Nature, Empire, Genocide? Struggling with Robins

Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes weaves together global and local stories of Spain's conquest in South America. Historian Nicholas A. Robins connects the demand for silver from New Spain with the very local environmental affects of silver and mercury mining on two towns in present day Bolivia and Peru. Robins characterizes his book as “a socio-ecological history which explores the noxious interrelationships between mercury and silver production, urban environments, and the people who lived and worked in them” (4).

In the late sixteenth century, the administrators of Spain's empire in South America increased the colony's output of silver by implementing an ancient refining technique at an industrial scale. Mercury and silver were mined, combined, and refined to keep up with global demand for silver. Much of the raw materials (silver and mercury) necessary for these processes cane from two towns, Huancavelica and Potosí.

Robins uses twenty-first century weather models to demonstrate the far-reaching affects of the poisonous refining process. Based on historical data from Spanish colonial sources, Robins' analysis suggests not only that the impact of a mercury-based refining process was incredibly toxic – though it certainly was – but also that mercury poisoning had a greater impact on indigenous populations because of the proximity of mills and mines to indigenous communities, and that each town's reputation for violence may well have been in part due to the side effects of widespread mercury poisoning.

The balance of the book details the system of recruitment for forced labor, the mita, in the mines and refining mills, and the intersecting networks of economic exploitation by priests and Spanish landlords, who forced Indians to pay for religious services and buy unwanted Spanish goods in the reparto market. The combined effects of depopulation and internal migration to escape forced labor, European disease, and mercury poisoning, decimated Indian communities.

Much of Robin's previous work has dealt with genocide, and Robins incorporates a discussion of genocide into his discussion of the decimation of Indian communities that accompanied mercury and silver mining in the final chapter of the book. Robins suggests that the policies of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who put these policies place to increase the production of silver in the Andes, make de Toledo “genocidier extraordinaire” because of their ultimate impact on the destruction of indigenous communities.

As an Americanist and a public historian, I don't have a good grasp of how widely the argument of empire-as-genocide is accepted in the historiography of Spanish South America. But the constellation of factors, human and natural, that Robins wrestles with in Mercury, Mining and Empire is tricky, and this reader would have appreciated a clearer distinction between the genocidal effects of European disease on indigenous populations and the Spanish policies of forced labor and religious conversion.

When Robins writes that the impact of forced labor to support silver mining “paled in comparison to those wrought by disease, especially in the lowlands and coast” (193), it's hard to know how seriously we should take his argument about empire-as-genocide, at least as it relates to mining. I'm willing to concede that Spanish demand for silver, and forced labor policies clothed in token allusions to “civilizing” the Indian add up to the wholesale destruction of indigenous populations and lifeways. But the application of genocide – a politically volatile concept coined in the twentieth century – requires considerably more unpacking than Robins allows in Mercury Mines and Empire.