The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru by Orlando Bentancor (review)

What is the matter with empire? Or rather, what is it made of ? This question drives Bentancor’s philosophical exploration of scholastic thought and applied science in the colonial Andes, focused on the silver mines of Potosí. In five dense chapters, Bentancor spans a long century to link the writings of Francisco de Vitoria, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (and his nemesis, Bartolomé de Las Casas), José de Acosta, a small group of writers that he labels “the circle of Toledo” (a reference to the Peruvian Viceroy Francisco de Toledo who formalized the Potosí mita labor draft and introduced mercury amalgamation), and Juan de Solórzano Pereira. Adding select metallurgical treatises to their works, including the world-famous Arte de los Metales (Madrid, 1640) by Álvaro Alonso Barba, Bentancor argues that understanding Spanish scholasticism as developed by the School of Salamanca and its heirs is central to understanding the mining and refining of precious metals in early colonial Spanish America. By extension, understanding the “matter of mining” as explained or justified by these thinkers and tinkerers reveals the logic of the early Spanish Empire, the grand global strategies of which were made possible by Potosí silver. More simply, Bentancor sees treatises on colonial governance and mining as mutually constitutive of empire.

For Spanish neo-scholastics, matter encountered in nature was raw, demanding perfection through ideal forms, just like Amerindian souls. Bentancor digs for the roots of the modern drive to dominate the material world, and how, in the Spanish case, this drive justified imperialism. Given that Pagden, Adorno, Brading, Dandelet, and others have approached this matter from other angles, Bentancor’s primary innovation, aside from his focus on metaphysical instrumentalism, is to take seriously the writings of metallurgists and miners.¹ As for indigenous views, Bentancor suggests that native Andean “vitalism,” a potential critique of Western political economy, must be understood as a “remainder” of colonial struggles.

Bentancor’s introduction offers a challenging but valuable exegesis of early modern Spanish scholasticism in light of Heidegger’s idea of “enframing” (seen as an outgrowth of Aristotle’s “handiwork metaphysics”) and Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism.² An alternative title for the book might be “Aristotle and Commodity Fetishism in South America,” but that would sell it short. By focusing on the mining of precious metals, Bentancor highlights repeated “impasses” or philosophical dead ends, as when the aim or “ends” of mining for the greater glory of God crashed into mining as wealth accumulation for its own sake.

Francisco de Vitoria, who had more to say about slavery, war, and trade than about mining per se, is the focus of Chapter 1. At issue for Bentancor is Vitoria’s stance regarding technical mastery. Vitoria uses Aristotelian logic to argue for Spanish superiority and thus rightful dominion. Chapter 2 situates Sepúlveda and Las Casas as adherents of the same logic—one justifying domination as “self-defense” and the other seeking “dominant” restitution for wrongs done to inferior Amerindians. Both narratives deemed native Americans the beneficiaries of a superior civilization, an early “impasse” in the history of the white man’s burden.

Acosta, in Chapter 3, is the first to concern himself directly with mining and “mastering” the mineral kingdom, which, for Bentancor, led to new impasses, particularly as regards exchange and money. At the core, however, Acosta was a metaphysical instrumentalist like his forebears. Bentancor sets aside some recent appraisals of Acosta as an early observational scientist to focus instead on his “onto-theological” assumptions, in particular his teleological defense of the encomienda and mita systems of forced labor as mechanisms to “perfect” the “barbaric” natives of the Americas while simultaneously perfecting raw matter (silver ore to silver). But Acosta’s speculations gave way to tactile horror. The Cerro Rico, or rich mountain, of Potosí, where Amerindians were forced to work under extreme duress, is his Exhibit A.

Was Acosta differently horrified than was Domingo...