American Baroque

Abstract

Patterns of pearl cultivation and circulation reveal vernacular practices that shaped emerging imperial ideas about value and wealth in the early modern world. Pearls’ variability and subjective beauty posed a profound challenge to the imperial impulse to order and control, underscoring the complexity of governing subjects and objects in the early modern world. Qualitative, evaluative language would play a prominent role in crown officials’ attempts to contain and channel this complexity. The book’s title reflects the evolving significance of the term barrueca (which became “baroque” in English), a word initially employed in the Venezuelan fisheries to describe irregular pearls. Over time, this term lost its close association with the jewel but came to serve as a metaphor for irregular, unbounded expression. Pearls’ enduring importance lies less in the revenue they generated than in the conversations they prompted about the nature of value and the importance of individual skill and judgment, as well as the natural world, in its creation and husbandry. The stories generated by pearls—an unusual, organic jewel—range globally, crossing geographic and imperial boundaries as well as moving across scales, linking the bounded experiences of individuals to the expansion of imperial bureaucracies. These microhistories illuminate the connections between these small- and large-scale historical processes, revealing the connections between empire as envisioned by monarchs, enacted in law, and experienced at sea and on the ground by individuals.

Nature’s Repository? Pearl Fishing and Environments in the Americas and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

“…ey had knowledge of the environmental conditions and techniques of pearl shing: it was said, for example, that indigenous shermen were able to identify the areas where oyster beds were located by carefully listening to the noise that oysters made underwater, a sound that the Spaniards said was similar to that of pigs looking for acorns. 21 ey were also able to swim in deep waters for long periods, an activity that no European would be able to or would accept to do. Local populations were soon subjugated by the Spaniards and forced to work as oarsmen and divers, and enslaved to search for pearls on the seabed of the Atlantic coast.…”

Objects and Agency: Science and Technology Studies, Latin American Studies, and Global Histories of Knowledge in the Early Modern World

“…For both the colonial and modern eras of the Latin American past, a regional frame has helped enable comparative perspectives that challenge pernicious narratives of US exceptionalism (Shukla and Tinsman 2007). The now well-established Atlantic world approach has drawn into sharper focus the inseparability of cultural, political, economic, environmental, epistemological, and technological transformations once understood as regionally discrete phenomena (e.g., Sweet 2003;Dubois 2004;Warsh 2018).…”

Introduction to Latin American Studies and the Humanities: One Year Later

“…The answer seems to have been "not much longer." In the past fifteen years, critical studies of colonial Iberian science have expanded and enriched core definitions of experience and expertise (Barrera Osorio 2006, 2010; Gómez 2017), empiricism and empire (Furtado 2008;Padrón 2009;Bleichmar 2012), and subaltern technologies and epistemologies (Norton 2017;Warsh 2018;Cagle 2018), changing the ways in which we understand science, imperial power, and the nature of knowledge production in South Asia and the Americas. Hugh Cagle's paper for this dossier, "On Agency and Objects: Science and Technology Studies, Latin American Studies, and Global Histories of Knowledge in the Early Modern World," responds to this recent work by analyzing the productive tensions between colonial Latin American studies and the history of science, technology, and medicine.…”