ANÁLISIS ENZIMÁTICO

boatmen, washers, sorters, and other members of the workforce. “The Pearl Fishers” offers a description of pearling in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and focuses on the ways in which the company-state and colonial government sought to discipline labor. Pearl diving is perhaps one of the most commented on features of the industry, and through contemporary travel writings, as well as numerous secondary historical and anthropological studies, we actually have some very rich material on the ins and outs of pearling, such as the make-up of the workforce, the tools and equipment used, and diving practices. Pulling from various archival records, this chapter tracks how, through the use of forced migration and violence to tax inducements and new diving technologies, the governments of Madras and Ceylon, often with the assistance of local community authorities and mercantile elites, sought to reorganize traditional structures and practices of skilled and unskilled labor at the pearl fishery, albeit with mixed results.

The dissertation then takes up the important themes of markets and marketplaces in Chapter 2. “The Great Pearl Fishery Bazaar” critically examines the formation and dynamics of markets and marketplaces that coalesced around pearl fishery compounds near Tuticorin, Punnaikayal, Kilakkarai, and elsewhere on the southeastern coast of India and places like Arippu, Kondachi, and Chilaw on the western coast of Sri Lanka.

Attempts to establish regular marketplaces represented efforts by the company-state and colonial state to break-up the traditional circulation patterns of humans, capital, and goods within the Gulf of Mannar during the pearling season. Whereas the pearl fishery was a seasonal event that floated from year to year, Madras and Colombo tried to fix the location of the pearl fishery to single spots, which they believed would increase both security and profitability. From infrastructure projects such as the construction of

permanent buildings to the manipulation of currency standards and money markets, British administrations on both sides of the Gulf tried to reengineer the marketplaces of the pearl fishery through a contradictory set of political economic ideologies and practices.

From the market of the fishery the dissertation turns to the business worlds of pearl merchants. Chapter 3— “The Business World is Mine Oysters”—focuses on the relationships between merchants and states during and after the rent of the pearl fishery. The chapter addresses efforts by Madras and Ceylon to shape the business practices and organization of merchants engaged in the pearl trade. After a general description and overview of the mercantile organization of the pearl trade, Chapter 3 then profiles four commercial magnates that rented the pearl fishery from the Madras government in the early nineteenth century. Each “case study” sheds light on certain aspects of the mercantile cultures and practices of pearl traders.

Chapter 4— “The Most Sovereign Commodity”—explores the historical

relationships between the pearl fisheries and politics. This chapter looks at how efforts by the British East India Company and, after 1802, the colonial state of British Ceylon, to establish control over the human and natural resources of Mannar dovetailed with questions about sovereignty. Chapter 4 focuses on disputes over rights, authority, and privileges claimed by local courts and temples. Claims to tax-free boats and shares of the revenue by Indian states and religious institutions were not only concerned with the material benefits derived from the industry but also motivated by the need to have “traditional” rights and honors recognized by the Company Raj and British Ceylon. During the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both Madras and

Ceylon sought to erode the preexisting economy of gifts and honors that undergirded the pearl fishery. In some cases, the Company and Crown perpetuated the strategies and practices employed by their Dutch predecessors, while in other instances a more complete reordering of the landscape was desired.

Chapter 5 focuses on corruption. “Foul Oysters” describes and analyzes a series frauds and defalcations investigated by the East India Company around the turn of the nineteenth century. When the Company assumed managerial control over the pearling industry from the Dutch VOC in 1796, officials in Madras and Colombo immediately turned their attention to management of the industry, hoping to use it as a source of revenue to help offset heavy military expenditures accrued during the Napoleonic Wars and shore up its legitimacy over the Gulf of Mannar region. The East India Company organized four consecutive fisheries between 1796-1799, which, according to Company officials in Madras, Colombo, and London, were all racked by fraud and corruption. Frederic North, then the highest ranking Company official on Ceylon, launched a massive investigation into the conduct of the commissioners. A close reading of the results of this investigation reveals that corruption functioned as an instrumental category through which to justify the presence of the East India Company in India and Ceylon. Not only did the investigation address the misconduct of government officials but it also probed the inner workings of the pearl fishery. The investigation quickly turned into a dragnet that gave the Company Raj the latest information about its newest—and potentially most lucrative—source of revenue.

This dissertation seeks to examine the extent to which the pearl fishery was not only a source of jewels and revenue for the Company and Crown, but also functioned as a

site through which governmental power flowed and imperial sovereignty established. Through an examination of government-sponsored engagements with the people and institutions that constituted the industry, this dissertation considers the history of pearling in the wider context of modern colonial governance, statecraft, and imperialism. It also explores the interstitial spaces between success and failure and finds that official discourse and policy intended to bring about major change to the industry were much smaller and less dramatic than intended. The enthusiasm with which Company and

Crown officials turned to the administration of the pearl fishery of Mannar also belies any impressions that the British sleepwalked into empire. The depth of engagement by British officials with the people, institutions, and environment reflected the significance of the pearling industry in wider political and economic terrain of South India and Sri Lanka. At the precise moment when the East India Company consolidated its position in southern India, and the British state founded Ceylon as a formal colony of the Crown,

administrators on both sides of Mannar turned their attention to the people and marine environment that produced a tiny luminous gem.

Humans throughout history have lived side-by-side with animals yet our

interpretations of the past seldom address relationships between us and other members of the animal kingdom.162 Oysters are modest creatures and have not received the same level

of attention as magnificent beasts and friendly companions. A diverse group of bivalve mollusks, some oysters are prized for their culinary qualities while others are celebrated

162 _{For Ottoman Egypt, see Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: University of Oxford}

Press, 2014. For India, see Julie Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). For Southeast Asia, see Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press 2001); Terenjit Sevea, “Pawangs on the Malay Frontier: Miraculous Intermediaries of Rice, Ore, Beasts and Guns,” PhD diss., University of California, 2013.

for their non-edible products, such as pearls and mother-of-pearl shells. One of the central aims of this dissertation is to not only analyze the techniques and applications of governmental power at the pearl fishery but to also pay homage to the humble pearl oyster. To this end, the discussion below tries to impart historical agency to the pearl oyster, to see it more than a producer of gems and shells but a live actor in a complex formed by interactions between humans and the environment.163 _{For thousands of years,}

pearls—formed by the secretion of nacre by mollusks to coat and neutralize foreign irritants like stones and sand—were largely harvested in the wilds of marine and fresh- water environments. Divers in pearling centers across the globe plunged below the

water’s surface, fighting against the elements and the limits of their own bodies, in search of a tiny, valuable, and naturally occurring jewel. For Rayo and Marana, the world they inhabited was far different, a world in which the only way of procuring pearls was from nature. This dissertation explores a slice of that bygone world.

163 _{Timothy Mitchell, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity}

Table 1

Locations of Pearl Fishery and Statements of Revenue, Ceylon, 1796-1837

Year Location Organizing Body Revenue Revenue (£)

1796 Arippu East India Company PNP 93,826 31,000

1797 Arippu East India Company P 321,702 106,000

1798 Arippu East India Company P 368,019 122,673

1799 Arippu East India Company SP 62,185.36.57 23,319.7.6

1801 Kondachi East India Company SP 32,054.31.79 12,020.5.0

1803 Chilaw British Ceylon PNP 40,638.14.3 12,191.8.0

1804 Arippu British Ceylon PNP 184,348.15.0 55,304.8.0

1806 Arippu British Ceylon RD 374,481.4.2 28,086.2.0

1808 Arippu British Ceylon PNP 236,443 57,863.0.8

1809 Arippu British Ceylon PNP 71,413.49.40 18,696.12.11

1814 Arippu British Ceylon RD 1,160,609.4.2 87,045.10.6

1815 Chilaw British Ceylon RD 4,858.0.3 364.7.1

1816 Arippu British Ceylon RD 4,085.10.2 306.8.9

1820 Arippu British Ceylon RD 29,233.6.1 2,192.10.3

1828 Arippu British Ceylon MR 311,956.2.1 31,195.12.3

1829 Arippu British Ceylon MR 397,265.12.3 39,726.11.6

1830 Arippu British Ceylon MR 243,690.8.8 24,369.1.0

1831 Arippu British Ceylon MR 317,464.1.6 31,746.8.1

1832 Karaitivu British Ceylon -- 3,869.18.4

1833 Arippu British Ceylon -- 25,043.10.0

1835 Arippu British Ceylon -- 38,247.0.9

1836 Arippu British Ceylon -- 23,535.15.9

1837 Arippu British Ceylon -- 9,397.15.5

Sources: James Steuart, An Account of the Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon (Cotta: Church Mission Press, 1843), 33-36; C. R. de Silva, “The Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon, 1796-1837,” Ceylon Literary Register 2, no. 10 (1932): 433-442. Abbreviations: Porto Novo Pagodas (PNP); Pagodas (P); Star Pagodas (SP); Rix Dollars (RD); Madras Rupees (MR).

Table 2

Locations of Pearl Fishery and Modes of Management, Madras, 1784-1830

Year Location Organizing Body Mode of Management

1784 Tuticorin East India Company Amani

1787 Tuticorin East India Company Amani

1792 Tuticorin East India Company Rent/Amani

1800 Tuticorin East India Company Rent

1805 Tuticorin East India Company Rent

1807 Tuticorin East India Company Rent

1810 Tuticorin East India Company Rent

1815 Tiruchendur East India Company Rent

1818 Punnaikayal East India Company Amani

1822 Tuticorin East India Company Rent

1828 Tuticorin/Punnaikayal East India Company Amani

CHAPTER 1: THE PEARL FISHERS

LABOR

In “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (1818), the English poet John Keats invokes the brutal treatment of divers at the pearl fishery of Ceylon. Adapted from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a fourteenth-century Italian text, Keats’s poem narrates the tragic story of a wealthy English maiden named Isabella. She endears herself to Lorenzo, a man of humble origins, kindling a forbidden love that sets in motion a series of unfortunate and ultimately tragic events. Isabella’s set of vicious and controlling brothers, who intend to marry her to a more distinguished suitor to satisfy their upwardly mobile ambitions, murder the object of her affection. Lorenzo’s ghost then visits Isabella in a lucid dream to reveal the true identity of his killers. She exhumes her lover’s body and buries his head in a basil pot, sullenly caring for the plant and mourning her loss. In this romantic epic, Keats finds literary parallels between the grisly act of Isabella’s brothers and their business exploits, which spanned the “torched mines and noisy factories” of

industrializing England to the distant edges of the nation’s overseas empire. In addition to investments in the domestic economy, the brothers reaped great rewards from speculating in the new-found British colony of Ceylon, particularly through a stake in the pearl fishery. But their material gains in the colony came at the expense of the health and safety of poor anonymous pearl divers. Keats wrote, “For them the Ceylon diver held his breath/And went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death.”

pearl fishery captivated the imaginations of scholars, artists, and travelers who either witnessed pearling operations or read secondhand accounts.164 Indeed, diving is perhaps

the most commented on feature of the pearling industry yet such attention over nearly two millennia, from literary sagas and opera librettos to lavish travelogues and fiery political tracts, has by and large invested the lives and labor of the workforce with an idealized, unchanging quality.165 _{For instance, the classic three-act opera Les Pêcheurs de}

Perles (1863) by French composer George Bizet is a romanticized tale about tragic love and friendship set in fictionalized ancient Ceylon village, a place far away from the stages and salons of nineteenth-century Paris. American composer Les Baxter and his band released a song titled “Pearls of Ceylon” on the album Ports of Pleasure (1957). In the literary realm, travel accounts by globetrotting luminaries such as Marco Polo became cornerstones of subsequent understandings and interpretations of the life and work of pearl divers. His descriptions of pearling in the Gulf of Mannar bear a striking

resemblance to those of Dutch and British officials during the early modern and modern periods: “The pearl-fishers take their vessels, great and small, and proceed into this gulf, where they stop from the beginning of April till the middle of May.”166 _Travelers’

descriptions of pearling further reverberated through writings by government officials, naturalists, and travelers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. George Turnour, East India Company officer and superintendent of the 1799 pearl fishery at Arippu, for instance, submitted a report on the social and economic conditions of the island to his supervisor, Governor Frederick North, in which Turnour wrote that diving was “prescribed by ancient usage, from which these people cannot be prevailed upon to

164 _{Subrahmanyam, “Noble Harvest from the Sea,” 137.} 165 _{Subrahmanyam, “Noble Harvest from the Sea.”} 166 _{Donkin, Beyond Price, 158.}

depart, by any consideration whatever. No degree of richness of the Banks, or value of the Pearls, would induce the Pilot & Arapannars to deviate one Iota from what their Fathers, did before them.”167 A similar discourse on the pearl diver and his work

continued into the twentieth century. George Kunz, for example, a scholar of gems and precious jewels, wrote in the early twentieth century, “A remarkable instance of

immutability of custom in the Orient is found in the fact that, except in a few minor particulars, accounts written more than three centuries ago, could serve as a description of the methods of the fisheries in recent years.”168 Sea crafts and other tools used at the

pearl fishery received the same treatment.169 James Steuart, for example, commented on

the primitive design of the boats that made up the pearling fleets: “Indeed, when the rude state of their craft and their awkward management are considered, it would appear, that no improvement could have taken place in the people, since the days when the pearls of Cleopatra's earrings were landed at Aripo.”170 From poems and operas to travelogues and

government reports, various writings about pearling over many centuries imbued representations of the lives, labor, and leisure of the industry’s workforce with an idealized and romantic quality.

This chapter seeks to historically contextualize labor at the pearl fishery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The practice and process of diving for pearls in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mannar became the objects of governmental reform and improvement during the early years of British management. When British

167 _{BL, IOR, F, 4, 129, 2401, 132 (emphasis in original).} 168 _{Kunz, The Book of the Pearl, 103.}

169 _{James Hornell, The Origins and Ethnological Significance of Indian Boat Designs (Calcutta: Asiatic}

Society of Bengal, 1920); Hornell, Fishing in Many Waters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).

officers assumed direct managerial control over the human and natural resources of the pearl fishery at the close of the eighteenth century, they encountered a complex system of rights, institutions, and practices that had evolved through centuries of engagement with both local and foreign political powers. Far from an antediluvian pastime, many of the problems identified by British officials related to labor had also been singled out by their European predecessors and continued to trouble even the most ardent reformers. For instance, smuggling and poaching were recurring themes in writings by Dutch officials, a topic that also preoccupied British officials on both sides of the Gulf of Mannar. As discussed in the introduction, as the strands of Pax Britannica came together in the late eighteenth century, a major intellectual shift occurred in the realm of economic thought, with classical liberalism displacing mercantilism as the preferred framework of political economy. The Company and Crown governments in turn brought new ideas to bear on the management and governance of people and oysters, strategies and techniques that sought to not only increase profits and productivity by attenuating the financial and physical hazards of pearling, but also fundamentally reshape the social, economic, and political foundations of the industry. From armed vessels at sea and police forces on shore, to tax inducements and technological innovations, government officials, as well as native mercantile elites, meant to interrupt “traditional” labor relations and organization. Efforts by the company-state and colonial state to deploy modern forms of governmental power through the management of pearling labor was, of course, not isolated to this particular industry, as scholars such as economic historian Prasannan Parthasarathi have demonstrated in the case of weavers in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-

century Madras.171 _{During the course of the early nineteenth century, the sway of liberal}

utilitarianism and free market ideologies sought to break-up the traditional arrangements and customary rights of laborers and introduce market-based reforms, such as monetary wages and open labor markets. Archival documents and contemporary travel accounts are replete with references to the strategies and tactics employed by the governments of Madras and Ceylon and local pearl merchants to discipline labor at the pearl fishery. Yet many preexisting structures and conditions of labor at the pearl fishery, such as diving technologies, labor relations, migratory patterns, and disciplinary regimes persisted through the early colonial period without being completely transformed as some administrators had imagined.

The discussion below not only provides a description of the pearling process from start to finish but also tracks the impact of company-state and colonial state rule on the lives and work of pearl divers and other laboring groups whose toils were integral to the overall functioning of the industry. The first section— “A Pearling Life”—describes the process by which pearls were harvested from the Gulf of Mannar. It begins with a short