Green with desire: Colour of Paradise.

After a while one begins to wonder how different commodities histories there can be. Sure the commodities themselves are different, but the history of how they spread as commodities cannot be as radically different as their respective authors are wont to suggest. Kris Lane’s, Colour of Paradise  gives us a perspective on emerald’s as a commodity that is a bit different for three reasons from previous works we have read. First, Kris Lane presents a truly global perspective by discussing all players involved in the emerald commodity web. Second, as far as the commodities that we consider to be most profitable that came from South America, emeralds would not be at the top of that list. Why then write a book about it and how can you show its importance? Third, while other authors have tried to reorient the commodity chain/web process Kris Lane does so by going so far off the previously known path.

First, like Kristen mentions in her blog post, his players include Muzo and African miners, Spanish Conquistadors, European smugglers, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and New Christian merchants, and Asian consumers. While we have always considered the commodities we’ve read about to be global products because we have knowledge of how far they eventually travel the world, Lane actually shows us, and in much detail, both with historical and scientific evidence, how truly global Colombian emeralds are. His story of Nadir Shah and his conquering of the Mughal Empire in India is one of the many ways he shows us the journey that emeralds take. While it may sound as if I’m romanticizing the emerald as a commodity and sort of humanizing them by saying the emeralds took a journey, it’s the tone of the book that Lane set. Both Carol and Susan discuss in their blog posts the “romantic” undertones of Lane’s book and I agree that this is the impression I was also left with. However, I think he’s very clear that people are the agents of change and not emeralds. As Susan says “this book reads like a sweeping action novel involving many exotic locales and unorthodox characters.” I think he’s very clear in stating that these people specifically the Asian consumers and Jewish merchants are the clear cut forces that have the power to move emeralds.

Second, Columbian cocaine and Peruvian silver would be two South American commodities that were more famous, and probably valuable, than emeralds. Why then emeralds? Lane admits that emeralds were not a notably important trade item, but he tries to show his readers that their production and trade reflect bigger issues about early modern global commodity flows and “help to reveal slow shifts in a deep current of global political economy.” (7) I think he proves this and for me his strongest argument comes from the scientific evidence he provides: “Mineralogists confirmed what historians and gemologists had long suspected: that most of the quality emeralds circulating in Eurasia…were of New World origin[and] nearly all the emeralds tested could be traced…to Columbia’s Muzo, Coscuez and Chivor districts.” (125)

Third, most of the authors we have read (most recently Solturi, Gootenberg and Soto Laveaga) have tried to reorient  the commodity web process by showing how the native peoples who had first contact with these commodities were responsible for and contributed to more the process than was previously recognized. Lane argues that the commodity chain process should be reoriented to focus more on the Asian consumers rather than Europeans merchants or Latin American producers since it was their rapacious appetite for silver that fueled the expansion of Atlantic and Mediterranean trade routes. Like Marcy Norton says about chocolate fitting in easily to the existing trade networks, Lane argues the same of emeralds. One of the biggest differences between silver and emeralds is that for these Muslim “gunpowder” Empires, “green is the colour of Paradise…thus, among the Mughals, Ottomans and Safavids, emeralds held pride of place among gemstones simply for their sacred colour.” (6) This means that emeralds are able to fit in easily within the existing Eastern empires, which is another reason Lane can argue that their flows helped wed America to Asia.

Overall a very easy and interesting read although I have to admit the parts about rock formations in Columbia did make my eyes gloss over a bit.

Nadine