Ever since the sixteenth century, Potosí's aura as the world's mining boomtown-supreme has both fascinated and appalled Europeans. There is, of course, the stream of texts and images of conscript Indian labourers (mitayos) hacking silver nuggets in the bowels of the Cerro Rico, providing enough silver to build a bridge across continent and ocean to Europe. From the early chronicles of Matienzo and Capoche, down through the ages to the modern historical work of Carlos Sempat Assadourian and the late Enrique Tandeter, Potosí has been synonymous with the infamous forced migration of thousands of labourers to the silver mines and, through them, with the compulsory incorporation of the Andean peasant economy into the booming mining economy. Arguably, Potosí's early modern rise was, in good measure, the product of the most ambitious and violent project of bureaucratic rationalism and social engineering in early Spanish America. Yet, it was the bustling unbounded marketplace that has traditionally offered relief from the infernal underground images of the mitayos. From the earliest chronicles, we catch glimpses of Potosí's wild side – its relentless traffic in treasure hunters, merchants and transient labourers; its sprawling indigenous barrios with their bars and brothels; its underground economy of weekend silver thieves, and above all, its informal retail markets. It is this exotic world of the urban Potosí marketplace where, as Matienzo and Capoche first noted, we see the limits of the Spanish regulatory state, as it ran up against the power and agency of indigenous people controlling large sectors of the wholesale and retail trade in scrap metals and Indian staples (coca, maize, chicha beer, etc.). The urban marketplace, then and now, was also a transgressive spatial and cultural site, where the dominance of indigenous women in the retail commodity market stood in mute, but powerful, defiance of Spanish colonial hierarchies of race, gender and class. As such, the study of Potosí's marketplace is a portrait of economic agency, cultural adaptivity and gender hierarchies turned upside-down. Set against the black backdrop of mercantile capitalism's predations, the history of ‘sweet commerce’ is (or rather, can be construed as) the sunny side of Potosí's historiography.

Jane Mangan's Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí, certainly represents the most positive study of Potosí to date. She uses this history to shift ‘our view of Potosí from the mines to the market,’ so as to explore the experiences, interactions and identities of the (mostly) urban market women who dominated the streets and stalls of the city's market plazas and helped develop Potosí's urban economy. Exploiting a rich vein of sources (much as Peter Bakewell did for his social history of wage labourers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Potosí), Mangan uses royal, notarial, and judicial records to probe the social dynamics of the retail market in (mostly) Indian staples, the articulation of urban trade and rural ayllu economies, and the tension between market practices and government regulations in the halcyon days of the silver boom.

Particularly noteworthy is the author's pursuit of petty trading activities as an arena of power struggles among a variety of protagonists motivated by diverse interests and identities. She also studies the marketplace as a cultural site of shifting ethnic identities, where ethnic ‘passing’ went in multiple directions. Mangan's bottom-up analysis of women's monopoly over petty trade, credit, and other economic activities in the city, as well as the fluidity of their economic and ethnic status, are themes of historical and anthropological interest. Many scholars have used contemporary peasant ferias and other popular markets as fluid interstitial spaces to explore the jostling of gender, ethnic and class identities and the construction of mestizo marketplace cultures in the Andes. But rarely do historians manage to extract such vivid ethnographic patterns from sixteenth-century notarial records. It is, indeed, the measure of Potosí's importance as the premier producer of silver in the Americas that the city would have a battery of well-educated and legible notaries, inscribing all manner of economic transaction going on in the city in that era. And it is testimony to Mangan's archival and literary skills that she is able to use those sources to bring Potosí's colourful urban history to life.

Jane Mangan's primary aim is to elucidate the micro-economics of trading practices and roles of Indian women in the urban economy. We glean much about the scope and inner workings of the urban market from the intricacies of trading relations and the extensive networks of loan and pawn-broking that circulated credit and debt among the masses, well beyond the world of high finance among Potosí's rich merchants, bankers, churches and convents. We also glimpse the formation of Potosí's mass consumer market through the extensive brewing and sale of chicha (corn beer) and in the coca trade during the peak of the silver boom, when tens of thousands of Indians were migrating (or being marched) to the city. There is, as well, a long chapter on the ‘urban marketplace in the face of decline,’ beginning in 1650. The quotidian signs of economic decay in the late seventeenth century crop up in the descriptive anecdotes: Potosí's tighter credit market, the slackening pulse of trade, shops closing, tighter government regulations, and so forth. Rather than trying to analyse macro-trends, however, Mangan delivers the socio-economic narrative of decline through a mélange of indigenous experiences and activities. Thus it is difficult to plot trends or nail down the changing ‘economic role of urban Indian women’ – either over time, or in synchronic relationship to their rural female counterparts or to urban indigenous men who laboured in commerce or mining.

But in a descriptive and celebratory sort of way, this social history ‘cries out … for Indian women to be recognized as entrepreneurs who gained both economic and social capital in their urban workaday worlds’ (p. 182). If there was ever any doubt, Jane Mangan's book definitively locates Potosí's indigenous and chola market women at the cutting edge of the seventeenth-century global economy.