Colonial andean silver, the global economy, and indigenous labour in Peru's Huancavelica Mercury Mines of Death

Silver from Potosí and other colonial Spanish American mines made possible the rise of a global economy, based in significant ways on the trade by Europe of American silver for silks, spices and other Asian goods. Nowhere was the human cost of that commercial network higher, however, than at the Huancavelica mercury mines, where the colonial government forced indigenous workers to toil in conditions so poisonous and dangerous that some officials referred to the site as the “mine of death” and a “public slaughterhouse.” Officials justified the coercion on the grounds that because refiners used mercury to process their silver ores through amalgamation and that the empire and its economy depended on American silver. By 1650 improved ventilation in the Huancavelica mines and better refining techniques had lowered the workers' death rates, but labour there still may have killed as many as a third of the male population.