Enlightened Reform at the Hualgayoc Silver Mine in Trujillo, Peru

In the North of Peru in the final decades of the eighteenth century, an epic struggle over the future of Indian workers and Spanish imperial finances took place at the Hualgayoc silver mine in Trujillo. Although the Indian labor draft called the mita had long since been outlawed in this part of Peru, miners throughout the viceroyalty continued to lobby for the system of forced labor, monopoly contracts, and price fixing that had made them spectacularly wealthy. They refused to recognize how the world was changing around them: less than a decade earlier, indigenous opposition to the mita had been one of the main rallying cries of the Tupac Amaru rebels throughout the Andes. But unlike the miners, Trujillo's powerful reforming Bishop, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, readily saw how the backbreaking work in such deleterious conditions for so little pay jeopardized the peaceful order of the kingdom. Instead, he offered a different vision of operations at the mine; one based on the ideas of community, sociability, and industry that had been the hallmark of his other attempts at improvement throughout his bishopric. To shape his extensive agenda, he drew on classic notions of Enlightened reform, but he pushed in a much more radical direction than his contemporaries. Ultimately, the Bishop viewed his trip to Cajamarca as his ultimate chance to promote his vision of utopia in Trujillo. What he did not foresee was the depth of the challenge the miners would pose. This paper reconstructs this epic struggle over the future of what remained the most profitable industry in the Spanish empire, placing it in the broader context of reform in the Atlantic world during the Age of Enlightenment.