The Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (review)

Lane’s engaging and informative account of the early modern emerald trade begins with an insight offered by a discipline not usually invoked by historians—geochemistry. Mineralogical analysis reveals that many of the spectacular emeralds that survive today in the best private and state jewelry collections of India, Turkey, and Iran originated in South American shale beds (xi, 29). How did these American gemstones travel half-way around the world, and what did they mean to the people who sought them? Drawing on numerous archival resources, as well as on the work of anthropologists, historians, and geochemists, Lane reconstructs the patterns of production and circulation that allowed Colombian emeralds to travel from the scarred mountain tops of the Eastern Cordillera through the hands of Andean, West and West-Central African miners, mixed-race lapidaries, and Portuguese New Christian merchants to consumers in south and southwestern Asia.

Lane begins by acknowledging that the overall economic significance of emeralds was far less than that generated by either American silver or Asian textiles (11). He ends by conceding that a precise quantitative assessment of the emerald trade is impossible to calculate with certainty due to the inherent unreliability of written records of the trade’s volume (226). Miners hid the products of their labors from the mine operators, and mine owners, in turn, deceived tax collectors to protect their profits. Merchants bearing emeralds were loath to advertise their precious cargo; emeralds often sailed undetected on ships. Purchasers frequently lied about provenance to obscure their source for any number of reasons. But it is neither the numbers of emeralds mined or sold nor their perceived economic value that Lane pursues; his interest is in the “human relationships mediated by material goods” (12). Lane’s rich portrait of the emerald miners, merchants, monopolists, and modern-day emerald barons makes a convincing case that the true value and significance of the jewel rested—and continues to rest—in the far-reaching and entangled human networks that moved emeralds around the globe.

Using surviving records of royal taxes paid on Columbian emeralds (Appendix 1), Lane provides the most accurate possible outline of the trade’s cycles of boom and bust. Even more impressively, he paints a detailed and fascinating portrait of emerald production and circulation, from the techniques employed in emerald mining and their human and environmental toll to the language of the racial codes used to discuss the mines’ African and Amerindian laborers and to the Sephardic merchant networks that stretched from Cartagena to Goa. His account is made all the more vivid by the photographs, maps, and charts that accompany the text.

Lane describes the process of researching the book as “romancing Colombia’s stones” (xiii), and at times, his enthusiasm for the early modern whirl of commodities and people trumps a more nuanced take on the complexities of the era. However, he never loses sight of the tension that existed between increasingly global market for goods in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the (largely unsuccessful) attempts by increasingly centralized governments to tax and regulate the movement of valuable commodities—and the people who carried them.

Lane’s interest in the links between early modern globalization and present-day conflicts and concerns is clear. He occasionally describes historical events with language that immediately evokes modern struggles for control of material resources and people; he discusses Spain’s attempts at “winning Asia’s hearts and minds” and compares Inquisition torture suffered by Sephardic gem merchants to “waterboarding” (9, 109). Although his use of loaded modern phrases can be jarring, the postscript about today’s esmeralderos, or emerald bosses, underscores the enduring relevance of the trade’s imperial past. Not only does Colombia remain the world’s most important producer of emeralds (xi), but many of the less savory characteristics of the early modern trade continue to shape the emerald market today.