Mining has shaped the history of Latin America since its very beginnings in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Silver mining, in Mexico and Peru in particular, formed one of the pillars of the Latin American economies for three centuries, and reshaped global economics. Gold, diamonds, tin, copper, iron and other minerals have also played powerful roles in the history of the region, and the world economy. Surprisingly, until now, no historian of Latin America had taken on the task of producing a book-length historical overview of mining in the region. Kendall Brown's concise volume provides us with a sweeping, synthetic survey that will be of value to scholars and students of Latin America. He does not attempt an exhaustive account, but rather provides one that focuses on key regions and themes across five centuries. Several prominent strands run throughout the book, including economic development and the social and ecological consequences of mining.

As a scholar of colonial Peru, Brown has spent decades studying Potosí in Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia). Potosí's legendary Cerro Rico provides him with a thread that runs throughout the book, playing a very large role in the first half, beginning with his personal ‘pilgrimage’ to this fabled city in 1995. Brown devotes four chapters (roughly 100 pages) to the colonial period, and a further four chapters (another 100 pages) to the post-independence era. The first chapter expertly and succinctly summarises pre-Columbian mining, Spanish and Portuguese pursuit of gold and silver, the main focal points of mining in the colonial centuries and the impact of American bullion on the world economy – Peruvian and then Mexican silver from the mid-sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, and Brazilian gold after 1700. The second chapter magisterially surveys colonial Latin American mining in just over 30 pages. Potosí and Peru dominated silver production until the eighteenth century, when rising Mexican silver production outstripped the declining ores of Upper Peru. Brown takes the reader through the forced labour systems (such as the notorious mita), changing technologies (especially amalgamation and the patio process) and the key role of mercury from the Old World and the New. Moving to the discovery of gold in Brazil, he shows how different the mining systems of Portuguese America were from those of deep-shaft silver mining in Spanish America. Ultimately, these precious metals made their way not only to Europe but also to China, which received 90 per cent of American output through the seventeenth century.

The next two chapters summarise colonial labour and labourers in the mines. Although the total mining labour force at any point in the colonial period numbered less than 100,000 in Mexico and Peru combined, these workers toiled ceaselessly at the core of the colonial economic system. Brown discusses the rise of the mita and the differences between labour systems in Mexico and Peru. Although the mita persisted in the Andean world into the nineteenth century, in both regions wage labour gradually expanded, but without the proletarianisation found in wage labour elsewhere in the Americas and Europe. Mine owners across Portuguese and Spanish America relied on labourers who for centuries moved between their fields and the mines, whether from compulsion or choice.

Independence brought with it not only the chaos of war but also the eventual end of the key elements of the colonial Spanish American regime – cheap forced labour and mercury at stable prices. Most of the changes in mining did not come until after 1850 with the growing importance of non-precious metals (such as copper and tin), new types of energy and technology, and innovative refining processes (cyanide, in particular). Chapter 6 is a fine overview of the changing forms of technology and labour that brings the story well into the twentieth century, and the following chapter focuses on the role of miners in revolutionary contexts in the second half of the twentieth century. The Bolivian Revolution in 1952 brings Brown back to Potosí (and other mines). He also dissects the role of miners (mainly of copper) in Allende's Chile. The final section of his chapter on miners and revolution concentrates on Brazil, the story of iron and steel and then gold in the Amazon. The hundreds of thousands of highly dispersed garimpeiros panning for gold across the vast Amazon basin contrast starkly with the highly concentrated industrial workers of Bolivia and Chile. In all these cases, Brown traces the emergence of proletarianisation as miners increasingly turn to full-time wage labour and organising.

In his final chapter, Brown turns to the environmental impact of mining. As he notes, thousands of miners have died or been crippled by rock falls, mercury poisoning and company repression. The human cost of mining has been high, and the ‘export of staple goods such as minerals and metals [has] offered no permanent security to Latin American economies’ (p. 194). Too often mining has operated as an enclave apart from the larger, national economies. Brown notes that mining has been a ‘bargain with the devil’, and he takes the reader back to Potosí and the devil images such as those of Tío Jorge nestled in the galleries of the mines. This concise history of mining in Latin America makes clear the enormous wealth produced by mines across the region as well as the long-term economic, human and ecological costs of five centuries of extracting the riches of the earth. It is an impressive, clear and useful synthesis.