Shiny Green Rocks

Kris Lane presents three arguments in his book Colour of Paradise: that emeralds draw out shifts in “global political economy”, that their meaning changed as they changed hands, and that their rarity and “shifting cultural meanings” resulted in a unique commodity chain.
For Lane, what is interesting about the emerald commodity chain is that it tied Spanish colonial America with “Asia”—here used in the European sense to refer mainly to the Middle East and India. This is interesting to Lane, because all the while, emeralds are presumed to be an Oriental “thing,” not the product of enslaved miners in Central America.

Ultimately, Lane refers to emeralds as useless rocks, but explains that it was cultural values and perceptions that initially made them a commodity. For the Muslims, the color of the emerald had spiritual significance; this was also true to a certain extent for Catholics who used the stones as gifts to honored saints. In the case of Nadir Shah, they were also a symbol of earthly power and perhaps masculinity providing him with a way to castrate the Mughal emperor of Delhi.

The emerald commodity chain as described by Lane is interesting in its sheer heterogeneity involving, on one end, Africans, Muzos, Incas, and other Amerindians extracting emeralds from the mines and sending them into the hands of European merchants, especially Jews and their “New Christian” counterparts in Spain, who were being persecuted at the hands of the Inquisition. These emeralds then pass into the hands of the Asian elite, rulers like Nadir Shah.

Nowadays, emeralds are not especially significant. In fact, Lane touches on how the West has inscribed its own cultural peccadillo of turning most everything into a science project onto the emerald, classifying its mineral properties and learning how to synthesize it in a lab. But for Lane, the history of this relatively unimpressive minor gemstone unlocks a mysterious past and uncovers global linkages heretofore unsystematically examined. I also detect a bit of Asian exoticism in Lane’s fascination with emeralds, but why not, it doesn’t hamper his academic efforts in this text.

*P.S. I hereby move Prof. Bristol and the class for permission to change my name to "Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction"!