A Thirsty Colonization: Water and Environmental Transformation in the Silver City of Potosí, 1545-1760

This dissertation brings together social and environmental history to examine how the Spanish Empire and multiethnic local society of Potosí engaged in a constant search for water in the Andean highland between 1545 and 1770. I explore the experience of tens of thousands of inhabitants, most of them Indigenous people, inhabiting a high-altitude urban mining landscape lacking permanent water sources and the interplay between the Andean environment and the Spanish colonization that led to the construction of one of the most ambitious engineering works to collect rainwater in the New World. In doing so, it seeks to provide a timely reflection on the pressing issue of how high-mountain societies in the Andes and beyond are constantly rebuilding their environments to meet water challenges triggered by climate change and extractive colonial economies and how the ever-changing physical environment plays an active role in human adaptations and livelihoods. It demonstrates how water —not just silver—became the most contested commodity within the Potosi mining society. Conflicts over water shaped both Spanish efforts of radical ecological transformations to sustain its global hegemony and the ways of experiencing the urban landscape by different people who inhabited Potosí. With this in mind, this dissertation traces the process of building of one of the most impressive engineering works in the early modern world: a network of thirty-four water reservoirs and the artificial river known as Ribera of Potosí. I study how the Spanish conceived and used this ambitious water infrastructure to sustain the colonial order and its political economy. Furthermore, this research joins the recent historiographical turn of mining in Latin America to scrutinize aspects little explored by the economic and social studies of past decades. In this sense, the study of the reservoir and waters in Potosí opens a field of possibilities to understand the experience of different people building and living the mining and urban landscape of Potosí. The dissertation is composed of five chapters that address different critical junctures in the history of the search for and management of water in the city of Potosí from its founding until the mid-eighteenth century. The first chapter “Water, Energy, and Mining Ecology in the Imperial City of Potosí 1545-1590" delves into the early history of the search for and uses of water in and around Potosí from the discovery of the silver mines in 1545 to the time of the revolution of amalgamation (1570-1590). The second chapter, “The Great Machine and its Water. Droughts and the Expansion of Potosí Hydraulic Infrastructure 1590-1610” scrutinizes a series of dry years between 1590 and 1610 that prompted the local mining society and Spanish government to expand the hydraulic infrastructure to sustain the machine-city of Potosí. The third chapter “A Flooded Imperial City. Climate, Hydraulic Practices, and Disaster in Potosí 1594-1626” provides a close examination of different episodes of flooding in Potosí between 1594 and 1626. The fourth chapter “Rebuilding the Mining Urban Landscape of Potosí. Infrastructure, Water, and Climatic Adaptations, 1626-1631” examines the process of reconstruction of the reservoirs, human-made river, and city of Potosí between 1626 and 1631 to illuminate the attitudes and responses of the Spanish monarchy, miners, and residents of this Andean colonial metropolis in the face of environmental transformations and climatic emergency in the seventeenth-century Andes. The final chapter, “Confronting Visions. The Spanish Bourbon Government, Azogueros, and the Conquest of a Fluid Landscape, 1700-1760” addresses the intersection between the hydraulic nature of Potosí and the desires of mining entrepreneurs and Spanish Bourbon government officials to boost mining production.