Trading Roles is an exemplary work of social history on colonial Potosí, Spanish America's most important silver mining center. It builds on the research of social and economic historians and also reflects more recent scholarly interests in gender, identity, and cultural history. By making petty trade the center of her book, instead of the silver industry or international commerce, Jane Mangan has vastly increased our understanding of the lives of ordinary people as they negotiated and shaped the economy of a city that was at the center of Spain's empire in the Americas. Trading Roles is very well written and Mangan's meticulous use of qualitative and quantitative sources always move her narrative along instead of overwhelming it. The book will be essential reading for many different groups of students of colonial Latin America, from those interested in markets and credit mechanisms to those who seek a clearer understanding of changing ethnic identities and gender roles.
The first chapter of the Trading Roles provides an overview of the growth of silver mining in Potosí, the involvement of indigenous people in the mining process and in trade, and the policy changes introduced by the colonial government in the 1570s to make the mines more productive and place control of the industry more firmly in Spanish hands. The book's last chapter complements the first by discussing the decline of the mining center in the seventeenth century and how native people, women, and the poor in general, were affected by the city's failing fortunes. Mangan demonstrates that indigenous women were essential to local commerce beginning in the mid 1500s and that those native women who managed to do well a hundred years later were often those who had ties to the indigenous elite.
Chapter Two is a discussion of official attempts to control local commerce, particularly pulperias or grocery stores. The Potosí city council sought to limit the number of licensed pulperias and to guarantee that only married Spanish men could own them. These regulations were presumably aimed at preventing the sale of alcoholic beverages to indigenous workers and combating trade in silver that workers illegally took from the mines. The town council maintained that stores run by indigenous or mixed-race people, or those located in Indian neighborhoods outside the city center, would more likely become venues for crime or debauchery. Ultimately, market demand was such that the city fathers were helpless to control the situation. Earlier than in many other places in the colonial Andes, even humble people in Potosí were forced to buy many things they had previously produced for themselves, and pulperias sprouted in all areas of the city. By the seventeenth century, although most urban commercial properties were still owned or rented by men, there were women among their number, as well as Indians and people of African descent.
Bread and the Andean alcoholic beverage chicha are the subjects of the third chapter. Although chicherías, establishments where the corn beer was served, were vigorously condemned by local officials as promoting drunkenness, immoral behavior, and violence, the authorities were pretty much helpless to prevent their proliferation. Less expensive than wine, chicha soon developed a following among almost all sectors of the population. If grocery stores (pulperias) were often owned by men and looked after by women, the world of chicha was dominated by women. Non-elite Spanish women who had to make a living often went into the chicha business and hired indigenous women to make the brew.
If chicha was an indigenous drink that rapidly became popular with people of all ethnicities, bread was a European food that non-Europeans adopted in the colonial urban setting. Bread baking, unlike chicha brewing, was actively encouraged by the colonial government and its production was limited to a smaller group of more prosperous people. While there were some Spanish women who ran bakeries, the bakery owners were overwhelmingly Spanish men. So important was bread believed to be to the well being of the city that bakery owners received contingents of coerced laborers as mine owners received forced workers through the corvee system known as the mita. As in other places in Latin America, bakery workers were often slaves who were rented cheaply by their owners as a form of punishment for misbehavior.
One of the most interesting chapters in Trading Roles deals with credit and how virtually everyone in Potosí was strapped for cash. Anyone who has done research in colonial archives has run across many references to small debts and loans. Jane Mangan has put together massive documentation about minor credit activities to give us a picture of what urban social and economic life was really like. It makes sense that in a society that was in the process of being monetarized—in which people had to buy things they had never bought before and pay for them with money—that there would be a cash shortage. What is surprising is that specie should have been in such short supply in Potosí which, as Mangan puts it, was saturated with silver. Yet, while there were requirements to pay for certain things in cash, the economic system was far from completely capitalist and employers tried to save their own cash by paying workers in goods whenever possible. Furthermore, forced labor in the mining industry was profitable for mine owners precisely because the laborers, who made up a good portion of the native people in Potosí, received less than a living wage. The result of these circumstances was a society of chronic debtors who took out loans or pawned various goods, sometimes to start businesses, sometimes just to buy food. Both men and women borrowed and loaned money, with women, including indigenous women, often being in good positions to lend money because of their ties to commerce. The discussion of pawn provides an interesting view of the material culture of Potosí in which silver objects and fine indigenous textiles became “currency” for people of different ethnicities.
The penultimate chapter of Trading Roles deals specifically with women merchants and in it Mangan explores the importance of marital status to women's success in trade. Because of legal restrictions on married women, historians have suggested that they were less likely to be involved in commerce than widows who, facing no such restrictions, could be active businesswomen. Mangan concludes however, that, at least in Potosí, married women were no more hampered by legal barriers than were their single counterparts and that widows did not necessarily have the financial resources to become thriving entrepreneurs.
In Trading Roles Mangan not only examines the variety of economic and social roles of indigenous, mestizo, African and African-descended men and women in Potosí. She also brings poor and middling Spaniards, who are often overlooked by historians, into the picture. Mangan also does an admirable job of showing how and why some indigenous people were able to benefit from colonialism without denying the exploitation that most suffered. Finally, her research raises a thorny problem that Andeanists tend to avoid: how can we explain the alacrity with which indigenous people engaged in commerce during the colonial period if, as most scholars maintain, the pre-Columbian economy functioned in most places without markets?
