Goldsmiths and jewelers were highly mobile artisans in the early modern world. In addition to working with precious metals and stones, many also prospected for mineral deposits and examined the material environments where they formed. Focusing on Dutch and British East India Company networks that developed over the course of the seventeenth century, I follow goldsmiths’ travels to regions rumoured to abound in gold and precious gems across the Indian Ocean. The only known sources of diamonds in the early modern period, mines in South and Southeast Asia were already nodes in a thriving Indian Ocean gem trade, which attracted Europeans to the region as much as its famous spices. Goldsmiths who voyaged to the East Indies visited mines and markets, and conveyed resulting insights from Asian environments and interlocutors to their clients and business partners. In addition to these itinerant experts, the domestic goldsmiths’ trade also facilitated the exchange of information about the places where precious minerals formed. Even artisans who had not traveled abroad could still be sources of insight into the nature of distant locales. This paper uses the seventeenth century goldsmiths’ trade to nuance concepts of mobility, circulation, and commodity chains in early modern science. I demonstrate that a combination of local and long-distance exchanges between goldsmiths and jewelers contributed to knowledge of distant parts of the globe through polycentric, multidirectional, and overlapping circuits of knowledge, objects, and capital.

As Russian settlers established copper and iron industries in the Ural Mountains in the early eighteenth century, they encountered gorgeous colored stones in mines: beryls, quartzes, agates, jaspers, and especially malachites. To find, mine, and work these stones, mine owners and administrators relied on the local knowledges of indigenous Uralians, for whom colored stones had long been holy objects associated with particular mountains, and of Russian miners, who viewed them as gifts from the patron spirits of the mines. Visiting academic naturalists likewise focused on the local specificities of Urals stones, collecting data on the position of colored stones in mines and chemically analyzing them to determine what made the stones of the Urals unique. While embedded in local matrices of meaning, these stones also left the Urals, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, as both the state mining administration and private mine owners established lapidary workshops where artisans crafted stone objets d’art. Carved into grand, imposing vases, malachites and other colored stones adorned palaces in St. Petersburg and entered the world’s great art collections, in the process becoming symbols of Russia’s imperial power. This paper follows the colored stones of the Urals, particularly malachites, as they moved from the mine to the mineral or art collection, and traces how understandings and meanings of these objects shifted as they were used in the formation of both regional and imperial identities.

Pearls are an organically occurring gemstone produced by both freshwater and saltwater-dwelling mollusks. The late nineteenth-century saw a global commodity boom in the demand for pearls across world markets, and many of these pearls were harvested from reefs in the Indian Ocean world. In this paper I explore what it might mean to move beyond the pearl as commodity, to think about the pearl-as-labor: what is a pearl, and what does a pearl mean, from the perspective of the undersea, or for the human pearl divers who harvested them? I suggest that pearls (English), or, more appropriately, muttu (Tamil) or lu’lu (Arabic) had varied resonances in each site of extraction. This plural reading of the pearl between the sites of extraction and consumption, I suggest, offers us a “nacreous” of layered mode of reading pearls, and, in turn, also labor, empire, capitalism and extraction.