Eric’s Reviews > American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 > Status Update

Still loving this book, but taking a break to dive into Odd Arne Westad's tome on the Cold War.

"Pearls accessibility and anonymity enabled early modern subjects around the globe to engage in practices of wealth management that were deeply embedded in the social (and, at sites of perarl production, natural) worlds in which they lived. These worlds often intersected with--but did not always align with--emerging imperial visions of wealth husbandry focused on orderly relationships among people and goods." 192

Chapter 4 takes the pearl story global: Caribbean, California, Sri Lanka, and Iberia.

"Early royal visions of wealth management failed to encompass the realities of life in the pearl fisheries, where residents produced distinct understandings of the relationship between economies on land and ecologies at sea as well as between the labor of diverse subjects and the wealth of the empire." p. 76

Early royal visions of wealth management failed to encompass the realities of life in the pearl fisheries, where residents produced distinct understandings of the relationship

"Pearl's ubiquity as much as their plain, fragile beauty...obscured the violent maelstrom of commerce and labor that produced them. On a hem, around a neck, traded for food or wine or passage, pearls bore no traces of the lives altered and lost through enslavement or the submarine pillaging of the reefs...Pearls bore no mark of origin, leaving room for their consumbers to imagine one as they saw fit." (48)