ABSTRACT
In the year 1676, two weddings took place at opposite poles of European colonial settlement in the Americas – two weddings, 4,000 miles apart, but connected by a silver thread. At the southern end of this thread, high in the Andes, almost three miles above sea level, stood the city of Potosi in the Viceroyalty of Peru, then the largest city in the Western Hemisphere with a population comparable to London’s or Amsterdam’s. Far to the north, a small scattering of the silver that spewed forth from Potosi would occasionally wash up in Boston. New England’s capital was then a town of about 4,000 people, perhaps one-fiftieth the size of Potosi. Like Antonio Lopez de Quiroga, John Hull had a daughter, Hannah, who in February 1676 was, like Lorenza, marrying an aspiring merchant and future judge. In extant scholarship on colonial British America, the concept of political economy has received much attention from historians concerned with era of American Revolution.
