Pearls for the Crown

Regular price €96.99
A01=Mónica Domínguez Torres
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Augustus the Strong
Author_Mónica Domínguez Torres
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black pearl divers
Caribbean
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=ACQB
Category=AGA
Colombia
construction of identiy of the early modern Iberian and Latin American world
COP=United States
Cosimo II de’ Medici
Cubagua Island
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Dresden
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Florence
Germany
Immaculate Conception
Italy
labor history
Language_English
Margarita Island
Native American pearl divers
Natural History
New World chronicles
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Pearl Coast
pearl fishing
pearls
Price_€50 to €100
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Riohacha
softlaunch
Spain
Toledo
trade
Venezuela

Product details

  • ISBN 9780271096810
  • Weight: 1043g
  • Dimensions: 203 x 254mm
  • Publication Date: 23 Apr 2024
  • Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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In the age of European expansion, pearls became potent symbols of imperial supremacy. Pearls for the Crown demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today.

When Christopher Columbus encountered pristine pearl beds in southern Caribbean waters in 1498, he procured the first source of New World wealth for the Spanish Crown, but he also established an alternative path to an industry that had remained outside European control for centuries. Centering her study on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry, Mónica Domínguez Torres examines the interplay of materiality, labor, race, and power that drove artistic production in the early modern period. Spanish colonizers exploited the expertise and forced labor of Native American and African workers to establish pearling centers along the coasts of South and Central America, disrupting the environmental and demographic dynamics of their overseas territories. Drawing from postcolonial theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism, Domínguez Torres demonstrates how, through use of the pearl, European courtly art articulated ideas about imperial expansion, European superiority, and control over nature, all of which played key roles in the political circles surrounding the Spanish Crown.

This highly anticipated interdisciplinary study will be welcomed by scholars of art history, the history of colonial Latin America, and ecocriticism in the context of the Spanish colonies.

Mónica Domínguez Torres is Professor of Art History with a joint appointment in Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Delaware.