The 1545 discovery of massive silver deposits at Potosí, Bolivia, arguably changed the world. But what did that interconnected if not fully globalized world look like a century after discovery, once silver from the Americas had had some time to flow and settle in? We know that much silver reached Asia in exchange for a wide range of mostly luxury commodities, but how did silver exchanges work, and what did silver do beyond the realm of transoceanic commerce? Did it spark wars, for instance? Historian Kris Lane offers a global overview of silver exchanges and consumption forms in the mid-seventeenth century in order to get beyond standard treatments of "bullion flows" and Eurasian arbitrage. How was Potosí itself transformed? And "America"?

Kris Lane holds the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA. He is author of Pandemic in Potosí: Fear, Loathing, and Public Piety in a Colonial Mining Metropolis (2021), Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World (2019),Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750 (2015), Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (2010), and Quito 1599: City & Colony in Transition (2002). Lane is currently writing a history of the great Potosí mint fraud of the 1640s. A documentary history of the Basque-Vicuña conflict of the 1620s is in press.