Stoned

Aja Raden

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062334718
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

As entertaining as it is incisive, Stoned is a raucous journey through the history of human desire for what is rare, and therefore precious.

What makes a stone a jewel? What makes a jewel priceless? And why do we covet beautiful things? In this brilliant account of how eight jewels shaped the course of history, jeweler and scientist Aja Raden tells an original and often startling story about our unshakeable addiction to beauty and the darker side of human desire.

What moves the world is what moves each of us: desire. Jewelry—which has long served as a stand-in for wealth and power, glamor and success—has birthed cultural movements, launched political dynasties, and started wars. Masterfully weaving together pop science and history, Stoned breaks history into three categories—Want, Take, and Have—and explains what the diamond on your finger has to do with the GI Bill, why green-tinted jewelry has been exalted by so many cultures, why the glass beads that bought Manhattan for the Dutch were initially considered a fair trade, and how the French Revolution started over a coveted necklace.

Studded with lively personalities and fascinating details, Stoned tells the remarkable story of our abiding desire for the rare and extraordinary.

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PART I

WANT

DESIRE, DELUSION, AND THE SCARCITY EFFECT

What’s a stone worth? Well, it depends on the stone, obviously.

The real question is: What are our criteria for measuring?

How do we gauge a stone’s value? By its beauty? It’s certainly a factor, but only sometimes. Besides, it leads us right back to the question of criteria: How do we accurately judge a stone’s beauty? Beauty is important, but terribly subjective.

Size matters, but only once absolute value has been established. A large ruby is worth more than a small ruby. But then, a small ruby is worth more than an enormous marble floor, so size certainly isn’t definitive. The same holds true for quality: A flawless quartz is still just, well . . . quartz.

So what’s a stone worth? What makes a stone a jewel? What makes a jewel priceless?

The answer can, perhaps unsurprisingly, be found in a more general examination of the fluctuating value of physical resources like corn, barley, rice, and crude oil. What makes the value of these resources skyrocket? Scarcity. And what makes their value plummet? Oversaturation—when the supply of the resource outpaces the demand.

The same is true for a stone. Ultimately, it’s not beauty that determines its value—nor is it size or quality, though each of these factors is important.^* It is a question of rarity. It’s the extremes one must go to to obtain a stone. It’s that heady feeling that you have something no one else—or very few other people—have.

The problem with quartz is that it’s just so common. Value comes from perceived scarcity, and the reverse is also true. As soon as a thing becomes too accessible, it loses its luster. After all, if you could buy one, a moon rock (as opposed to their dime-a-dozen cousins, meteorites) would cost a great deal more than a diamond. Evidently, a large part of what makes a stone a jewel, let alone what makes us want it, is just how hard it is to get.

This section is about the very real imaginary value of jewels. Think that the phrase real imagined value is a paradox? Think again. How valuable something is depends in large part, if not entirely, on how valuable (i.e., rare) we perceive it to be—as history has shown us again and again. Each of the accounts in these first three chapters examines how we determine, create, and sometimes imagine value, and how our collective story has been shaped by those valuations.

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1

KEEP THE CHANGE

The Beads That Bought Manhattan

(1626)

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, “Ours.”

—VINE DELORIA JR.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

—PROVERB

In the Age of Exploration—which could just as easily have been known as the Age of Exploitation—Europe was expanding its knowledge of the world. And it was doing so through unapologetic conquest. What began as a simple race to India’s and Asia’s gem and spice markets rapidly evolved into a competition to own the world.

The Portuguese employed brute force to lay claim to new land, and the Spanish Conquistadors declared that they were divinely chosen to rule the world. The British felt no need to justify their conquests at all. But the Dutch, perhaps the strangest exploiters of all, liked to shop for countries. And in 1626, a Dutchman named Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians, an eastern branch of the Delaware Nation, for the bargain price of twenty-four dollars’ worth of glass beads and trinkets.

The story of the purchase of Manhattan is one of the most contentious and oft-disputed stories in American history. That modest sale has gone down as the biggest swindle ever perpetrated. The fabled exchange has been dissected and reexamined with the weak hope of proving it a myth. Some people just dismiss the event out of hand, claiming it’s apocryphal—that the infamous exchange never took place at all. The deal seems so unfair, some parties have even suggested that the island be returned to the “original” owners.

But what may be the most surprising fact about the whole transaction is that in 1626, and for a long time afterward, both parties were very happy with it.

Hello Paleface

In May of 1626 Peter Minuit was working for the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, which translates roughly as the Dutch East India Company. From now on, we’ll just call it the VOC for short. Minuit was authorized by his superiors at the VOC to buy a large and secure tract of land for the safety and consolidation of Dutch colonists.

He wasn’t the first Dutchman to explore the New World. Minuit wasn’t even the first governor of the New Netherlands empowered by the VOC to buy a country. He replaced a man named Willem Verhulst, who was an embezzler and who was unpopular with the Dutch colonists in his charge. Far worse, by VOC standards, he was an incompetent businessman. He couldn’t strike a deal with the Delaware Indians, as he’d been commissioned to do.

All VOC agents (and by extension, Dutch colonists) were under explicit orders to be “civil and respectful” in their dealings with any and all “Indians,” primarily because the New World was very much a business venture to the Dutch and there’s no profit in alienating the people you have to work with.^*

When Verhulst, who was alienating pretty much everyone, was summarily sent back to Amsterdam in disgrace on September 23, 1626, Peter Minuit immediately replaced him as governor. Minuit wasted no time buying what became New Amsterdam Island in May of 1626. Then Minuit and five men made essentially the same deal with the Carnarsee tribe for what we now know as Staten Island. And that deed of sale still exists in Amsterdam. So much for apocryphal.

When Minuit approached a group of inhabitants^* on New Amsterdam, what we now call Manhattan Island, he did so with every intention of purchasing the land for a fair price, or at least one that was agreed upon as fair by any and all of the inhabitants he found living there.

And yet on May 4, 1626, the island of Manhattan was sold to the VOC by “the local inhabitants thereof” for sixty guilders’ (famously calculated at about twenty-four dollars’) worth of beads, buttons, and trinkets.

Crazy, right? Somebody clearly got worked.

Or did they? According to Native American authority Professor Raymond Fogelson of the University of Chicago, the deal definitely went down and most certainly involved beads. But the Lenape Indians with whom Minuit negotiated were most likely under the impression that they were just selling the right to live on the island, or use its resources, as they themselves did—not the right to own the land itself forever, much less the right to prevent other people from using it. When he and I spoke on this subject, he agreed that at the time the sale was made, the Lenape certainly knew they were making a sale, and more important, were perfectly satisfied with the price.

This leaves us with the a lingering and disconcerting question: Why would the Lenape Indians, being of sound mind and equal intelligence, have sold anything, even the use of an island, for some glass beads and buttons?

There are many possible answers, but the most obvious is also the simplest: Value is relative. If Minuit had presented the Lenape Indians with a sack full of diamonds, no one would question the merit of the transaction. Because glass beads are even less valuable to us than they were to the Dutch, we assume the Indians got taken. But overabundance always breeds contempt—and if it weren’t for their value on an international scale, locals in Myanmar today might dismiss their own abundant rubies the same way we do glass beads.

Gemstones are, in fact, just colorful gravel. They’re just rocks that we’ve given special names. True jewels are things that are beautiful and scarce. We want them because few others can possess them. We want them even more if they are from some very faraway, exotic place. Their value is, and always has been, 90 percent imaginary.

The Economics of Desire

Imaginary value is a tricky thing; it has a very real way of becoming very real. Anyone familiar with the tulipomania of the 1630s knows that a little hype goes a long way, and can easily turn a pretty bauble into an economic bubble.

Tulipomania is the name given to a strange phenomenon that took the Netherlands by storm in the 1630s and destroyed the entire Dutch economy within a single week. And the blowback it caused was in no way imaginary.

Although tulips are deeply associated with Holland (for reasons about to become apparent), the flowers aren’t indigenous to Europe. Tulips come from the sexy and exotic Near East—Turkey to be exact. They weren’t even introduced to Europe until 1559. For about a decade, a grassroots interest in the flowers spread very slowly. But their popularity gradually increased, especially among the wealthy and competitive, and the market for tulip bulbs expanded, the way markets for novel and beautiful things tend to do.

Tulips made their way across all of Western Europe by 1600, arriving in England for the first time that year. For the next thirty years, the popularity of tulips grew rapidly. But in the three months between February and May 1637, the phenomenon hit a tipping point, and tulips created the first recorded economic bubble in history.^*

By 1630, all wealthy people had tulip collections. It was the thing to own. In 1630 a wealthy Dutch person without at least a modest tulip garden would likely be socially shunned. As the value of tulips increased, the necessity of owning tulips to maintain your social standing also increased. Prices skyrocketed, and bulbs were traded for staggering sums. In the final several years leading up to 1637, the mania for tulips had spread to the middle classes, even though within a few years a single bulb cost more than a modest house.^* Owning at least one tulip plant—like the diamonds of today—was evidence that you belonged to the right class, even if you really couldn’t afford one. By late 1636, at the height of the frenzy, the middle and lower classes were selling their homes and farmland to buy a single bulb. Like contemporary house flippers, they believed the bulb’s value was real, and that it could only continue to go up.

The most expensive tulip bulb ever sold was a Semper Augustus, a pretty red and white flower, sold for the equivalent of twelve acres of prime building land. Ultimately, by the fevered peak of February 1636, tulip bulbs were exchanged at such dementedly inflated rates that a few people got rich, but most were leveraged up to their eyeballs in the tulip frenzy and had no idea that they were about to lose everything.

That same month, something shocking happened: People failed to show up at a small, invitation-only tulip auction in Haarlem. The very exclusive event was probably a bust because there was a simultaneous outbreak of the bubonic plague in the very same neighborhood as the auction.

Nevertheless, people panicked—about the tulips, not the Black Death. When that one auction failed to produce the expected crowds, everyone else began to doubt the desirability (and thus the monetary value) of the bulbs. That failed auction was the tiny catalyst that began the equivalent of a tulip stock-market crash.

People stopped buying and began to default on tulip contracts. Investors of every class were left homeless, holding nothing but suddenly worthless onionlike bulbs. People begged the Dutch government and the courts for help, but the situation was such a Ponzi mess, so complicated, that even The Hague was at a loss. Ultimately, the government declared tulip sales gambling debts and refused to be involved.

Within two months, half of Holland was destitute, and indifferent to the exorbitantly priced bulbs spread across Europe. ...