The Underground Wealth of Nations: On the Capitalist Origins of Silver Mining, A.D. 1150-1450 (Yale Series in Economic and Financial History)

Early European mining history is not well covered, so this book certainly fills a void. The author has done a lot of research and has a very extensive and wide ranging bibliography.However she is not a good writer, and is handicapped by evidently not being a native English speaker (she is from Puerto Rico). The book is filled with quotations in various languages, almost none of which are translated for the reader. The maps show general locations of mines but there are no labels for the mines, no rivers or boundaries shown, so they are of limited value. She doesn't seem to be familiar with mining technology. She mentions 'washing' ore many times but it was only much later in the book that I realized that she was referring to panning (remember how the Forty-niners washed pans of water and river gravel to separate out the heavier gold particles). On p. 227 she writes of 'fragments of old continents in the seabed floor' which don't exist; the oldest part of the world's seabeds is only about 200 million years old and there are no old continental fragments in the sea floor.Unfortunately, like many recent books, no one seems to have bothered to edit her text. Yale University Press seems to have put zero effort into the book. Her syntax is frequently tortured and hard to follow. There are language mistakes. On p. 179 she uses the word 'engendered' (to promote, to develop,..) when she actually wanted the word 'prevented.' There are errors of fact. For example she wrote that England used French for several hundred years after 1066 because of its commercial ties with France and the Low Countries, omitting the fact that the Norman conquerors of 1066, the future overlords of England, came from Normandy in France where their native language was French.For her next books the author would be well advised to find a tough, thorough and knowledgeable editor who could give her hard and extensive research work the exposition it deserves. And probably she should find another publisher who would actually put some effort into the book, including much needed critical advice.

A true revelation !!

The one virtue of this book is drawing together of various sources on early modern mining in Europe. Thereafter it’s poorly written, edited and trash. I’m surprised it got through the Yale editorial processes, but perhaps things have changed over the decades in the academy. The authors use of inverted commas when not required, for example, “toil and trouble” repeatedly so. Then there’s the pretentious use of language, a malaise that blights many an academic work, for example selected at random, “Drawing upon lessons from mining history, a mountain chain is the space and place that created the conditions determining the success or failure of capitalist mining” Really? Teenagers and sophomores might be impressed with this drivel masquerading as profundity. Then what to make of sentences that are barely English, “In time, Tuscany’s olive oil was superior to that of Lombardy,’amid the pestiferous marshes of Maremma’” or the clumsy, “Almost all coastal lands are swampy, as historian Wickham observes”. Then we also are treated to inconsistent translations, where the lazy author has used a modern French secondary text to quote from “Sidonie Apollinaire”. Again really? What about actually using the Latin as Sidonius Apollinaris” is normally known by in the English language. I had looked forward to reading this book, hoping to learn something, but the sheer plethora of errors and inanity gives me concern that the content is suspect. An awful, awful travesty of an academic book.