There was a time in Colombian history, during the couple of decades before the start of the cocaine boom in the 1980s, when the illegal mining and peddling of emeralds from the Muzo fields provided the high profits and criminal liaisons that narcotráfico was later to bring far more abundantly and brutally. The contraband in emeralds was, however, so completely overshadowed by the cocaine boom that the traffic in illicit gems now seems something of an innocent pastime, a veritable vicar's tea party compared to the fabulous fortunes, insidious corruption and ferocious violence that sprang from Colombia's emergence as the centre of the international cocaine trade. Nonetheless, the extraction and exchange of Colombian emeralds has a long and intriguing history that, as Kris Lane shows in this book, is well worth telling. In his hands, this story is not simply an interesting theme in Colombian economic and social history, reaching from the sixteenth to the present century, but also a history that reveals much about the extraordinary webs of exchange which the gunpowder and commercial empires of the Atlantic world forged with their rich and powerful equivalents in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. Indeed, as he argues, the history of emeralds in the age of gunpowder provides an instructive case study for the ‘reorienting’ of early modern history away from Europe and towards a fuller appreciation of the part played by Asian economic growth in driving the global interconnections made possible by European maritime exploration and colonial expansion.

The key thesis of the ‘reorientation’ approach is that Asian rather than European markets were the dynamo of international trade, since it was the insatiable Eastern demand for silver, principally from China, that drove the growth of Spanish American silver mining and thus fuelled the expansion of the Atlantic and Eastern trades that energised European commercial capitalism. Lane shows how emeralds contributed to the construction of this new, ‘global’ world. Emeralds were similar to silver in the sense that they were an essential medium of exchange for the Asian commodities that Europeans wanted. But they differed from silver in having more complex meanings, infused by the courtly cultures of Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman princes. Here, perhaps, is the most interesting part of the book: the explanation of the growth of the Colombian emerald trade in terms of Eastern potentates rather than bejewelled European aristocrats or encrusted Christian altars. Mughal kings incorporated emeralds into a princely economy of power that pivoted on lavish gift-giving and aimed at winning awed respect and devoted allegiance by a ‘profligate philanthropy’ (p. 151); Safavid and Ottoman kings also prized emeralds as props in a theatre of power and, because their intense green evoked the pastures and palms of Paradise, as emblems of Islamic piety. China was much less interested in emeralds, preferring the jade which it sourced and worked within its own territories, but the demand from the Muslim world was sufficiently rich to finance the complicated routes which took emeralds from Muzo, via northern Europe and the Mediterranean, to the East. Ironically, Europeans enriched themselves from emeralds because Eastern princes valued them for rituals and sacred dramas comparable to those of the Amerindians whose conquest had given Spaniards access to the sources of the gem.

The book is replete with intriguing details on several subjects related to the Colombian emerald – called ‘Oriental’ because it was confused with the inferior Egyptian gem – and its history as a globally traded commodity. Professor Lane gives a comprehensive picture of the source of emeralds in the Muzo mines and the character of their workforce (initially Indian tributaries and African slaves), the techniques and cycles of extraction, the conversion of gems into jewels and, not least, the economic and social organisation of the international emerald trade. Emeralds, like other gems and jewels, were largely traded by Sephardic Jews operating under the Luso-Hispanic umbrella until, by the mid-seventeenth century, the focal points moved towards London and other northern European centres, and other Jewish merchants were drawn in. Throughout, the Portuguese Carreira de India played a pivotal part in the trade, with Jewish merchants operating out of Lisbon turning Goa into the centre for gem trading in South Asia. Here, again, the historical traces left by the emerald trade reveal the huge importance of Eastern markets in the development of global trade, not in this case the markets of China but those found in the Muslim-dominated worlds of Persia, Turkey and, above all, India. Asian consumers, like Europeans, thus played their distant, unwitting part in the exploitation of Amerindian and African labourers who were forced to mine emeralds; indeed, they continue to do so today, when impoverished miners dig emeralds to feed the fashion for Mughal-style jewellery among the new Indian bourgeoisie.

This is not a conventional book of Latin American history; it is, as the author says, more an ‘experiment in global history by way of a luxury commodity’ (p. 2). But that is its strength, for the author makes a strong case for ‘reorienting’ Latin American colonial history. Through the prism of the Colombian emerald, he tells us much about the dynamics of global commodity trades, the relation of European mercantile expansion to Asian societies, the imbrication of Luso-Hispanic mercantile networks, the interactions of Jewish traders and Muslim courtly cultures and, above all, the significance of Asia in driving early modern European commercial capitalism.

Well written, well illustrated, imaginative in its approach and deploying an impressive and eclectic range of sources, this book traces the history of an exotic Spanish American commodity to great effect. By paying as much attention to demand as to supply, the author shows how this very special commodity created new global commercial connections between communities and cultures of very different kinds, and thereby throws new light on the origins and consequences of Spanish colonisation in America, Portuguese expansion in the East, and the first globalisation that came in their wake.