Pearls, People, and Power : Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds

Authors

Pedro Machado
Steve Mullins
Joseph Christensen

Files

Series

Indian Ocean Studies Series

Description

Pearls, People, and Power is the first book to examine the trade, distribution, production, and consumption of pearls and mother-of-pearl in the global Indian Ocean over more than five centuries. While scholars have long recognized the importance of pearling to the social, cultural, and economic practices of both coastal and inland areas, the overwhelming majority have confined themselves to highly localized or at best regional studies of the pearl trade. By contrast, this book stresses how pearling and the exchange in pearl shell were interconnected processes that brought the ports, islands, and coasts into close relation with one another, creating dense networks of connectivity that were not necessarily circumscribed by local, regional, or indeed national frames.

Essays from a variety of disciplines address the role of slaves and indentured workers in maritime labor arrangements, systems of bondage and transoceanic migration, the impact of European imperialism on regional and local communities, commodity flows and networks of exchange, and patterns of marine resource exploitation between the Industrial Revolution and Great Depression. By encompassing the geographical, cultural, and thematic diversity of Indian Ocean pearling, Pearls, People, and Power deepens our appreciation of the underlying historical dynamics of the many worlds of the Indian Ocean.

Contributors: Robert Carter, William G. Clarence-Smith, Joseph Christensen, Matthew S. Hopper, Pedro Machado, Julia T. Martínez, Michael McCarthy, Jonathan Miran, Steve Mullins, Karl Neuenfeldt, Samuel M. Ostroff, and James Francis Warren.

Copyright Statement

Pearls, People, and Power © 2019 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821446935

Publication Date

1-27-2020

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Pearl, Mother-of-Pearl, Indian Ocean region, Pearling, Pearl Industry, Pearl Trade, History, Economics

Disciplines

Economic History | History | International Business | International Economics | Near and Middle Eastern Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Machado, Pedro; Mullins, Steve; and Christensen, Joseph, "Pearls, People, and Power : Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds" (2020). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 62.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/62