Lane's Colour of Paradise

Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires

Carol’s post noted that Lane’s phrase about emeralds revealing “the slow shifts in the deep current of global political economy” is a very romantic notion.  The word romantic resonated with me because this book reads like a sweeping action novel involving many exotic locales and unorthodox characters.  This tale takes us from pre-Columbian emerald mines, across trade routes to crypto-Jewish (or New Christian) merchants constantly peering over their shoulders for inquisitors, to jewel-laden power-plotting shahs.  It’s a very romantic study that spans economics, politics, anthropology, archaeology, art history, and gemology, just to name a few disciplines.  Lane’s impressive list of relevant questions on page 18 of the introduction perhaps the broad scope of his study. 

Emeralds are an interesting commodity because they don’t do anything.  They don’t sweeten our coffee, regulate our hormones, dye our fabrics, or nourish us.  An emerald is an inert, useless thing around which humans weave tales of importance and value.  I couldn’t help comparing Lane’s examination of the connoisseurship associated with emeralds with Brian Spooner’s article on oriental carpets in The Social Lives of Things (Appadurai).  As Spooner describes, luxury goods like these are part commodity and part symbol.  The connoisseur relies on the lore of the dealer in order to value the commodity.   In the case of emeralds, the lore invented by the dealers was that emeralds from the Americas are valued much lower than emeralds from Asia and Egypt, so that the Columbian emeralds were referred to as “oriental” to imply quality and discern them from “Peruvian” or low quality, perhaps even fake, stones (pg. 101).  

The additional value added to them by the great moguls and shahs of the Islamic empires is impressive.  Emeralds became an important part of the elaborate “gift economies” of the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman empires.  In these places emeralds could simultaneously demonstrate religiosity and altruism as part of zakat, the charitable aspect of Islam; or display wealth and power.  Mughal emperors, Lane tells us, understood power differently than in the West in that they relied less on war and victory narratives and more on rites of passage that were marked by “the incessant giving and receiving of exquisitely useless gifts” like emeralds (151).  These gifts indicated not only the divine origins of rulers but also the ability to refuse gifts helped to solidify the social divide between the rulers and his subjects.  The irony that most of these lovely “oriental” emeralds originated in Columbian mines, and that the desire for them in the Islamic world help drive international trade networks is the main point of Lane’s book.  As Appadurai noted, the politics of value is in many contexts a politics of knowledge.