Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosi (review)

This is a book on the metropolis that was once known as the miraculous city of Potosí – but it is not a book about the silver mines that gave the city its fame. Rather, Jane Mangan has given us our first book focusing particularly on the daily trade that grew up around the mines, and on ordinary people’s creation of their own identities in the crucible of the commercial markets introduced by the colonizers. It is about the colonial bureaucracy’s directives, and about people’s responses to those directives, including acquiescence, resistance and manipulation. In the words of Mangan, colonial Andeans, especially the indigenous, “waged the very battles that determined how the local economy functioned, and by doing so, they used trading roles both to create an urban economy and to establish unique urban entrepreneurial identities” (4).

In no sense does Mangan simplify indigenous experience or treat it as a seamless whole. She remains supremely conscious of differentiation in indigenous experience. Her jumping off place is a clear and concise statement that we need to keep varied aspects of native lives front stage at all times. “If, taken as a whole, recent scholarship on Andean trade has highlighted the critical importance of indigenous adaptation to colonial rule, that community’s overwhelming exploitation by the colonial system was never far from view. And in the case of Potosí, the combination of silver riches and forced labor brings together indigenous initiative and indigenous suffering in a dramatic way” (8). Furthermore, beyond the contradictory nature of individuals’ lives, the author grapples with differences within the native community. “I contend that elite indigenous families who became well established in sixteenth-century trade passed on their gains and status to subsequent generations, some of which remained dominant through the end of the seventeenth century” (8).

Mangan’s book thus demonstrates postmodern sensibility without any postmodern silliness. It is based on extensive research, and demonstrates a genuine interest in the complexities of real people’s lives. An additional strength is that it essentially includes a book-within-a-book on women, in the form of a subsection of the introduction and a long chapter, “Enterprising Women: Female Traders in the Urban Economy.” After providing an excellent overview of the scholarly tradition, which has been bifurcated between studies tending to follow Irene Silverblatt’s vision of indigenous women’s sufferings, and those more in line with Elinor Burkett’s classic article on their strength and independence, Mangan offers a vision of a world in which women knew both realities. She is in close touch with other current work, such as the recent book by Kimberly Gauderman (Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law and Economy in Spanish America ), and shows, like Gauderman, not only that women were commercially active but also that they were expected to be active, contrary to our modern expectations. “Families sanctioned the activity,” Mangan asserts (140).

If the book has a weakness it is that at the moment of conclusion, Mangan suddenly adds a section which she calls “Colonial Potosí in Comparative Perspective,” yet she cannot truly sustain such perspective. In a previous section, she argues that her “historical actors [in Potosí] rarely met with the rigid hierarchies imagined for the colonial world because the size of the population and the intensity of market opportunities created flexibility,” (179) and in this final section she argues, for example, that the opportunities even for ordinary people to operate on credit in this city must “greatly revise our understanding of the colonial urban experience throughout LatinAmerica” (184). I do not agree: Potosí was, by definition, different. It was awash with specie. Certainly this book does not offer any proof that ordinary people elsewhere had greater access to credit than we have believed. Perhaps current pressures to conduct comparative studies, which in a general sense I of course applaud, should not be applied to all our works.

Mangan’s book stands on its own, without...