Bartolomé Inga’s mining technologies: Indians, science, cyphered secrecy, and modernity in the new world

ABSTRACT

Print culture is allegedly the cornerstone of modernity, responsible for the rise of the ‘public sphere’. The Spanish Empire throws these tenets into question. Print culture never became a major force as it would in Northern Europe. A world of manuscript production was fertile nonetheless. It was within reach for every subject to write, petition, and debate with officials and the Crown. This did not produce a public sphere in which printed books traded hands in cafés. Indeed, this epistolary culture was highly secretive. There was widespread literacy in encrypting. This vertical, secretive system of petitioning nonetheless produced immense amounts of new knowledge on nature, politics, ethnography, and political economy, upending the pervasive theory of openness-as-knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Potosi
• amalgamation
• scientific revolution
• industrial revolution
• print culture
• public sphere
• indigenous entrepreneurs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References

Archival sources

Archivo General de la Nacion de-Mexico. Mexico City, Mexico. (AGN-Mexico), Archivo General de Indias. Seville, Spain (AGI)

Notes

1. “Secretos de las minas de Indias”. Ms 994, 113r-148v.  Biblioteca nacional. Madrid.  See also, "Expediente y licencia de pasajero a Bartolomé Atabalipa Inca, a Perú" (January 26, 1608). AGI. CONTRATACION, 5307, N.2. R.3; "Real cédula para que se acomode en navios de la armada a Bartolomé Inga, que regresa al Peru" (December 11, 1613). AGI. PANAMA, leg. 237, fol. 14, 26r.

2. Cruz-Pascale Absi, “Cerros ardientes”. See also, Van Buren and Cohen, “Technological Changes”.

3. Rudolph, “The Lakes of Potosi.” The Bolivian engineer Luis Serrano has largely built on the reports of Rudolph in his studies of the colonial lakes. See, Serrano and Peláez, “Potosí y sus lagunas”.

4. See Cañizares-Esguerra, “On Ignored Scientific Revolution”.

5. On this innovation, see Muro, “Bartolomé de Medina”; Bargalló, La minería y La metalurgía; and Bakewell, Miners.

6. AGN-Mexico. Mercedes 8: 83–84.

7. AGN-Mexico. Mercedes 5: 103–104v.

8. Ibid., 244–245.

9. Ibid., 247–248.

10. AGN-Mexico. Mercedes 6: 191v-192v.

11. Ibid., 332v-33v.

12. AGN-Mexico. Mercedes 7: 349v-350.

13. AGN-Mexico. Mercedes 9: 217v-28v.

14. AGN-Mexico. Duplicados Cedulas Reales, Cedulas 1: 286–287v.

15. AGN-Mexico. Mercedes 9: 223.

16. Jacobs, Scientific Culture.

17. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution.

18. Eisenstein, The Printing Press.

19. Valle de la Cerda, “Memoria”.

20. Fernández Córdoba, Primera, y segunda parte, 105r-109r.

21. Narváez, “Historia y criptología”. 17–62; see also Lohmann Villena, “Cifras y claves”.

22. Bouza, Corre Manuscrito.

23. Portuondo, Secret Science.

24. For a critique of models of state formation around print, see Cañizares-Esguerra, “La memoria y el estado”.

25. For a full-fledged alternative to the Eisenstein-Habermas model of print culture and public sphere as the origin of “modernity”, see our forthcoming Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters, The Radical Spanish Empire. The book recasts entirely the narrative of liberal progress.