This book is as sophisticated, polished, and richly textured as the pearls it focuses on. Molly Warsh embeds the history of a single object in macrohistorical processes, using pearls as a lens to study early modern maritime empires and the generation and management of wealth. The author adeptly brings to life the complexity that shaped pearls’ production and circulation to illustrate the multifaceted encounters that redefined the early modern world.
Warsh uses the term “baroque” to signify not only irregular pearls, but also the intricate ways in which they were traded. Pearls were infinitely varied in their natural state and followed myriad paths from seabed to the hands of consumers, symbolizing the possibilities of a newly connected world, “its mayhem and its magic” (203). Moreover, Warsh links pearls’ irregularity to early modern political governance, particularly the inefficiency with which local bureaucracies worked in remote regions and the difficulties the Spanish crown faced in harnessing New World productivity to political power. Royal attempts to impose order on the relationships among individuals and imperial goods stumbled upon the independence of colonial subjects. Warsh argues that peoples’ perceptions and actions shaped imperial structures and limited powers of enforcement, an idea that is not novel for historians but that is here lustrously explicated with pearls.
The title does not capture the book's geographical breadth; it includes not only Spanish and Portuguese pearl production on Caribbean, Californian, and Brazilian coasts, but also similar English and Swedish ventures in the Indian Ocean and northern Europe. The book is divided into six chapters organized in roughly chronological fashion, a conclusion, and an essay on primary and secondary sources, with copious and meaty footnotes that are one of the many highlights of this work.
The early part of the book pivots around pearl-fishing operations on the Venezuelan coastline from 1498 to the 1540s. With an eye to counterbalancing the long-standing historiographical focus on the mainland portions of the Spanish empire, Warsh stresses the importance of the maritime sphere and the chaotic imperatives that shaped the early Spanish imperial bureaucracy. Pearl production relied from the start on indigenous and African divers in a regime of enforced servitude and slavery. Divers’ living and working conditions are indeed one of the most appealing themes of the book. Experiments with oyster-harvesting devices backed by the crown to reduce reliance on human labor failed because they considered neither the maritime ecology of the settlements nor local practice and knowledge.
Another major thread of the book is the private possession of pearls. The Spanish crown attempted to enforce the quinto, a tax on one-fifth of the total pearl haul, but Warsh estimates that 80 percent of pearls harvested moved through sub-rosa channels into markets on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. Warsh includes vignettes of high-ranking diplomats in Venice and merchants in Baiona (Galicia) who acted as jewel brokers and whose intricate networks of contacts, alliances, and mutual obligation she pieces together with fascinating detail.
The logic behind private transactions remained largely beyond the purview of imperial authorities. Warsh contends that the value of pearls was determined by independent, subjective, and contextual judgment rather than official assessments that attempted to commodify pearls and separate them into distinct categories for fiscal purposes. The author also refers to how the destabilizing abundance of pearls could muddy distinctions among subjects. Inquisition records from Lima and Cartagena on cases against New Christian merchants serve Warsh to argue that pearls could make and unmake fortunes. In addition, they were easy to pawn in times of hardship for people of Spanish or African origin, whether freeborn or born into servitude, rich or poor.
There is overlap between the chapters in the themes they address. This leads to some redundancy, especially with the idea that local practices of wealth management limited crown approaches to extending authority over distant people and products. The last chapter brings home this point again with a discussion of mid 1600s English pearl fishing in Virginia, Bermuda, and the Indian Ocean, as well as Swedish attempts to harness river pearl production. The book focuses on Iberian imperial initiatives; therefore, this wide-ranging chapter remains somewhat disjointed. This could perhaps have been offset if Warsh had provided more context on English and Swedish imperial goals, scope, and experience to establish a more effective comparison with the Spanish endeavors. I also wonder if placing pearls in relation to other high-value items like gold and diamonds would have added valuable angles to Warsh's arguments.
Minor quibbles aside, this book is a remarkable contribution to the history of empires and the complex knot of relationships, coerced and collaborative, that sustained the production of wealth and knowledge. This monograph could be assigned to graduate students, and it will be of interest to historians of the Spanish, Portuguese and English empires, historians of commodity chains, environmental historians, and historians of science and technology.
