The silver mountain of Potosí
One mountain finances Europe — and is paid for in lives
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Cerro Rico produced, in some periods, most of the world's silver. Labour came through the mita, a corvée system the Inca had used for public works and which the Spanish redirected into mining. Mercury amalgamation, introduced in the 1570s, raised both extraction and poisoning. The silver is the physical thread of the first genuinely global economy: it travelled on the Manila galleons to China, which demanded taxes in silver, and financed European wars along the way. The phrase "vale un Potosí" still means immensely valuable in Spanish.
For children
In Bolivia stands a mountain that was full of silver. Within a hundred years Potosí became one of the world's largest cities, bigger than London. The silver became coins in Spain and ended up in China. But the work in the mines was lethal, and hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and enslaved Africans died down there.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org