With the opening of sea routes in the fifteenth century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean Sea. They were refugees and ...migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early seventeenth century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish empire. A Nation Upon The Ocean Sea traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its fragmentation in the middle of the seventeenth and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, their private reflections and public arguments. This finely-textured account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics as merchants of the Portuguese Nation took up the pen to advocate a program of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade. A microhistory, A Nation Upon The Ocean Sea contributes to our understanding of the broader histories of capitalism, empire, and diaspora in the early Atlantic. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780195175691/toc.html
This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the ...Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out.
Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitability over and over again in Mexico's mining districts. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision—a moral ecology—that defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book's breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.
Since the early 1990s Canadian mining companies extended their presence in Latin America in unprecedented numbers and ways. This article presents a historical synthesis of this phenomenon. It shows ...Canadian overseas mining as predominantly focused on exploration and precious metal mining; traces its origins in the nexus between new techniques and hubs of speculative capital; and shows the political innovations produced by this commodity frontier, both in the deployment of new forms of corporate governmentality and in the emergence of locally-based movements for resource sovereignty and socio-ecological justice.
This essay is part of a larger project that investigates the environmental effects of mining in Mexico. Although mining played a critical role in the economic, political, and social development of ...Spanish American colonies, and although it has consequently received extensive attention by historians, there exists no serious study of its environmental dimensions. The study establishes the overall rhythms and scales of fuel wood consumption—the main source of energy for silver smelting and refining—for mining districts located along the length of New Spain (Chihuahua to Taxco) from the beginning of colonial mining (1522) to the turn of the nineteenth century. It also details the more local environmental dynamics of mining, describing the practice of charcoal-making, its connection with emerging pastoralism and agriculture, and its social and ethnic dimensions.
Abstract This introduction examines the socio-ecological conflicts and global activism generated by the activities of large-scale extractive industries (mining and oil) in Canada and Latin America ...through the lenses of five authors: Karyn Keenan; Liisa North and Laura Young; Luis Ángel Saavedra; and Henry Veltmeyer. It argues that although the exploitation of natural resources has been at the heart of the Latin American political economy since the colonial period, this latest chapter of resistance is characterised by the emergence of new rights discourses and transnational strategies which not only reshape the future of Canadian development, but also present a challenge to the current resource regime and its historical dominance in Latin America.
Résumé Cet article examine les conflits socio-écologiques et l'activisme global générés par les activités des industries extractives (minières et pétrolières) en Amérique latine et au Canada pendant la dernière décennie à travers les perspectives de cinq auteurs : Karyn Keenan, Liisa North et Laura Young, Luis Ángel Saavedra et Henry Veltmeyer. Cet article fait ressortir que même si l'exploitation des ressources naturelles a toujours fait partie de l'économie politique d'Amérique latine depuis la période coloniale, cette dernière étape de résistance est caractérisée par l'émergence de nouveaux discours sur les droits et les stratégies transnationales qui non seulement remettent en question le futur du développement canadien, mais qui s'opposent au régime actuel et sa dominance historique en Amérique latine.
The Last Mine Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken
The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro,
12/2022
Book Chapter
This short chapter provides a description of the material organization and scales of the open-pit heap-leach operation that the Canadian mining company Metallica Resources established at the Cerro de ...San Pedro. This operation would excavate the bulk of the porphyry deposit in totum and then process it with open-air cyanide amalgamation on a leach pad. By giving an account of the organization and the scales of the operation, the chapter enables a comparison with previous cycles of mining and thereby underscore its much shorter duration, lower work-force, and higher demands on local waters.
This chapter contextualizes the third cycle of mining at Cerro de San Pedro. New techniques, combined with global capital flows, and a Neoliberal renovation of past regimes of extractivist ...governance, combined to fuel the rapid expansion of large-scale, high through-put, mining across the Americas and the world. At Cerro de San Pedro, in Mexico, and across much of Latin America, this commodity frontier advanced by reviving operations in mining districts considered spent and abandoned. The chapter describes the development and proliferation of open-pit heap-leach mining, the positioning of Canadian stock exchanges (Vancouver and then Toronto) as central hubs for global capital for mining ventures, and the propagation of neoliberal policies in the governance of Latin America's mining sector.
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