Accessible, authoritative, and articulate, Colour of Paradise is a gem of a book. Using a well-known aspect of colonial Colombia’s export economy, emerald mining, Kris Lane explains the dynamics of early modern global commerce and consumer culture. He tracks the stones from their mining in New Granada to their exchange in the polyglot Atlantic economy to their acquisition by Asian nobility from Syria to India and so tells a fascinating story of an often fetishized commodity. This allows him to deftly illustrate significant continuities between the era of the gunpowder empires and the twenty-first century, including global supply-chain management, exploited and enslaved labor that facilitate evolving patterns of elite consumption, the intersection of various trading networks that simultaneously complicate and enable worldwide exchange, and the internationalization of cultural tastes and preferences.

To be sure, emeralds from the famous mines of Muzo quickly came to be esteemed by sixteenth-century European political...

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