American Baroque

On March 5, 2019, a ruckus erupted in the New Hampshire state legislature when lawmakers wore strings of pearls to support a gun-rights advocacy group. The supporters of gun control felt mocked as pearl clutchers, while the adorned lawmakers and the gun-possession advocates they were supporting claimed they wore the necklaces as badges of conservatism. This little bit of local drama highlights the complexities embodied in our understandings of pearls, which Molly Warsh seeks to elucidate in American Baroque. She shows that pearls have global significance as an important catalyst to a variety of human behaviors.Warsh manages to cover two centuries and touch on a wide variety of topics in a concise volume. While the book broaches environmental history, technological exoticism, slavery, and many other subjects that relate to pearls, Warsh pursues her argument that pearls “gave rise to a productive tension between vernacular, small-scale understandings of wealth management . . . and developing imperial understandings of the same” with an admirable focus (p. 8). By mapping but not exploring some of these byroads, Warsh produces a cogent argument that will lay the way for future explorations of pearls and that links with recent dissertations by Samuel Ostroff on pearl fisheries under the Dutch and British in the Gulf of Mannar and by Kjell Ericson on cultured pearls and the Japanese entrepreneur Mikimoto Kōkichi.The book proceeds roughly in chronological order. The introduction and chapters 1 and 2 begin with Christopher Columbus, who supposedly discovered the Caribbean pearl beds, and underline the maritime nature of empire in the early modern world. In chapter 1, the appeal and symbolism of pearls and their importance is explained. Chapter 2 discusses consumption by European aristocracy in the sixteenth century and “the dialogue between individual imperative and imperial directive” as a framework for looking at “private approaches to wealth management,” theft, and smuggling (p. 50). In chapter 3, ecological impacts, imperial administrative policy, and slavery in the Americas as a result of pearling are considered. Warsh describes these as important for wealth management and its reflection in imperial bureaucracy. Chapter 4 moves into the seventeenth century by examining technological innovations in diving and the Cardona company, providing a comparison of New World pearling practices and wealth management to those employed in Sri Lanka based on João de Ribeiro's account of the Gulf of Mannar from 1680. These topics are used to explore the relationships between labor, production, and the crown. Chapter 5 focuses on administrative control and challenges to it posed by smuggling, which is also examined as a means of private wealth accumulation, especially among private citizens and prisoners of the Inquisition and others under the thumb of Spanish colonialism. These topics are explored as “networks of belonging and obligation” for not just the New World but also the Estado da Índia (p. 182). Chapter 6 brings in the English East India Company and consumption in northern Europe as a way of seeing how the administrative value of pearls diminished with increasing global trade, although they retained their symbolism. The conclusion summarizes the argument embodied in the book's title: that pearls elucidate human relationships with the natural world, which in turn bring us to a new and better understanding of the rise and fall of empires.World history can be difficult to accomplish because it often requires many languages, distant archives, and synthesis of large amounts of material. This project is no exception. Warsh has generally done an admirable job. Inevitably, some important regions (China and the Persian Gulf) were not examined, and potential topics, such as pearl color or medicinal applications, were omitted to create a cohesive argument. However, while one can understand the lack of Dutch-language archival sources from a historian of the Ibero-American world, the discorporate presence of the Dutch trading companies, which were active in these regions and in the pearl trade and were arguably more important than the English (who are examined) in Asia and the Americas in the seventeenth century, creates a focused but incomplete picture. The Dutch adumbration is highlighted by the fact that 7 of the 30 illustrations included in the book are works by Dutch or Flemish artists. It is an odd contrast to the deft and thoughtful way that Warsh includes discussions of these visual sources in her analysis. Serious students and scholars will mourn the employment of an “essay on sources” rather than a bibliography. The footnotes are comprehensive, but those not already familiar with the topic will not be able to locate the archival sources used extensively in chapters 2 through 5 or easily compile a reading list.Undoubtedly, historians and students of the Spanish empire, luxury trade, the Columbian exchange, and world history will find this a valuable addition to existing scholarship. Our ancestors found pearls mysterious and speculated that they might have come from raindrops, bird spit, mermaid tears, or dragon hair. Today most people know how they are formed, but with American Baroque, we now know that they in turn contributed to the formation of empires

Art · Art history · Baroque · Empire · Literature · Political science · Ridiculous · Variety (cybernetics · Vernacular · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

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