A few decades later, Europeans discovered the immense network of silver mines centred on Potosi, in what is now Bolivia. Before long the metal came to account for 99 per cent of the mineral exports from the Spanish colonies. Between 1503 and 1660, 16 million kilograms of silver was shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal. And that was on top of the 185,000 kilograms of gold that arrived in Spanish ports during the same period. By the early 1800s, a total of 100 million kilograms of silver had been drained from Latin America and pumped into the
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