Nature’s Repository? Pearl Fishing and Environments in the Americas and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

Abstract: The early modern period was “the great age of pearls.” Portraits of rulers, aristocrats and elites in both Europe and Asia show the abundant use of pearls in jewellery and clothing. Sought after for their lustre and their symbolism, pearls were a marine material transformed into the most astonishing works of ornamentation. Yet, pearls were also a natural resource produced by oysters harvested by the millions from the warm tropical waters of the Americas and the Indian Ocean. The case of pearl fishing off the coast of Venezuela in the early sixteenth century by the Spanish, highlights two factors: first, the intense fishing of pearls that led to their depletion, and second, the concomitant exploitation of enslaved divers. Technology – both the organisation of labour and the tools used in pearl fishing – depleted the resource rather than protecting or enhancing it. This article argues, however, that the so-called “curse of the commons” – the idea that when a number of people have unchecked access to a finite resource, they will tend to overexploit it – is not fate. A second case study – that of the Dutch East India Company’s pearl fishing in the Gulf of Mannar in the seventeenth century – presents a different understanding of pearls as a resource, one that emphasises profitability over time. The article uses the concepts of “simultaneous” and “sequential” games from economics in arguing that technology can be both a repository of processes and a tool of destruction.