Colour of Paradise

Kris Lane’s Colour of Paradise is the first work that gives us close look at middlemen.  Books like Banana Cultures gave us a view of one type of middleman, the transnational cooperation, but others, like Jungle Laboratories only noted how much the campesino hated middlemen.  Lane shows us that these middlemen not only moved gems from New Grenada to Europe, but also move the emeralds on to Asia or cut and work the stones into luxury goods.

Lane notes that many of these middlemen were ethnic minorities, such as Jews, conversos, and Armenians.  It is not unusually for people from ethnic minorities to become middlemen, but it is most significant in societies where ethnic majorities have some sort of cultural or religious prohibition against trade or credit.  Lane References Edgar Samuel on how the tight knit relations of religion and extended family is an important factor in the advantages of middleman minorities, especially for the credit needed in long distance trade.  While Samuel is referring to European trade, you can still find Hasidic Jews in the diamond trade exchanging stones of great value only on the credit of ones word.

Even though middlemen rarely compose a plurality of an ethic minority’s population, people around them often perceive minorities as predominantly engaging in trade or lending.  This often leads to deadly situations for the minority as a whole, for example the long-standing violence against Armenians in the Near East.  Lane notes the increased severity of the inquisition by 1630 and this correlates with the shift of the Emerald trade to the Netherlands and then onto England.  The middleman minority is perhaps one of the best historical reasons for studying economics.  People who do not understand basic economic principles often refer to their activities as exploitation or respond to middlemen with violence.