In the late nineteenth century, thousands of men and boys across the northern rim of the Indian Ocean dove daily to the ocean floor in search of pearl-bearing oysters. It was the height of the so-called global pearl boom, driven by enormous demand for pearls in Europe and North America. Far removed from the showrooms of New York, London, and Paris, these divers drew on skills and expertise handed down across generations to conduct the dangerous work of hauling oysters up from the warm shallows. But they also faced a new challenge: the rise of British power in the Indian Ocean. In this talk, I examine the transformations wrought by colonial extraction across the three primary sites that fed the pearl boom between 1850 and 1930: the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar near Sri Lanka, and the Mergui Archipelago in Myanmar, treating in particular the nature of, and relationships between, colonial and vernacular knowledge of the undersea.

Tamara Fernando is an environmental and labor historian of the modern Indian Ocean world. She is presently an assistant professor in the history of the global south at SUNY Stony Brook, New York. Her publications have appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History of Science and Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim.