Emeralds

Two points from prior blog posts hit upon two of the major contributions Lane's book brings to our understanding of commodity history as well as Atlantic history: the importance of Jews/New Christians and the importance of Eurasia as a center of consumption. Lane argues effectively that Jews/New Christians were the critical group of traders that facilitated the emerald trade. I think too often we look at nations against nations as a way of understanding flows of goods, which is influenced by mercantilism's importance in the early modern world. As books like Lane's or Alison Games' Web of Empire show, the history of the Atlantic World has webs of people related in different ways controlling the majority of trade. For Lane, these Jews created communities in all regions of the world to facilitate trading. In addition, the fact that they were marginalized members of society that often had to hide their religion or origins helped them bond more concretely and dovetailed nicely with the illicit trade of emeralds. These traders were in my mind the agents of change in this book because they sought out the market for emeralds as well as supply of emeralds to satisfy the demand.

I appreciated this book for bring Eurasia into the world economy because though many books will say silver was being sent to Asia, very few try and put Asia at the center of the history. Although Lane spends a lot of his book describing the way the emeralds got to Eurasia, and thus the center seems to be in Europe, I think the point is that all this was happening in Europe in order to send emeralds and goods to Eurasia. If Eurasians don't want emeralds, a very different history would occur and this demand is very important. I do have to wonder how important  was this trade in emeralds though. Lane explains that emeralds provided the profit for most trading vessels, who were breaking even through their trade of bulk commodities to Europe such as tobacco, sugar, etc. This is problematic because if the ships were making a profit off of emeralds but the whole point of the expedition was to send back bulk goods, the demand would lie in the bulk goods that were the focus of the trip. This would lead the emeralds of secondary importance, and the main market and main impetus for the traders would be Europe acquiring goods for themselves, not Europe acquiring goods to trade to Eurasia. I think it is important to understand what was most important for the traders to acquire because it does change the center of the story. I think for Lane the location of consumption is most important because they are the ones moving the history with their demand. I think many of the commodity histories we have read tend towards emphasizing that production and supply are more important in the commodity chain.