The political economy of Bolivia has been dominated by the extraction and export of mineral wealth; in the nineteenth century by silver, in the twentieth by tin. The decline of silver in the 1890s neatly coincides with the rise of tin so that there has been little consideration of the origins of the latter. Casual references suggest that they are to be found in the decision of silver miners to turn their attention to tin deposits once the decline in the price of silver destroyed the profitability of working the nobler metal. This shift in attention from one mineral to another was facilitated by the completion of the railway from the Pacific coast to Oruro, the centre of the tin-mining district, in 1892 which reduced the cost of exporting to European markets. The apparent innocence of the birth of the industry contrasts sharply with the negative images that have been inextricably associated with it in its period of maturity. Then it became ‘dominated’ by the figures of Patiñio, Hochschild and Aramayo, and few who have commented on the industry have been able to avoid referring to them as ‘tin barons’.
