The beginnings of Warsh’s pearl project were seeded while she was a graduate student in history at Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a PhD in 2009. As an historian, she argues that the heart of the imperial endeavor must be viewed not only through the lens of colonial empire-builders and elites around gilded government tables, but also through examinations of the ordinary lives engaged in “small-scale, local, site-specific practices of resource cultivation,” that helped shape a political economy.
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“The endeavor of empire is a constant struggle it’s full of complexity,” she says. Her forthcoming book American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire 1492-1700 resists the idea that the dynamics of cultivating imperial fortunes can be categorized. “Later on, this becomes a metaphor for outlandish style, for something that breaks the mold.” Barrueca, for instance, eventually becomes baroque in English-a word used to describe a misshapen, irregular pearl.
As she combed the archives over time, Warsh began noticing new words to describe pearls based on shape, color, and size. A pearl-based lexicon emerged as handlers tried to impose order and make a profit.
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Spanish officials wondered how to convert this natural resource into recognizable, taxable currency. To unravel the intertwined economic, political, social, and cultural threads of the pearl industry in its heyday required Warsh to dive deep into many disciplines: economics, sociology, art history, environmental science, and others.īecause natural pearls are such a variable commodity, she explains, “it became really hard for governments to tax or regulate them in any way.” They were smuggled easily and often, and sold on black markets, where they trickled into the hands of soldiers and everyday citizens, who cherished even a single pearl not as adornment, but as a valuable bartering tool. Warsh’s research delves into the complex labor systems, economic quandaries, and range of human experiences generated by the plunder of these maritime jewels during a time of expanding colonialism. “The best estimates of marine biologists are that in the 30 boom years of these fisheries, they harvested more than a billion oysters-which produced millions and millions of pearls.” “It’s difficult to convey the scale,” Warsh says of the 16th- and 17th-century operation. She has been researching the colonial-era dynamics that surrounded the pearl industry and its Spanish-controlled Caribbean fisheries during the years following Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. Pitt’s Molly Warsh, an assistant professor of world history, spent a lot of time during the past decade globe-trotting, digging through historical archives. But there’s more to the pearl’s story than what glitters in imperial wealth and status. European nobility coveted the pearl-a gem that has been prized since ancient times. Sometime around 1595, Queen Elizabeth I sat for a portrait, which shows her adorned in strands of luminous pearls.
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