Huallpa - world maker

From Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty.

Portobello was the result, in many ways, of one man and one day in the summer of 1544. A young Inca name Diego Huallpa had spent a long morning tracking an elusive deer on the mountain called Potosi in the kingdom of Peru (now Bolivia). The lining of his throat began to parch as he ascended beyond the thirteen-thousand-foot mark, high even for an Inca who spent his life in thin air. But fresh meat was precious, and Huallpa pressed on, determined to claim his prey. As he reached for a shrub to steady himself on the slopes, the plant tore away, and in its thick, dangling roots was entwined something that flashed in the sun, distracting Huallpa. He brushed away the clots of dirt; the metal gleamed under his thumb. Silver; unmistakeably.

The Spanish were soon knocking on his door, threatening Huallpa with the rack, one of their earliest imports to the Americas. He pointed them to the mountain. Even when their Indian workers began to dig out piles of silver from the spot where Huallpa led them to, the colonial administrators could not conceive of what they had found. In the next two centuries, Potosi would yield almost 2 billion ounces of high-grade silver ore, at a a time when the metal was just as valuable as gold. The entire European economy, tamped down for decades because of a lack of precious metals to serve as currency, took on a new life when the first ships began arriving in Spain groaning under the weight of the mine's silver bars. The famed city of El Dorado, the City of the Golden Man, drove the conquistadors mad with its tales of unfathomable riches, but it was a myth. Potosi was real. To this day, when a Spaniard wishes to talk of any crazily wealthy thing, he simply says, "It's a Potosi."

The global economy now runs on fiat currency and credit but our understanding of those instruments only arose as a consequence of trade that had been enabled through Potosi silver. What would have been the path of history had there never been that silver infused first flood of trade?

Should Huallpa be acknowledged as the inadvertent author of the modern world?