Trading Roles : Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí

Jane E Mangan

ISBN 10: 0822334704 / ISBN 13: 9780822334705

Published by Duke University Press Mai 2005, 2005

About this Item

Neuware - A social history of trade in a colonial city in Peru, arguing that markets, stores, and taverns were important sites of cultural creation and showing how the gender and ethnic identities of participants affected how they adapted to the market economy.

Seller Inventory # 9780822334705

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Trading Roles : Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí
• Publisher: Duke University Press Mai 2005
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822334704
• ISBN 13: 9780822334705
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 235W x 157H x 21D millimeters 235 millimeters width by 157 millimeters height by 21 millimeters depth
• Weight: 440 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Located in the heart of the Andes, Potosí was arguably the most important urban center in the Western Hemisphere during the colonial era. It was internationally famous for its abundant silver mines and regionally infamous for its labor draft. Set in this context of opulence and oppression associated with the silver trade, Trading Roles emphasizes daily life in the city’s streets, markets, and taverns. As Jane E. Mangan shows, food and drink transactions emerged as the most common site of interaction for Potosinos of different ethnic and class backgrounds. Within two decades of Potosí’s founding in the 1540s, the majority of the city’s inhabitants no longer produced food or alcohol for themselves; they purchased these items. Mangan presents a vibrant social history of colonial Potosí through an investigation of everyday commerce during the city’s economic heyday, between the discovery of silver in 1545 and the waning of production in the late seventeenth century.

Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosí. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosí’s economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.

About the Author

Jane E. Mangan is Assistant Professor of History at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. She is the editor of Natural and Moral History of the Indies, by José de Acosta (also published by Duke University Press).