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

Abstract

Accessible, authoritative, and articulate, Colour of Paradise is a gem of a book. Using a well-known aspect of colonial Colombia’s export economy, emerald mining, Kris Lane explains the dynamics of early modern global commerce and consumer culture. He tracks the stones from their mining in New Granada to their exchange in the polyglot Atlantic economy to their acquisition by Asian nobility from Syria to India and so tells a fascinating story of an often fetishized commodity. This allows him to deftly illustrate significant continuities between the era of the gunpowder empires and the twenty-first century, including global supply-chain management, exploited and enslaved labor that facilitate evolving patterns of elite consumption, the intersection of various trading networks that simultaneously complicate and enable worldwide exchange, and the internationalization of cultural tastes and preferences.To be sure, emeralds from the famous mines of Muzo quickly came to be esteemed by sixteenth-century European political and intellectual elites. But, more to the point of the book, the larger, better Colombian stones found special favor “in South and southwestern Asia, where they were consumed, hoarded, ritually exchanged and pillaged by the rulers of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires” (pp. x – xi). Despite this receptive market, however, emerald dealing remained “a highly uncertain business” (p. 124). Sometimes, it was added on to the legal export of standard goods like tobacco, cocoa, and hides. More often, though, colonial merchants and miners smuggled emeralds out of New Granada in conjunction with the transatlantic slave trade.Informed by the work of Colombia’s master historians, from Pedro de Aguado to Juan Friede, Lane’s analytical perspective is solidly based in impressive archival research in Colombia and Europe. But it is also enlivened by his passion for Colombia and its inhabitants, historical and current. His analysis of dynastic displays of wealth and prestige is firmly rooted in his appreciation for the land in and around Muzo and the miners who worked it. For example, Lane describes in detail the “folded shale beds known as capas esmeraldíferas” (p. 33) from which the emeralds came so that we understand the physical geography of the enterprise. Similarly, he reflects with insightful, even moral, sensitivity upon the mine owners and the miners, acknowledging both the violence of the business and the human reactions to working in a precarious environment. This examination of Hapsburg-era emerald mining anchors the book. In fact, the emphasis accentuates the eighteenth-century decline in the emerald trade as mine production fell, British smuggling increased, and Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman power collapsed.Nonetheless, Lane’s intent is to follow the global trajectories of these Colombian stones. And so he introduces seventeenth-century Cartagena exporters such as the Portuguese Jew Manuel de Fonseca Enríquez, who likely shipped emeralds to Lisbon and Amsterdam. From there, the stones were “sucked into the gift economies of South and southwestern Asia” (p. 144). He and his colleagues then invested the profits in consumer goods that were traded for African slaves destined for Cartagena (p. 107). Thus Fonseca Enríquez exemplified the Caribbean facet of intersecting commercial networks and the personalities who “had become key vectors in emeralds’ steady eastern flow” (p. 142). In turn, the Mughal emperor Jahan (r. 1628 – 1658), who commissioned the Taj Mahal, typified the emerald consumer. His extravagance with gifts such as jewel-studded swords and inkpots displayed the significance of emeralds as an unmistakable symbol of the divine origin of kingship.To his credit, Lane shows admirable restraint as an author. His analysis does not overreach. He acknowledges his educated surmises, which necessarily occur in any treatment of informal economies. He understands that in the eighteenth century “emeralds were now a kind of tag-along commodity rather than a super-secret stowaway” (p. 188). All in all, Lane’s controlled, considered, and comprehensive study of early modern Colombian emeralds deserves a wide audience.