the object of an English raid on Norridgewock mis-
sion in 1724. There were no winners, only losers, in
the four Abenaki-English wars during 1675-1 727.
French policies are shown as sometimes unenlight-
ened, but English policies almost always were. Jes-
uits frequently succeeded in providing the Abenaki
with desired services, and so the Abenaki usually
supported French military efforts-whenever i t
seemed advantageous to do so. Abenaki actions
maximized autonomy, given the alternatives avail-
able. The Embattled Northeast is highly recom-
mended for its own alliance of interdisciplinary in-
puts.
Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in
Potosi, 7545-1650. PETER BAKEWELL. Albu-
querque: The University of New Mexico Press,
1984. xvi + 213 pp., maps, figures, illustra-
tions, appendixes, glossary, references, in-
dex. $19.95 (cloth).
IOHN HOWLAND ROWE
University of California, Berkeley
Miners of the Red Mountain is a book by a his-
torian on Indian labor in the silver mines of Potosi,
in what is now Bolivia, between 1545 and 1650.
Why should anyone but a specialist be interested in
that subject?
Potosi was a mountain of silver, a fabulous trea-
sure in the eyes of Europeans and one of the richest
jewels in the crown of imperial Spain. It was Amer-
ican silver that financed the wars of Europe from the
Protestant Reformation through the Thirty Years
War. More of this silver came from Potosi than any-
where else; for part of the period, this location
alone produced twice as much silver as all the
mines of Mexico combined. All the work in the
mines was performed by Indians, and the total work
force was nearly 10,000 men, about 45 percent of
whom worked under coercion and were paid less
than it cost them to live. A large part of what is now
southern Peru and Bolivia was subject to the labor
draft lor Potosi.
The mines were owned by individual Spaniards
who also controlled the refining process. These in-
dividuals were the chief beneficiaries of the mining
effort. Since the crown claimed one-fifth of all the
silver produced, i t too had an important interest in
maintaining production.
Actual work in mines was not something Span-
iards did willingly. In Spain, Spaniards were con-
demned to work in the mines as punishment for
atrocious crimes, so there was severe stigma asso-
ciated with this form of labor. With such anteced-
ents, the home government was naturally troubled
by the tendency of Spanish colonists to insist that
free Indians who had committed no crime be forced
to mine silver and gold. Officials in Spain could see
no alternative, however, and the forced labor of In-
dians was approved repeatedly as necessary in the
interests of the state.
The alternative that received little or no consid-
eration was that of paying the mine workers a wage
that would make the job worth their while. The
mine owners insisted that they needed cheap labor
400 american ethnologist
to stay in business, and they got what they said they
needed. The Indians, in effect, were forced to pay
them a subsidy, not infrequently a subsidy in cash,
as happened when Indians paid for substitutes to es-
cape the labor draft, the dreaded mita of Potosi.
Bakewell reminds those who tend to think of Po-
tosi only in terms of the mita that more than half the
labor force worked voluntarily and was better paid
than the draft laborers. His study deals with both
groups. There is a certain emphasis on the volunteer
workers, however, which is reflected in the chapter
headings. Bakewell discusses wages and cost of liv-
ing, working conditions and welfare as well as he
can, given the limitations of the documents he has
available. Very little of the kind of information that
ethnologists look for i s easily recoverable from
Spanish colonial documents.
Bakewell has written a pioneer synthesis i n
which he lays out the major changes in the labor
situation at Potosi with relation to changes in min-
ing conditions (for example, as easily accessible de-
posits of high grade ore were worked out, extraction
became both more difficult and more expensive).
The documents Bakewell uses reflect the point of
view of the mine owners, and their biases affect his
study. Latin American historians tend to follow the
lead of their documents in this way and thus to be-
come apologists for the Spanish imperial regime
when writing about the colonial period.
In order to understand what happened to mine
workers at Potosi, a broader perspective is neces-
sary. Bakewell wrote his dissertation on silver min-
ing in colonial Mexico (Cambridge, 1971), and the
context he offers for Potosi is a comparison with the
Mexican mines. Unfortunately, in making the com-
parison he misreads his own table, statingon p. 183
that mines in the Mexico City district employed
58.8 percent forced labor, when the correct figure
is 26.6 percent.
Two major pieces of the context are missing. One
is the context of the Spanish economy, and espe-
cially the ever more desperate state of Spanish gov-
ernment finances. Successive crises, and particu-
larly those of the 1590s and 16205, led to increases
in the pressures on the American colonies to pro-
duce more treasure, at whatever sacrifice. Theother
element missing from this account concerns the
pressures impinging on the Indian labor force from
sources other than the Potosi mines. There were
other demands for forced labor, financial pressures
resulting from the illegal commercial activities of
the corregidores (provincial governors), and prop-
erty losses as the result of the sale to Spaniards of
Indian land taken by the Spanish government as
baldio (idle).Changes in these factors increased the
problems faced by Indians subject to the mita of Po-
tosi during the period covered.
Within its limitations, this is a useful study of an
important subject, and we can hope that it will in-
terest others to look at the surviving documents and
tell us more about Indian labor in the mines of co-
lonial Potosi.
Notable Family Networks in Latin America.
DIANA BALMORI, STUART F. VOSS, and
MILES WORTMAN. Chicago: University of Chl-
cago Press, 1984. 290 p ~ . figures,
, photo-
graphs, notes, references, Index. $27.00
(cloth).