Mining Language

Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism.

By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

“[ Mining Language ] contributes to many of the most important discussions currently ongoing in modern scholarship. . . . [T]he book's methodological blueprint will prove inspirational to many young scholars." -- H-Early-America”

...A remarkable achievement. . . . A novel and important contribution to our understanding of early modern science and empire." --Hispanic American Historical Review

[Mining Language] contributes to many of the most important discussions currently ongoing in modern scholarship. . . . [T]he book's methodological blueprint will prove inspirational to many young scholars." --H-Early-America

[An] inspiring study. . . . Mining Language speaks to the heart of current discussions in the field of intercultural and interlingual knowledge transformations." --Technology and Culture

An exemplary and erudite study in how deep attentiveness to language and to the challenging work of locating and comparing disparate and often fragmentary sources can yield new insights into knowledges and agencies that have been rendered invisible by colonialism."--H-LatAm

An insightful addition to a growing body of work on the emergence of early modern scientific and technological epistemologies." --The Americas

An original and fascinating study that reveals the significant contributions that indigenous and African peoples have made to the emergence of new scientific ideas and technologies." --Bulletin of Spanish Studies

Bigelow has an impressive range of historiographical influences, which includes literature on mining and metallurgy from archaeology, art history, cultural studies, geography, history, and linguistics. . . . a methodological model for reconstituting knowledge production in different imperial settings."--William and Mary Quarterly

Allison Margaret Bigelow is assistant professor of colonial Latin American literature at the University of Virginia.

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