4 - Oceanic Connections in the Mine: Gem Merchants and Labor between Madagascar and Sri Lanka in the Twenty-First Century

Scholars have used the lens of Indian Ocean World history to foreground Afro-Asian connection. These framings have traced material, spiritual, political, and labor connections between East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia, occasionally extending as far as Japan and the Indo-Pacific. This interconnected Indian Ocean world is thought to have been strangled on the eve of decolonization, as the era of nation states ruptured the unregulated movement of pilgrims, merchants, sailors, and traders. “Afro-Asia” replaced the Indian Ocean world as a frame for narrating world history. Despite its oceanic moniker, scholars have also asked us to read Indian Ocean history embedded in the bowels of the earth, several tens of meters underground. This paper asks how the changing contemporary networks of commerce, extraction and labor reflect in the 21^st c. gem mining industry between Madagascar and Sri Lanka, as Sri Lanka’s central gem mines are exhausted, and jewelers move their capital and operations to Madagascar. Gemstones including sapphires, emeralds, versions of chrysoberyl, from the island of Sri Lanka have a long history of trade across the Indian Ocean world. Within the last decade, however, as Lanka’s precious gemstones deposits are exhausted, traders are moving their operations across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, particularly to Madagascar. In this paper I consider longer oceanic networks of commerce and how they are increasingly transformed in the first decades of the 21^st c. I ask if oceanic history is still the right frame for new systems of extraction, labor, and environmental degradation.