Kris Lane. Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010. Pp. xiv, 280. $40.00

Commodity histories have long since proved their potential to enrich understanding of the material world. Historians have traced the production, distribution, and consumption of products as diverse as silver, sugar, cod, cotton, cacao, coffee, and petroleum. Emeralds cannot claim a significance equal to these commodities, nor even to other gems and jewels such as diamonds, jade, or pearls. Nevertheless, Kris Lane devotes an engaging and highly readable study to emeralds, which he endows with unusual significance through his insightful observations on the cultural as well as material history of the early modern world.

Lane is principally a historian of Latin America, but he ranges broadly throughout much of the early modern world in this book, and in doing so he associates emeralds with the larger patterns of what he terms “early modern globalization” (p. 6). Most emeralds of early modern...