This microhistory examines European industrial capitalism in the postcolonial Andes, focusing on the abandoned site of Changamoqo in Bolivia’s Sajama province. This place features ruins from a nineteenth-century marketplace and foundry at the base of a sacred mountain. Archaeological research, archival analysis and oral histories reveal why foreigners invested heavily in this remote Indigenous region. The site exemplifies a capitalist model developed by European immigrants and local partners, adapting the Andean premodern institution of the ‘tambo’. Changamoqo offers crucial insights from a bottom-up, multidisciplinary and situated perspective into the long history of postcolonial extractivism in the Andes.
