A Distant Reading of Legal Dissertations from German Universities in the Seventeenth Century

Scholars and students at early modern European universities wrote hundreds of thousands of dissertations. One reason why these sources have long been neglected is that they defy any individual's capacity for close reading. This article adopts a digital distant reading approach to uncover long-term trends in the titles of over 20,000 legal dissertations written at German universities during the seventeenth century. Providing a pathway into a forbidding archive, the article highlights the dissertations’ interest for the history of jurisprudence and its receptiveness to social change, the history of universities and academic publishing, baroque rhetoric, and cultural, political, and economic history. The titles reveal a markedly declining interest in civil law, with topical issues like debt and marriage eluding this trend. Initially, dissertations were often written in dialogic form, but these were gradually supplanted by more single-voiced and monographic texts. Jurists increasingly preferred sharply delineated, diverse, and often original subjects, writing about anything from somnambulism to pearl fishing. The way in which seventeenth-century jurists expanded the scope of their writing reflects broader revaluations of scholarly curiosity and baroque polyhistorism as well as the heightened stature of an epistemic community that interpreted ever more spheres of life through its own categories.

Agricultural Production in Qatar’s Hot Arid Climate

Agriculture has played an essential role in the provision of food and has been a major factor in overall economic development for societies around the world for millennia. In the past, agriculture in hot, arid countries like Qatar faced many challenges, the primary one being a dearth of water for irrigation. Historically this severely limited Qatar’s economic development, which was based largely on resource exploitation, pearl fishing, and only more recently, on the exploitation of its oil and gas reserves which subsequently has led to Qatar’s great wealth. This paper gives an overview of the recent evolution of Qatar’s agricultural sector and investigates future trends that tackle the challenges of its hot arid climate and the limited availability of agricultural resources. Specifically, the review analyses Qatar’s potential to develop a national food security strategy based on a significant expansion of food production in the country. We review recent policy actions implemented to address challenges in the food supply chain caused by a 3.5-year blockade imposed by the adjacent Arab Gulf States, discussing the renewed interest in the potential that an enhanced agricultural sector must provide some aspects of food security and the implications for policymakers that would logically ensue.

“A Few More or Less Make No Difference”

This chapter considers how pearls’ subjective beauty, their complex and mysterious origins, and their powerful association with mastery of the seas allowed them to remain a powerful heuristic device for the expression of ideas about mutability, worth, and the nature of different places and peoples around the world. As empires moved to objectify profit and regulate the role of subjects in new ways, pearls continued to serve as a useful index (elenco in Spanish, a word Pliny the Elder employed to denote an elongated pearl but that, by the early seventeenth century, had come to stand for the very impulse to order and compartmentalize that the jewel provoked) of peoples’ highly independent and contingent calculations of worth. Through a consideration of crown-sponsored pearl-fishing interventions in the Scottish Highlands and along Swedish rivers close to the city of Gothenburg, this chapter traces how pearls continued to facilitate the expression of distinct approaches to resource husbandry at scales personal and imperial. The chapter further explores the late-seventeenth-century market for pearls in London and the jewel’s unstable political and economic value as expressed in private correspondence as well as in portraits of women and enslaved bodies whose value was considered impermanent and for purchase..

“Even The Black Women Wear Strands of Pearls”

This chapter considers the enduring significance of the Caribbean pearl-fishing settlements in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the wake of a devastating tsunami in 1541, the Pearl Coast never again reached the pearl-producing heights of the 1520s and 1530s, yet its complex political economy demanded constant crown attention and recognition of the centrality of black pearl divers to the region’s identity, as evidenced by the royal coat of arms granted to Margarita Island in 1600. This era coincided with the political merger of Portugal and Spain, a contentious political union with profound repercussions for the rules governing the movement of people and products within and beyond Iberian realms. Pearls and pearl fishing, meanwhile, continued to evoke maritime wealth and power beyond Spain, explored in art by painters charged with conveying the wonders of a world in transformation. As royal chroniclers reflected on the early history of the American pearl fisheries with an eye to assessing the errors and accomplishments of the past, crown officials sought to improve their management of these unruly settlements. Meanwhile, enslaved laborers in Venezuela and diplomats in England and Italy continued to use pearls to navigate the changing parameters of their lives.

Pearls and a Political Ecology of Empire, 1498–1541

This chapter traces how the Caribbean fisheries were embedded in global Iberian merchant networks that spanned the Atlantic and stretched into the Indian Ocean and beyond, connecting traders, laborers, and religious missionaries from the Americas to Asia. In the first four decades of the Venezuelan pearl-fishing settlements’ existence (their most lucrative ones), residents put forth their vision of an emerging American political economy, one which had a living ecology at its heart. The expertise of Warao, Guaquerí, and Arawak communities profoundly shaped vernacular practices of wealth husbandry along the Pearl Coast. So, too, did the skills of enslaved West Africans and indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean basin, all of whom labored in increasing numbers and various capacities alongside the motley assortment of European who came to settle, trade, and conduct slave-raiding in the region.

Making “A Machine of Pearls” in the Seventeenth Century

This chapter considers the place of pearls and pearl fisheries in the context of Iberian crisis of the seventeenth century. As arbitristas, or experts, proposed all sorts of solutions intended to address Iberia’s financial and political woes, this zeitgeist of improvement shaped plans for, and reflections on, pearl fishing around the globe. These pearl-fishing proposals drew on a mixture of custom and innovation. As observers of pearl diving in the Caribbean continued to report horrific suffering alongside remarkably autonomous practices by enslaved workers, the Spanish crown supported proposals for Pacific coast fisheries that relied on diverse skilled crew as well as new diving technologies designed to render enslaved workers unnecessary. The chapter focuses on the Cardona Company voyages to California, which included black laborers as well as levantisco, or Levantine, divers and elaborate diving suits. The chapter also considers how the vexing yet appealing complexity of pearls and pearl-fishing settlements were reflected in a 1680 account of Sri Lankan pearl fishing written by Portuguese author João de Ribeiro and in the 1681 Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (the reissue of the body of laws) governing the Spanish Indies.

Pirates and pearls: Jikiri and the challenge to maritime security and American sovereignty in the Sulu Archipelago, 1907–1909

In 1908–1909, maritime commerce, fishing and traffic in the Sulu Archipelago in the southern Philippines almost came to a standstill due to a surge in piracy and coastal raids that challenged US colonial rule in the area. The leader of the outlaws was a renegade subject of the Sultan of Sulu, a Samal named Jikiri. Together with his followers, Jikiri was responsible for the murders of at least 40 people in numerous raids on small trading vessels, pearl fishers, coastal settlements and towns throughout the archipelago. In spite of the concerted efforts of the US Army, the Philippine Constabulary and private bounty hunters, Jikiri was able to avoid defeat for more than one and half years, before he was eventually killed in July 1909. His decision to take to piracy was triggered by the failure of the US authorities to pay compensation for the loss of the traditional claims that many families in the Sulu Archipelago had to the pearl beds of the region, as stipulated by a law on pearl fishing adopted in 1904. The law was in several respects disadvantageous to the native population of Sulu and this – together with the high-handed behaviour of the local officers in charge of the Sulu district from 1906 – fuelled widespread discontent with colonial rule and led several of the leading headmen of Sulu covertly to sympathize with, and protect, Jikiri and his followers. This sponsorship combined with the general reluctance of the population to cooperate with the US military explains why Jikiri was able to defy the vastly superior US forces for so long. American officers at the time tended to attribute the depredations to the allegedly piratical nature of the Sulus, but this article argues that the so-called ‘decay theory’, first proposed by Raffles a century earlier, is a more appropriate explanation of this surge in piracy.