...0 23 11 2023 It is well known that mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World. Historians and economic historians of slavery, labour, science have documented the variety of ways in which American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded...

...0 23 11 2023 This chapter considers silver in medieval and early modern terms, acknowledging alchemy, astrology and the connection between heavenly bodies and terrestrial metals. It notes analogies between the Moon’s noble yet variable nature and the noble yet variable nature of silver...

...0 23 11 2023 This essay contextualizes early modern recipes for testing and counterfeiting silver. Throughout sixteenth-century Europe (and beyond), both practices were associated with alchemy. Yet, the boundaries between assayers and alchemists were generally blurred. The first part...

...0 23 11 2023 Silver money linked the world in the seventeenth century, but scholars have mostly focused on macro-economic trends rather than everyday experience. This chapter argues that thanks to bonanza, trade, and war, silver coins in many and mutable forms expedited market penetration...

...0 23 11 2023 The introduction sets the scene for the volume and introduces the papers. It briefly sketches the state of scholarship in silver across the various fields – mining and extractive expertise, Indigenous knowledge and labour, colonialism and exploitative practices, early modern silver...

...0 23 11 2023 The yearly Spanish fleet to Spain from America carried a vast amount of mined silver mostly from Peru and from the mine at Potosí in particular. The crossing was perilous and in 1622 the fleet was sunk off the coast of Florida by a hurricane. Such loss devastated the economy...

... appeal. This chapter discusses fidda (silver in Arabic) with regard to tarnish. Drawing upon medieval literary and visual sources, I attend to the natural process of the blackening of the surface of silver (fidda) and suggest that this specific process initiated new...

...0 23 11 2023 Precolumbian artisans understood very well how to incorporate materials to make shiny and glimmering garments, composed of gold and silver plaques or colourful feathers stitched onto the surface of cloth. But it was not until the Spanish introduction of metal yarns, composed...

... to the human body, all intricately fashioned from a single sheet of silver. It had been commissioned by the Amsterdam silversmith’s guild to commemorate the death of another silversmith, the artist’s own brother. Made to address the discernment of men knowledgeable in silver and its properties, the work...

...Silver convulsed and transformed the early modern world. It bankrolled and justified the Spanish monarchy in its landgrab and empire building, both in the so-called ‘New World’ and in Europe. Demand for precious metals from China and Japan fuelled Iberian colonization in the Americas, Africa...