No good general book on colonial Spanish American mining yet exists. Carlos Prieto’s Mining in the New World (New York, 1973) is slight. Perceptive observations abound, however, in D. A. Brading and Harry E. Cross, ‘Colonial silver mining: Mexico and Peru’, HAHR, 52/4 (1972), 545–79, and in Alvaro Jara, Tres ensayos sobre economía minera hispanoamericana (Santiago, Chile, 1966). For silver production over the entire colonial period, see Richard L. Garner, ‘Long-term silver mining trends in Spanish America: A comparative analysis of Peru and Mexico’, AHR, 93/4 (1988), 898–935. Adám Szászdi, ‘Preliminary estimates of gold and silver production in America, 1501–1610’, in Hermann Kellenbenz, Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion (Stuttgart, 1981), gives more detailed estimates for the first century. Modesto Bargalló, La minería y la metalurgia en la América española durante la época colonial (Mexico, D.F., 1955) concentrates on technical aspects of mining and refining, on which it is still the best study available. For the Spanish background to colonial mining, see Julio Sánchez Gómez’s impressively thorough De minería, metalúrgica y comercio de metales: La minería no férrica en el Reino de Castilla, 1450–1610, 2 vols. (Salamanca, 1989).

The fundamental bibliography is Eugenio Maffei and Ramón Rúa Figueroa, Apuntes para una biblioteca española de libros, folletos y artículos, impresos y manuscritos, relativos al conocimiento y explotación de las riquezas minerales y a las ciencias auxiliares, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1871), reprinted in VI Congreso Internacional de Minería, vols. 2 and 3 (León, 1970). This is supplemented by Justo García Morales, Apuntes para una bibliografía minera espanola e iberoamericana (1870–1969), VI Congreso Internacional de Mineria, vol. 4 (León, 1970).