gems, gemology, gem trade, business, Asia, diamond, emerald, sapphire, Ceylon, Myanmar, pearls, Goa, Borneo, Indonesia, India

It is comparatively recently that historical scholarship has begun to escape from the Eurocentric assumption that the first global economic system was ‘invented’ by European seafarers in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This latter phenomenon, so brilliantly described by Immanuel Wallerstein,1 we now begin to see rather as a European take over of the run-down remains of an older global trading system, in which Europe was peripheral, and in which a series of precociously-developed urban complexes exchanged a highly selective range of goods through a network of trade which was intricate, far-flung and often indirect. This global system peaked in the thirteenth century, with the Islamic Middle East as its heart, and China as its most advanced participant.2 Medieval Europe’s knowledge of quite important parts of the system was vague. If we glance at Mandeville’s Travels, which was originally written in French, possibly at Liège around 1357, not, of course, by its fictitious English author, but certainly by someone who had never left Europe, we have, in effect, a compilation of other men’s accounts of the Middle East and Asia. They are quite good on the Middle East, where Crusader and Armenian sources were available, and not totally ill-informed about central Asia and China thanks to the accounts of Franciscan missionaries like Odoric of Pordenone. ‘Mandeville’ says, quite correctly, that Genoese and Venetian merchants visited Cathay. On India he is woefully ignorant, more than usually inclined to fable and error, but clear that it is from ‘Ind’ that men obtain ‘the good diamonds.