backgrounds. Within two decades of Potosi's founding in the 1540s, the majority of the city's inhabitants no longer produced food or alcohol for themselves; they purchased these items. Mangan presents a vibrant social history of colonial Potosi through an investigation of everyday commerce during the city's economic heyday, between the discovery of silver in 1545 and the waning of production in the late seventeenth century.Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosi. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosi's economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.
Table of Contents
About the series vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. "The Largest Population and the Most Commerce": The Genesis of Potosi's Urban Economy 21
2. Making Room to Sell: Location, Regulation, and the Properties of Urban Trade 48
3. Light on the Chicha, Heavy on the Bread: The Colonial Market for Brewing and Baking 76
4. The World of Credit in the City of Silver 106
5. Enterprising Women: Female Traders in the Urban Economy 134
6. ?Vale un Potosi? The Urban Marketplace in the Face of Decline, 1650-1700 161
Conclusion 178
Appendix 191
Notes 197
Glosary 251
Bibliography 255
Index 267
by "Nielsen BookData"