In 1550 there was a mountain as big and as rich as Potosi in the Caribbean. It was a mountain made of pearls and empty oyster shells. In a beautifully crafted book, Molly Warsh describes the spectacular production of pearls in three tiny sixteenth-century areas of Venezuela: Cubagua, Margarita, and the Pearl Coast. Every year throughout the century, the Spanish Crown received an average of 1,000 pounds of pearls as tax, corresponding to the monarch's quinto, a fifth of all production (90). Yet Crown accountants never registered 80 percent of the pearls actually produced (53). Smugglers transported them in the seams of sleeves and coats or swallowed them. The tiny islands off the coast of Venezuela could just as well have been silver mountains, like Potosi. Drawing heavily on the monumental scholarship of Enrique Otte (who reconstructed every detail of this pearl economy) and using pearls as both case study and metaphor, Warsh explores the very nature of the early modern imperial state. Her argument: the monarchy helplessly sought to regulate production, value, and circulation of pearls, but was outmaneuvered at every turn by slaves, towns, merchants, pirates, and its own bureaucracies.

Like Potosi, Cubagua and Margarita quickly became violently cosmopolitan. By the time a tsunami wiped out the island, in 1541, Cubagua had thousands of Amerindian slaves from every region of the Indies working as divers and servants of pearl crews; there were also hundreds of Africans, moriscos, and Greek slaves (47). The traffic of Amerindian slaves in the early Caribbean provided labor for gold mines and sugar plantations; it also fed the growing demand for pearl divers. The Bahamas were not only hit by hurricanes: 30,000 sixteenth-century Lucayos were captured and moved to places like the Pearl Coast (39).

Yet these slaves were not hapless. Many swallowed the pearls and freed themselves through self-purchase after recovering them in their own shit. Spanish grandees in European courts trafficked pearls that were worth 30 ducados (12,000 maravedies) each (120), a fortune about the value of one enslaved African woman and her son (49). The most valuable pearls received the name of caconas, a name whose significance entirely escapes Warsh. The best pearls came from the shit (caca) of slaves.

To standardize value on mountains of pearls was simply impossible, for pearls were not stamped by machines but were the unique products of living organisms. Warsh describes crown efforts to standardize pearl types to regulate the quinto, assigning fixed value through taxonomy and nomenclature. There were pearls that fit a type and could be gathered in groups of standardized valuation (elencos) and those that could not (berruecas) (129). Warsh draws on the names of the latter to define the early modern state as a Baroque mismatch of failed top-down efforts to regulate bottom-up individual initiatives. The state sought to transform individuals into elencos, yet individuals remained stubbornly berruecos. Pirates, smugglers, and slaves took pearls to gain upward mobility. Elite courtiers themselves trafficked pearls outside the supervision of Crown bureaucracies.

Warsh argues that the tension between top-down rules and bottom-up vernacular actions manifested repeatedly in debates over ecological exhaustion of oyster beds. The Crown sought larger loads of pearl collection (and, thus, revenue) by favoring European entrepreneurs who patented dredges (66). Warsh maintains that locals resisted because they understood that the overharvesting of oyster reefs with dredges would destroy oyster fisheries. Local towns aggressively lobbied to block Crown initiatives to introduce new European technologies.

For all the brilliance in the writing and analysis, Warsh's model of top-down imperial imposition and bottom-up vernacular resistance has deep flaws. The Crown responded to petitions of abolitionist friars, favoring dredges to limit slavery. Friars also wrestled from the Crown dozens of new laws to regulate captivity. Yet the Crown also responded to the petitions of locals who favored slavery. The vernacular-imperial split is a fiction. Locals pursued new legislation through petitioning with as much success as did the Fugger and the Welser. The pull and push of petitioning produced legislation. Otte compiled hundreds, if not thousands, of pearl-fishery-related royal decrees. Why are there so many, enough to occupy two thick volumes for Cubagua and another for Margarita—two tiny islands?

Take, for example, the case of Margarita's coat of arms, whose origin Warsh misinterprets. It has three Afro-Indian divers paddling on a canoe flanked by two saints; a queen's crown stands on top with a hanging pearl (a reference to the Virgin Mary). Warsh argues that the design came top-down, reflecting the crown's desire to hover over the divers (102). This is wrong: thousands of petitions for coats of arms survive in archives. The Crown almost never modified the designs. The so-called imperial edicts actually reflect local vernacular voices. The state was indeed Baroque, but largely because each edict was unique and unclassifiable. The law was a result of idiosyncratic pleading and lobbying, a negotiation of sorts.