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Seeing like the sea: the pearl fishery of Ceylon as a maritime assemblage, 1799–1925

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jules Skotnes-Brown .

This paper argues that the pearl fishery of colonial Ceylon, which has featured in key economic and state-centric analyses of imperialism in South Asia, may also be read as a multi-species assemblage where the non-human – sharks, molluscs and bluebottle flies, for instance – have new causal and agential power to shape emergent capitalist forms. Importantly, however, this consideration of the non-human above and below the waves of the sea also compels the parsing apart of the ‘human’, revealing a system of multiple, overlapping regimes of labour. Thus, contrary to the model of Raubwirtschaft [plunder economy], which homogenises and flattens both the natural world and those who inhabit it, the fishery represents a tiered and variegated system where overseers, divers, and indentured workers interacted with and produced the ocean and its maritime occupants in independent but intersecting ways.

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