Technology and Culture

438 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE originally mining and smelting a silver-rich ore, and extracted the silver with lead, which was plentiful in the district. By 1580 the English shareholders were reluctant to produce more investment capital, the German investors having failed in business. They leased the Cumberland operation to a major businessman, Thomas “Cus­ tomer” Smith, and Daniel Hechstetter. Hechstetter did not take any part in attempts, interesting but short-lived, to develop Cornish copper mining and smelting with coal in South Wales. Hammersley gives a more favorable view of the viability, even profitability, of the Cumberland operations than previous writers, though one is talking about a copper production that in modern terms is tiny—25 to 30 tons in good years. But the junior Daniel Hechstetter abandoned the lease in the 1630s after years of mining setbacks and falling silver recovery. There is a good description of the mining and smelting techniques and operations and interesting suggestions as to why the operation was not continued when consid­ erable quantities of copper ore were there to be discovered and mined. The documents themselves, which constitute the larger part of the book, are remarkably interesting on technical detail and the labor force, for both mining and smelting. They bristle with problems of interpretation and descriptive terms, which the editor wrestles with in a highly creditable way. Now that they are generally available, they will be a very important tool for future historians of technology, not least for what they reveal on the prehistory of the smelting of copper with coal. J. R. Harris Dr. Harris is professor of economic history at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The Copper-King and Essays in Eighteenth-Century Industry and Technology: England and France (1991). Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosí: The Life and Times ofAntonio Lopez de Quiroga. By Peter Bakewell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Pp. xviii + 250; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Peter Bakewell’s long interest in silver mining in colonial Spanish America has taken him from the mines of Zacatecas in northern Mexico to the Cerro Rico of Potosí in the altiplano of modern Bolivia. In this work, he examines the career of perhaps the most important of the mining investors of late-17th-century Potosí. Antonio Lopez de Quiroga, as Bakewell states, was at once “an investor, a technical innovator, a backer of explorations, a landowner, a trader, a politician” (p. xii). Born in the northwestern part of Spain, in Galicia, around 1620, he traveled to South America in the early TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 439 1640s and died in January 1699. He was of the hidalgo, a group roughly analogous to the minor gentry of England. He tried his hand in the Indies, as did earlier family members and so many others from poverty-striken Galicia. López de Quiroga arrived in Lima by 1642, perhaps representing one of the commercial interests of the city of Seville in the lucrative Lima trade. He reached Potosi in late 1648 and married into one of the important merchant families, which thus cemented a position in Potosi society. Within three years, the fatherin -law died, but not before making Antonio the executor of his estate. At the age of thirty, the young Galician had achieved prominence and control over capital in one of the largest cities in the New World. López de Quiroga began his career at a time when the silver mines of Potosi had entered a process of decline; this perhaps makes his success even more remarkable. Beginning slowly as a merchant and silver trader, and as a lender of money for mining operations, then purchasing a large hacienda southeast of Potosi, he was slowly drawn into the mining industry. A bad loan to one of the milling refiners who died in 1657 led to his assumption of the operation to help pay off the debt. That same year he took a three-year lease on a royal mine not far east of the Cerro Rico. Then, in 1661, he made claim to an abandoned shaft on the Rich Mountain itself. The key...