7. Extractive Economy and Institutions? (original) (raw)
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The mita is frequently seen as a paradigmatic example of an extractive economic and political institution of the Spanish Empire. This chapter first provides an overview of the complex process to obtain silver, showing it is more than mere extraction. The second part delineates a complex picture of extraction based on unfree (mita) and free labour, at the same time. A close analysis of the mita reveals changes, reminding us that institutions have a transformative history. Behind the continuity of the mita, there were far-reaching changes like the emergence of an important group of self-employed workers (kajchas) who were processing ores. In the third part, labour relations are linked to the institutions of land and mine ownership within the Spanish Empire.
Labour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.
Free and Unfree Labour in the Colonial Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
International Review of Social History, 2011
SummaryThis article analyses free and unfree labour in mining centres in the Andes during early Spanish colonial times. It focuses on two themes: the condition of indigenous or “native” people as “free labourers”, and the mita system of unfree labour. For that purpose I shall consider the cases of Potosí, the most important mining centre in the Andes, and San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo in southern Bolivia, a large mine unaffected by the mita system of labour obligations.
What the Iberian Copper Age can tell us about peasant societies, and vice versa.
Archaeology and History of Peasantries 1 From the Late Prehistory to the Middle Ages, 2020
This paper is a political economic interpretation of the reasons why I believe that Iberian Copper Age societies did not develop the material conditions necessary to allow the systematic and permanent exploitation of the primary producer through extra-economic means. I argue this is a result of the following factors: The low proportion of labor to land, the existence of a fluid social landscape, the nature of the intensification of production, the fractal nature of the social organization of production and of property rights, and the role played by ceremonial funds in both pumping and channeling the flow of surplus into non-infrastructural collective labor investments.
Underground Knowledge: Mining, Mapping and Law in Eighteenth-Century Nueva España
Proccedings 10 The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World, edited by Helge Wendt, 2016
"In this chapter, I argue that the kind of entanglements produced by the specific demands of depicting mines in Nueva España produced an environment in the sense mentioned above: as an occurrence of a set of relational practices. And we cannot understand further bifurcations and unfoldings of the Anthropocene without taking into account the way these soft technologies helped to sediment “ways of dealing with,” as well as how the conflicts these technologies helped to shape are ultimately erased in the process of stabilization."