When conquistadors subjugated Peru in 1534, the Inca civilization was only their first victim. Spain too would eventually pay a heavy price. The Spaniards discovered a veritable mountain of silver at Potosí, but it was only thanks to the potato domesticated in Peru's uplands some 8,000 years earlier that Spanish slave drivers could feed the army of conscripted miners they deployed to dig up the silver. As John Reader recounts in Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History , the flood of bullion proved more than the Old World could absorb. The unintended result: inflation that shredded Europe's social fabric,...
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