Pearls, Globalization, and the African Diaspora in the Arabian Gulf in the Age of Empire

In the late nineteenth century, the experienced a massive expansion of its leading industry, pearling.  Although pearls from the Gulf had circulated regionally to markets in and the for centuries, in the late nineteenth century a global pearl craze ignited a surge in pearl production that transformed the Gulf economy.  As demand for pearls in Europe and North America soared, the value of pearl exports from – the Gulf’s primary export center—increased more than eight times in the twenty years between 1885 and 1905, and then nearly doubled again in the following ten years.  Many of the divers who made this transformation in production possible were African or of African descent and many were slaves.  Enslaved Africans accounted for a third or a half of the annual diving crews, and the pearl boom accompanied a growth in the African Diaspora in the Gulf.  By the close of the nineteenth century, slave ships from carried an overwhelming majority of young males.  The British Empire, which attempted to control of the Gulf littoral, faced a dilemma of how to address the issue of slavery when much of the region’s economy depended on slave labor, and some of the countries that were the biggest consumers of Gulf pearls were the most vocally opposed to slave labor.  Then, just as suddenly as the pearl boom emerged, it collapsed in the face of Japanese cultured pearls, and many enslaved divers were cast out to fend for themselves.  Drawing on archival research in the and field research in the Gulf, this paper examines the global forces that led to the rise and demise of the Gulf’s pearl boom between the 1880s and 1920s and the role of African divers and their families in the Gulf economy.