1 - Finding, Sorting, and Studying Diamonds Early Modern India and Indonesia

Until the mid-eighteenth century, the world’s only sources of diamonds were a few localities in the Indian subcontinent and island of Borneo. Though less well-known than the spice trade, gemstones were an important commodity for many diasporic merchant communities in South and Southeast Asia, and sustained complex, specialized long-distance trading networks across Eurasia. Many participants described the gem-trade as distinctively knowledge-dependent, and in cultures across the Indian Ocean, gems and jewels were common metaphors for knowledge. This paper analyses the distinctive knowledge-making structures and practices of the early modern gem-trade, by looking at one set of nodes of its many global networks during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Using the extensive documentation of the Indian Ocean gem-trade from European colonial sources, I analyze how different forms of knowledge about earth and minerals were created and exchanged, focusing on vernacular techniques of classifying earth at diamond mines in South Kalimantan and in the Deccan region. Foreign merchants were not only dependent on local laborers to procure stones; they also learned from them about the conditions under which stones formed and were found in the earth. It was the ability to collate such local knowledge, I argue, that shaped subsequent developments in colonial surveying, mineralogy, and crystallography. This talk will show how the pathways of knowledge about gemstones were created and constrained by changing colonial relations.