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Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8897568

1527-1900

Andrew Konove,

Historical Studies on Spain

In this erudite and innovative study, Allison Bigelow traces the development of an early modern metallurgical lexicon that grew out of Iberian overseas encounters. Combining the methods of historical linguistics, literary and visual analysis, and archival research, Bigelow has produced an intellectual genealogy of the technology and terminology that shaped the Spanish and Portuguese colonial mining industries. In the process, she recovers the African, Amerindian, and South Asian origins of many of those ideas and practices and, just as crucially, identifies precisely how and when those influences were scrubbed from the European historical record. It is a remarkable achievement.The book is organized around four metals that were essential to Iberian overseas expansion: gold, copper, iron, and silver. Proceeding more or less chronologically, Bigelow begins by examining Spanish gold mining in the early sixteenth-century Caribbean through texts such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés's Historia general y natural delas Indias (1535) and Spanish archival petitions, reports, maps, and woodcuts. In this section, Bigelow demonstrates just how dependent Spaniards were on Indigenous and African mineralogical expertise and how “Taíno metallic cosmologies” shaped Spanish mining vocabulary and practices (p. 87). Those influences are evident in Spanish phrases such as “coger oro” (gathering gold), which Columbus coined in 1492 but reflected Taíno views of gold mining as agriculture harvest.In the second section, Bigelow shifts her attention from the Americas to Europe and South Asia in order to examine Iberian writing on iron. She focuses on dialogues written by the Goa-based Sephardic physician García d'Orta and the Seville-based Dr. Nicolás Monardes. Those authors captured South Asian and New World knowledge about iron as materia medica (healing materials), only to see it filtered and, in d'Orta's case, erased through publication and translation. These chapters lack the material histories of mining and metallurgy that the book's other sections illuminate in such striking detail, and thus this section may prove most satisfying to historians of early modern print culture. Nevertheless, these chapters offer a sophisticated meditation on the relationship between metals, race, and colonialism, to which the author returns in the book's final section.The third section brings us back to the Americas to explore how copper figured into Iberian imperial imaginations. Here Bigelow uses the Portuguese conquistador o Fidalgo de Elvas's account of Hernando de Soto's expedition to Florida in 1539 and the Andalusian council member Manuel Gaytán de Torres's 1621 project to create a copper colony in Cocorote, Venezuela. Both writers saw copper as a potential source of colonial wealth, despite its inferior status to silver and gold in Iberian society. Gaytán de Torres's proposal is particularly intriguing. It envisioned a largely autonomous mining colony that would thrive on African artisan expertise and Indigenous and Spanish trading networks—an alternative vision for Iberian colonization that he offered during a key moment of imperial self-examination and reimagination.The last section uses mining reports, council records, petitions, and scientific treatises such as Álvaro Alonso Barba's 1640 Arte de los metales to explore Spanish American silver mining and refining. Scholars have long known that Spaniards relied on Indigenous expertise to launch the colonial mining industry and used Indigenous institutions to mobilize the labor that turned that industry into the engine of the imperial economy. But Bigelow deepens our understanding of these processes by reconstructing the journeys of specific Indigenous concepts and practices as they entered the Spanish lexicon and were subsequently stripped of their intellectual authorship. When it came to amalgamation, a process that Bigelow argues was born out of the fusion of Old and New World expertise and institutions, Spaniards ultimately saw their own contributions erased by Enlightenment-era authors who claimed that Europeans, not Americans, had invented the process. In this section, Bigelow also explores the complex relationship between early modern mineral and skin color taxonomies, tracing Indigenous mineralogical classification methods and terminology as they were mistranslated in Spanish and European texts and gradually adapted to align with colonial racial hierarchies.Mining Language is well organized but intentionally untidy. Bigelow avoids packaging her argument into a neat narrative arc and instead embraces the complexity of the ideas and authors whom she examines. Her “awkward pairings” of Iberian travel narratives, technical reports, Indigenous creation stories, and medical dialogues resist easy distillation (p. 326). In a few areas, a reader might want more than Bigelow provides: her discussion of the relationship between minerals, skin color, and race, for example, raises more questions than it answers, and we learn much more about the Spanish empire than the Portuguese from the book. But Bigelow offers such rigorous and imaginative readings of her sources, some of which have attracted little scholarly attention before now, that the monograph's contributions far outweigh any shortcomings. The extraordinary breadth of scholarship that Bigelow engages only adds to the richness of this study. The author has succeeded in writing a history of metallurgy that is as methodologically heterodox as the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that she analyzes. It is a novel and important contribution to our understanding of early modern science and empire.