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American Baroque - Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R891
Discovery Miles 8 910
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American Baroque - Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (Paperback)
Series: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
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Pearls have enthralled global consumers since antiquity, and the
Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella explicitly charged Columbus
with finding pearls, as well as gold and silver, when he sailed
westward in 1492. American Baroque charts Spain's exploitation of
Caribbean pearl fisheries to trace the genesis of its maritime
empire. In the 1500s, licit and illicit trade in the jewel gave
rise to global networks, connecting the Caribbean to the Indian
Ocean to the pearl-producing regions of the Chesapeake and northern
Europe. Pearls-a unique source of wealth because of their
renewable, fungible, and portable nature-defied easy
categorization. Their value was highly subjective and determined
more by the individuals, free and enslaved, who produced, carried,
traded, wore, and painted them than by imperial decrees and
tax-related assessments. The irregular baroque pearl, often
transformed by the imagination of a skilled artisan into a
fantastical jewel, embodied this subjective appeal. Warsh blends
environmental, social, and cultural history to construct
microhistories of peoples' wide-ranging engagement with this
deceptively simple jewel. Pearls facilitated imperial fantasy and
personal ambition, adorned the wardrobes of monarchs and financed
their wars, and played a crucial part in the survival strategies of
diverse people of humble means. These stories, taken together,
uncover early modern conceptions of wealth, from the hardscrabble
shores of Caribbean islands to the lavish rooms of Mediterranean
palaces.
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