ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“The parts of the World known to contain Diamonds”: the Science and Politics of Minescapes in Early Modern Southeast Asia

• In Event: Minescapes 1: What is a “Minescape”?

English Abstract

New maritime trade links with the Indian Ocean world provided scholars in early modern Europe with unprecedented opportunities to investigate some of the most important gem localities of Asia. Especially ecause there were few known gemstone deposits in Europe, information about the “minescapes” of gem-rich lands around the Bay of Bengal was of considerable interest to natural philosophers. How could these environments and their subterranean treasures reveal particular facts and universal principles of mineral formation? To answer questions about how and why certain parts of the world contained diamonds and not others, naturalists sought out the insights of a variety of commercial actors who visited diamond mines in India and Borneo in the seventeenth century. However, both early modern participants in the gem trade and modern historians confront several issues in reconstructing these minescapes: first, not all gem deposits were equally accessible in the early modern period, due to restrictions imposed by local sovereigns; and second, not all of these minescapes are accessible to us today. The globally uneven continuous operation of early modern industries, especially in lands subsequently colonized by European empires, has significant consequences for our ability to retrace past mining practices in some of these sites, and for the global recognition of geoheritage sites.

Author

• Claire Conklin Sabel, University of Vienna