ESSAY ON SOURCES

PRIMARY SOURCES

My interest in pearl fishing in the Caribbean began when I came across a document in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain (the Spanish empire’s colonial archive), describing the labor regime of Caribbean pearl diving. It soon became clear that situating the production and circulation of this jewel in context would take me not only throughout the Caribbean but far beyond it. As the book argues, this arena of American colonial expansion was embedded from its earliest years in networks of labor and commerce that were regional, Atlantic, and global. As I traced the paths of pearls and people into and out of the pearl fisheries, I realized that the project would not evolve in a single imperial context.

Since beginning to work on this project, I have sought pearls in archives in Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Venezuela. If I had greater language skills and infinite time and resources, global archives from India to the Midde East and East Asia would surely yield interesting stories about pearl use in these regions, long centers of their own thriving trade in the jewel. My focus on the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds reflects both the constraints of time and training and my interest in how the encounters of the post-Columbus era shifted patterns in the trade.

The logic behind my archival peregrinations is not only that merchants and consumers from these regions purchased Caribbean pearls—although they did—but also that the history of pearls could not be told through a reliance on official accounts of their production or merchant accounts of their purchase and sale. Much like the jewel itself, records about pearls are varied and hard to find. In many ways, the most complete record of pearls’ popularity and abundance in the early modern period is the immense body of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artwork depicting the jewel—pearls bedeck men and women in secular and religious settings around the globe, pointing to a lively trade in the jewel and its popularity worldwide.

Archival sources on pearls are incomplete and irregular in their reflection of pearls’ particular qualities and the related difficulty of keeping track of them. Pearls easily evaded taxation; jewel merchants avoided announcing valuable shipments of the jewel when possible; individual owners of pearls did not always, or often, advertise their valuable possessions. As the microhistories recounted in this book indicate, when people sold pearls, they often sought to do so in secret, for reasons about which we can only speculate. The stories of who used pearls and how they used them appear in the interstices of imperial archives, in community archives, in travel accounts and the writing of early royal chroniclers, in incomplete personal letters and diaries, and in the odd merchant ledger. They emerge in discussions of production, of consumption, of regulation, and of diplomacy. Often they surface in the most interesting ways in discussions about something else entirely—such as Inquisition records or court cases about local scandals. It is not uncommon to find records of pearls in the bureaucratic aftermath of shipwrecks and unexpected deaths, when survivors and investors suddenly had a reason to register the loss of goods whose presence they had preferred not to declare when they assumed they would reach their destination.

Concretely, even as I failed to find clear accounting of Caribbean pearls’ yearly production and distribution, I was drawn to other types of evidence. Scattered among Seville’s notarial and imperial archives, and in the invaluable source compilations produced by historians such as Enrique Otte and H. Nectario María, was evidence of pearls’ utility and prominence in many different kinds of transactions. Concerns about pearls’ abundance and their scarcity led to court cases about oyster harvests, American officials’ constant litany of complaints about life and labor in the fisheries, council deliberations about specie shortages, and royal letters concerning the distinct uses of particular types of pearls. Evidence from archives around Spain and elsewhere in Europe further complicated the story of pearls, suggesting that the jewel’s worth encompassed more than could be recorded in a ledger. In the Spanish state archives in Simancas, pearls surfaced in correspondence between anxious diplomats who used the jewel in times of duress. Inquisition records in Lisbon and Madrid underscored pearls’ accessibility and illuminated the networks of local contacts and global merchants that moved pearls from household to household, pawned and sold and gifted, between neighborhoods and across oceans. I followed these global pathways alluded to in Iberian records to repositories elsewhere in Europe: private letters, East India Company files, and independent merchant books in Edinburgh and Amsterdam and London. Along the way, material artifacts and portraiture in all these cities provided a reminder of the deep consumer hunger for the jewel and its mutable symbolism.

Alongside these journeys to archives and museums across Europe, I talked with many people, from Scottish jewelers who explained complexities of pearl coloring and river-pearl poaching to marine biologists and gemologists who discussed the intricacies of pearl formation. The remarkable staff of the Mel Fisher Museum in Key West, Florida, taught me about pearl restoration and showed me more varieties of baroque pearls than I had ever laid eyes on. Finally, I was able to go to Venezuela to visit the Pearl Islands themselves. The harshness of the land, the clarity of the water, the density of the mangrove swamps, and the proximity of the mainland made the calculations of unsupervised enslaved divers, pearl-hungry and parched traders, and besieged Guayqueríes that much easier to imagine.

Over the course of this sleuthing, my methodology often felt haphazard—looking for low-hanging fruit, searching for pearls in indices and finders’ guides—but over time I realized the significance of this seemingly haphazard distribution of records concerning the jewel. Pearls ended up scattered so randomly throughout the imperial archives and beyond them because that was how they moved in the early modern period: people alternately engaged with imperial bureaucracies and avoided them. The bureaucracies themselves were nascent and imperfect, their approach to tracking the movement of people and products across realms still being honed through trial and error. Pearls’ random distribution, the absence of consistent major records of their production and movement across borders, was the story.

SECONDARY SOURCES

More works than I could possibly list have critically influenced my thinking and writing about pearls, but five books in particular served as models of creative and informed risk taking and provided enduring inspiration as I grappled with my disparate pearl evidence. Christopher S. Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2008) made me think differently about the evolving significance of origin in the early modern world and its link to the imagination. The changing relationship between an artifact’s place of fabrication and its appeal and the role of the artisan in creating meaning were of profound significance for me as I considered how people thought about pearls, their alleged provenance, and their worth. Wood’s work led me to Pamela H. Smith’s Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004), which furthered my thinking about the role of skilled individuals in the creation of value and the prominence of the natural world in expressions of subject identity. Mark Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York, 2004) provided a thrilling model of how to tell a long durée history encompassing world history in the story of a single subject. The combination of erudition and imagination in Stephen Greenblatt’s creative biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare(New York, 2004), made me think in new ways about the limits of historical knowledge and what a scholar can responsibly do to imagine a world just beyond the borders of what the documents allow us to say with certainty. My interest in how pearl dealings provide a fleeting glimpse of what lies almost entirely out of view—the subjective judgment contained in the independent gaze, so central to peoples’ perceptions of the value of pearls—drew a great deal of inspiration from Greenblatt’s book. As I began to investigate the ecological elements surrounding pearl harvesting, Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2008) caused me to reflect on political ecologies and holistic understandings of how communities husbanded human and natural wealth.

To the extent that American Baroque is a commodity study and a consideration of consumption practices, I am indebted to many excellent works that situate their subject in rich contexts of production, distribution, and consumption. Many such studies have explored the social, economic, and political contexts of material goods’ circulation in order to illuminate the history of the commodity at the heart of their inquiry. Particularly helpful in thinking about the movement of goods and consumer appetites in the context of the shifting early modern world were Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge, 1991); Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York, 2005); and David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, Conn., 2009). Perhaps the only natural and highly valued product that rivaled pearls as a reflection of the era’s fascination with variety was the tulip. The phenomenon of “tulipmania” is more familiar to most people than the story of pearls, even though tulips’ heyday was far briefer and the flower was less useful and certainly less portable. For an excellent recounting of the tulip craze, see Anna Pavord, The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (London, 1999). Lisa Jardine in Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York, 1998) and Ina Baghdiantz McCabe in A History of Global Consumption, 1500–1800 (London, 2014) offer rich overviews of the changing early modern context of consumption.

For the role of consumption and cultural identity in a medieval Iberian context, see Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, 2009). Brian Cowan looks at the rise of English coffee consumption and coffeehouse culture in the seventeenth century in The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Conn., 2005). Jonathan Eacott considers the relationship between empire and trade regulation in Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016). Michael Ziser considers the cultural power posed by a particular commodity in “Sovereign Remedies: Natural Authority and the ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco,’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., LXII (2005), 719–744. For a consideration of the relationship between commodities and state power in modern times, see, especially, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014), and Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York, 2001).

A growing body of literature approaches commodity trades with a deep appreciation of the natural habitats that produce them, focusing on the relationship between resource exploitation and political and commercial hegemony. Signal contributions include Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), which introduced me to the notion of “vernacular industries”; Jennifer L. Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2012); and Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008). The latter two are stellar commodity studies that offer rich social and cultural histories of the worlds that produced the goods in question. Kris Lane, Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpower Empires (New Haven, Conn., 2010), is a model of precision and broadmindedness in its re-creation of local context in global perspective. Additional examples of Latin American environmental history and commodity chains are, for example, Shawn William Miller, Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil’s Colonial Timber (Stanford, Calif., 2000), and his Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge, 2007); Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, N.C., 2006); and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810,” Environmental History, XV (2010), 94–119. My attempt to write a social and cultural history of pearls in American Baroque draws inspiration from all these works, each of which furthered my thinking about the centrality of commodity chains to social relations in an early American context over the long durée. I depart from these books to the degree that American Baroque is more pointillist in its approach—owing to a combination of my source base and my own magpie-like intellectual orientation. I focus on pearls to illuminate the human networks that then eclipse the jewel as the focus of the story. These human webs of obligation, knowledge, and belonging, as much as pearls themselves, inform my understanding of the baroque.

In its emphasis on the fundamental importance of peoples’ connection to the natural world and its products, American Baroque reflects both renewed attention to climate change in the early modern period as well as to the link between shifting political and economic geographies and control of the natural world. Other works that take a similar approach include Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Stanford, Calif., 2014); Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire; Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, Conn., 2012); J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, 2010); Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge, 2011); Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2013); Christopher L. Pastore, Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England (Cambridge, Mass., 2014); and John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 2003).

American Baroque also builds on the wide-ranging and growing body of literature focused on the relationship between the expansion of commercial circuits, global trade, and curiosity about nature. I found the following works on the cultural context of knowledge production to be particularly helpful: Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn., 2007); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000); Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2007); and Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 2001).

Although the book ranges beyond the bounds of the Iberian imperial world, it emerges from a unique Iberian cultural context. The many works of Regina Grafe and Tamar Herzog—especially Grafe, Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 2012), and Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, Conn., 2003)—were particularly helpful as I thought about how inhabitants of the Spanish and Portuguese empires understood their political identities on scales small and large. On scientific practice in the Iberian world, see Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, Tex., 2006); Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, 2012); Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, Calif., 2008); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, Calif., 2006); and María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago, 2009). These scholars, among others, have worked forcefully to counter the long-standing legacy of the Black Legend that still shapes historiography on the Spanish and Portuguese empires and that portrays these powers as backwaters of scientific learning and progressive thought. On the origins and legacy of the Black Legend, see Richard L. Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review, CI (1996), 423–446.

In its consideration of pearls as wealth, American Baroque also engages with a wide-ranging literature on the financial transformations of the era, beginning with the work of scholars of the Spanish Americas who have grappled with the significance of the empire’s silver outputs and the political and economic costs of the wealth produced in the sixteenth century. See Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000); and Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago, 2010).

J. H. Elliott towers over the field of scholarship on early modern Spain; like all scholars of anything touching upon the early modern Iberian world, my own work is deeply indebted to his oeuvre. Given my particular interests in the intersecting British and Iberian spheres, his consideration of the British and Spanish empires in Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006) served as an inspiring model of comparative history. Scholarly discussions of Habsburg fortunes have occurred in large part separately from discussions of the era’s evolving political economy focusing on developments in the Anglo and Dutch worlds, in spite of the increasing scholarly emphasis on “entangled” histories. See the forum, “Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World,” American Historical Review, CXII (2007), 710–799. One study that does consider the larger European context is Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth, Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II (Princeton, N.J., 2014), which looks at how Spain’s economic fortunes embedded the empire in a series of economic and social relationships throughout Europe.

To craft the book’s considerations of communities that engaged deeply with pearls, either at sites of production or in the distribution of the jewel, I have read widely about different types of networks. American Baroque defines networks in a capacious fashion to include small communities of friends, families, or enslaved laborers as well as diplomatic circles and religious orders. These networks often operated along nearly imperceptible circuits, their participants’ precise motivations and concerns remaining largely invisible. Excellent scholarship on early modern Sephardic communities proved particularly useful as I made sense of merchant networks. Exemplary works include Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford, 2007); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, Conn., 2008); and Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (Leicester, U.K., 1978). Each of these authors considers distinct moments in the history of the Sephardic diaspora and various commercial and trade practices that operated outside state-sponsored commercial activities. American Baroque also looks to networks of resource mobilization and heterogeneous trading practices, such as David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2012), and Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011).

Lastly, my contention that the seed of the conceptual utility of the term “baroque” lay in the knot of Caribbean encounters echoes the findings of many scholars who have focused on the uniquely American history of the concept. Beginning with the classic work of José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis, Minn., 1986), I began to think about how pearls’ global pathways in the early modern period might have shaped the conceptual influence of the term. Irlemar Chiampi in Barroco y modernidad (Mexico City, 2000) explores the baroque as an aesthetic and cultural crucible that lay at the heart of modernity and was uniquely American in its characteristics. Severo Sarduy, in his essay “El barroco y el neobarroco,” in César Fernández Moreno, ed., America Latina en su literatura (Mexico City, 1973), characterizes the baroque space as one of wasteful excess. In contrast, American Baroque considers the innumerable pathways of the era’s millions of pearls to be a sign of global engagement on a microhistorical level with the elaboration of value—in short, a space of creation rather than dissipation.

As the transnational and non-national perspectives have long had a role in scholarship on the baroque, this book seeks to build on, rather than break with, this traditional emphasis on the concept’s relevance for Latin America, seeking global commonalities in the negotiations this particular natural resource engendered. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup offer a useful overview of the role of the transnational / non-national in discussions of the baroque in literary (and art historical) criticism in Zamora and Kaup, eds., Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, N.C., 2010). Additionally, Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo, eds., Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context (Nashville, Tenn., 2005), provide numerous useful perspectives on new directions in scholarship on the baroque since Maravall. Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills, eds., Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation (Austin, Tex., 2013), consider the cultural components of the Hispanic baroque in their rich collection of essays on key concepts in the Spanish Atlantic world. Roland Greene’s Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013) proved invaluable for thinking about the relationship between language and practice in the early modern era, and particularly for the relevance of the vernacular during this period.

Working seriously within as well as across these multiple arenas of scholarship has been critical to this book’s argument about early modern political economy and the nature and influence of the baroque. In particular, the book underscores the resonance of the concept for thinking about the tension between chaos and order in the wake of the American encounter. As baroque pearls—and all pearls—represent a beautiful, irregular by-product of an unwanted penetration of the oyster, American Baroque considers the complex and rich encounters generated by the accidental European and African intrusion into the Americas. Both conceptual and rooted in fine-grained archival history, American Baroque incorporates the insights of scholars working in disparate fields to trace a path that links macro-level cultural and political elaboration to small-scale decision making by individuals.

Alongside my argument about the importance of small-scale approaches to wealth husbandry is a historiographic point about the global context in which the post-Columbus Americas took shape. The early modern encounter in the Caribbean was from its first moments deeply shaped by distant peoples and practices as well as by local context. This complexity and diversity of influences characterized the early Americas far beyond the pearl fisheries. In its inclusionary and multi-scale approach, the book offers a vision of a dynamic early modern world in which conversations about the nature of belonging and value, of people and products, bypassed imperial—and historiographic—boundaries.