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Who colonized Bolivia?

South America — the powers that ruled Bolivia, the dates, and what independence did and did not change.

In short

Who colonized Bolivia?

Spain, as Upper Peru from 1538 until independence in 1825 — the territory containing Potosí, the silver mountain that funded the Spanish Empire.

Potosí was for a time the largest city in the Americas and the single richest source of silver on earth. The wealth went to Seville; the mercury poisoning stayed.

Reference

Who ruled Bolivia, and when

before 1538
Inca Empire and Aymara kingdoms
1538–1825
Spain — Upper Peru

At a glance

Key facts

Colonising powers
Spain
Independence
6 August 1825
Potosí output
Around 40,000 tonnes of silver extracted over three centuries
Mortality
Mita mortality at Potosí and Huancavelica was extreme; estimates of deaths run to hundreds of thousands
Today
Potosí is among the poorest cities in South America

Chronology

Key dates

  1. 1545

    Silver found at Cerro Rico, Potosí.

  2. 1570s

    Toledo reforms institutionalise the mita labour draft.

  3. 1780–82

    Túpac Katari besieges La Paz.

  4. 1825

    Independence.

Context

What the record shows

The phrase vale un Potosí entered Spanish as a synonym for limitless wealth. The city that generated it is now one of the poorest in the hemisphere.

Questions

Frequently asked

Who colonised Bolivia?
Spain, which governed the territory as Upper Peru from 1538 until independence in 1825.
What was Potosí?
A silver mountain in what is now Bolivia, mined with forced Indigenous labour from 1545, which supplied a large share of the silver circulating in the early modern world economy.
When did Bolivia become independent?
6 August 1825.

Read on

Related in the archive

References

Sources — colonial Bolivia

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.