The desire of Latin America’s European colonists to amass reserves of precious metals, and later to discover and exploit mineral resources, played a significant and historically well-studied role in the conquest and colonization of Latin America. But until recent decades, economic historians of the colonial period focused particularly upon the impacts of Latin America’s mineral wealth on the economies of Europe – on price inflation in the sixteenth century, for example. Along with this approach came a heuristic bias toward European primary sources, such as customs records from the ports of Spain and Portugal. Heavy reliance on these sources resulted in a methodological error, namely the conclusion that trends in Latin American mining could reliably be deduced from trends in European precious metal receipts. Only since the 1960s and 1970s have scholars shifted away from the traditional emphasis on the traffic of minerals to Europe and toward an analysis of mining’s significant role in the economic development of colonial Latin America.

Because of its importance in the colonial economies and in the maintenance of imperial finances, the mining sector was always the object of much political attention. This attention translated into numerous direct state interventions in favor of the mining sector, including generous allotments of manpower, credit on favorable terms, and generous tax treatment. However, a comparative approach reveals that these policies were seldom the result of global imperial planning, but more often were the result of particular decisions for the different viceroyalties or regions. This chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of the characteristics of silver mining during the colonial period in the two great productive zones of Latin America, Mexico and the Andes.