Adam van Vianen and Ghosts of Silver in the Late Renaissance World

Silver transformed and convulsed the early modern world. Silver, even more than gold, occupied a deeply charged intersection of forces and dynamics — philosophical, religious, material, telluric, economic, colonialist, social, cultural, and courtly — that traversed and profoundly altered the world. Silver from the so-called 'New World' bankrolled and justified the Spanish monarchy in its landgrab, wars, and empire building in both the Americas and in Europe. The great mountain of fabulously rich silver, Cerro Ricco in Potosí, relentlessly exploited by the Spanish invaders from 1545, irrevocably changed power relations, empires, and entire social and environmental ecologies across the globe. Accelerating global commerce and the growth of capitalism, trade in silver intensified the accumulation of capital and uneven trade balances, and enhanced the wealth of northern Europe at the expense of the Global South, particularly of Latin America. This wealth helped jump start the Industrial Revolution a century later.

Silver: Transformational Matter draws together essays by leading anthropologists, art historians, and historians to rethink silver across diverse fields and bring into context mining, trade, the Spanish empire and colonialism, Indigenous expertise, high-end Islamic and European silver artifacts, philosophical and alchemical erudition, and the shimmer of silver in textiles and moonlight. The emphasis in this collection is on early modern silver (ca.1545-ca.1700), since that was the crux and highpoint of its economic, artistic, and colonialist triumph, but any notion of a homogeneous historical 'period' is strongly resisted. Time and place were splintered by silver, as well as brought into relation by it.