Abstract
In this original study, Molly Warsh utilises the fishing and distribution of New World pearls to illuminate the tensions between local and imperial approaches to wealth management in the early modern era. Warsh convincingly argues that maritime wealth, and pearls in particular, proved central to early Spanish encounters and enterprise within the Caribbean. Indeed, although pearls had become less central to considerations of imperial commerce by the seventeenth century, there continued to be an enduring global market in which pearls were harvested and consumed by individuals of different genders, races and classes. By focusing on pearls, Warsh joins other Atlantic historians who have utilised products such as chocolate, Madeira wine and emeralds to explore the expansion of global trade and the development of European imperial frameworks. Yet, Warsh demonstrates that pearls were unique among other commodities due to their oceanic origins and use as ‘an invisible type of wealth and value’ (p. 119). It was the mysterious and ungovernable nature of these small and variable jewels that appealed to consumers, while frustrating imperial attempts to regulate, tax and manage their supply and circulation. In examining multilateral attempts to understand and control this product, Warsh offers a nuanced account of the independent action and private judgements, as well as reactive imperial measures, that moulded political economies on a local and global scale.
The book consists of six chapters, which move chronologically across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and contain multiple microhistories exploring the cultivation, consumption and understandings of pearls as they were transferred between colonial and European markets. While the focus here is predominantly on Spanish Caribbean fisheries, particularly Venezuela’s Pearl Coast, and the distribution and use of pearls throughout the Iberian empire, the microhistories examined involve actors whose activities transcended imperial borders. Moreover, chapters four and six move away from the Caribbean to discuss fisheries in Northern Europe and the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This comparative focus expands the discussion beyond the Iberian world to encompass a wider narrative of early modern trade and consumption, in which pearls moved across borders with ease, resulting in comparable clashes between market forces, imperial planners and pearl fishers in sites such as the Pearl Coast, Highland Scotland and the Gulf of Mannar.
The real strength of American Baroque lies in Warsh’s ability to connect the conflicts between supply and regulation within local fisheries with those surrounding consumption and taxation throughout global markets. Focusing in on these tensions, Warsh demonstrates that there were a range of participants operating in and across these spheres that contested as well as advanced imperial authority. For example, in pearl fisheries, boat owners were reliant on enslaved African and indigenous American divers to harvest oyster banks. Attempts to monitor divers’ movements and contact with pearls proved unable to curtail their relative control over supply, which meant divers frequently kept pearls for themselves. In order to extract this wealth, boat owners called caconas (auctions) in which divers exchanged pearls for various goods. In turn, the semi-independent commercial activities of divers were central to the local political economies of pearl fisheries. Comparably, colonial residents competed with a wide array of European interests, calling upon their knowledge of local marine ecologies to contest state-sanctioned mechanical approaches to oyster harvesting, and utilising their expertise to maintain the most valuable pearls for themselves while still paying the required quinto (fifth) to the crown. Despite adapting regulations to better categorise this highly subjective product, crown reforms proved largely unsuccessful, and this not only points to the unique problems surrounding pearls themselves, but also highlights the difficulties of imposing authority over activities taking place in oceanic spaces largely removed from imperial oversight. These same conflicts played out at a global market level, as crown and merchants attempted to profit from this accessible and easy-to-hide commodity. Across all of these transactions and negotiations, Warsh weaves the argument that it was a mix of expertise and private knowledge – independent action and assessment – that fuelled these undertakings and sustained the political economy of pearls.
Absent from the book, however, is a detailed consideration of the local networks that linked sites of production to markets of distribution. Instead, the networks examined in detail throughout the book focus on the circulation of pearls after they had already left fisheries and been received in imperial hubs in the Americas or Europe. As such, we hear only briefly that transactions occurred at sea between mainland traders and enslaved pearl canoe operators (p. 97), and that pirates and petty traders were sent by other imperial powers to Spanish fisheries to access pearl stores (p. 149). It is clear that coastal traders, smugglers and pirates acting under various flags would have engaged in violent and non-violent encounters with local sellers (free and enslaved) across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that the products of such trade would have filtered into markets throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere. Asking for greater insight into this fundamentally obscure section of trade may be an unfair request, however, as Warsh explains that even in sites of greater imperial oversight the trade in pearls was exceptionally difficult to observe. In fact, that the reader can only glimpse the manifold ways in which pearls could and did reach markets directly from fisheries provides a sense of the mystery and danger that helped evoke desire for pearls throughout the Iberian (and non-Iberian) world. This absence, then, does not take away from the strengths of the book and, perhaps, even adds to it.
Of particular interest for maritime historians are the insights that this book offers into the ways in which diverse peoples engaged with the sea in the early modern era, whether as harvesters of marine resources, regulators of maritime wealth, or as consumers of irregular and elusive oceanic products. In exploring how people understood and acquired pearls, Warsh exposes much about early modern knowledge, perceptions, management and exploitation of the sea. Those who cultivated the product exhibited a clear understanding of the need to protect marine ecologies for sustainable fishing at the same time that the crown sought to maximize wealth extracted from the sea, often treating pearls in a similar vein to mineral deposits. As they moved across personal political economies as jewels, investments and affective gifts, pearls became symbols of exotic locales, individual ambitions and imperial maritime fantasies, and were embodied in art as manifestations of the nature and wealth of the New World. Pearls, then, were representative of the oceanic context that underpinned the expansion of early modern maritime empires and the growth of global trading networks. American Baroque shows this to be the case across both lived and imagined experiences of empire.