Pearl Trade History
Pearl Trade History
From Persian Gulf natural-pearl fisheries to the cultured revolution and beyond
The history of the pearl trade is the history of a gem moving from extreme rarity to global accessibility — and back again, to a market in which natural pearls are once more among the rarest gems on offer. For most of recorded history pearl was the most valuable jewel in the Western and Indian Ocean worlds. The natural-pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Mannar supplied a trade that ran from antiquity through the early twentieth century, and the collapse of those fisheries in the 1930s coincided with the commercial maturation of cultured pearl production in Japan. Cultured pearls then democratised access; in doing so they also rendered surviving natural pearls scarce in a way no human intervention could undo.
The natural-pearl world to 1900
The Persian Gulf fishery — operating off Bahrain, the Trucial Coast, and the Iranian shore — was the dominant source of natural pearls for the entire pre-modern Western and Indian Ocean trade. Greek, Roman, Persian, Arab, and later Mughal and Ottoman demand was supplied by Gulf divers working seasonal voyages from June through September, holding their breath at depths of fifteen to thirty metres to harvest Pinctada radiata oysters by hand. The Gulf of Mannar fishery between Sri Lanka and southern India ran in parallel, supplying both regional Indian demand and the export trade.
The Red Sea, the Sulu Sea, the Mergui Archipelago, the rivers of Scotland, the freshwater systems of central Europe, and the lakes of North America all supplied secondary pearl-producing fisheries, but none approached the volume or fame of the Gulf and Mannar operations. By the late nineteenth century the Gulf fishery employed tens of thousands of men in hundreds of dhows, and Bahrain was a sufficiently wealthy pearl-trading entrepôt that its tax revenues underwrote the early development of regional infrastructure.
Pearl pricing in the late nineteenth century reflected absolute rarity. A single fine round natural pearl of substantial weight could cost as much as a Manhattan brownstone — Cartier's New York shop on Fifth Avenue was famously bought in 1916 in exchange for a double pearl strand worth one million dollars at the time, equivalent to many times that figure in present-day terms.
The Mikimoto revolution
Kokichi Mikimoto, the son of an udon shop owner in Toba, Japan, began experimenting with cultured pearl production in the 1880s. By 1893 he had produced the first hemispherical cultured pearl; in 1916 a workable round-pearl culture protocol was patented, drawing on parallel work by Tokichi Nishikawa and Tatsuhei Mise. By the 1920s Mikimoto was producing commercial volumes of round Akoya cultured pearls, and in 1927 he opened a flagship shop on Fifth Avenue in New York that brought cultured pearls to the heart of the Western luxury market.
The natural-pearl trade fought back. London and Paris dealers initially refused to recognise cultured pearls as genuine, and a series of court cases through the 1920s and 1930s established the trade-name conventions still in use — cultured pearls had to be disclosed, but they were legitimately pearls.
The collapse of the Gulf fishery
The Persian Gulf fishery began to decline in the late 1920s under the combined pressures of cultured-pearl competition, the global Great Depression, and the discovery of oil in the Gulf states which redirected labour and capital. By the late 1930s the fishery had collapsed in commercial terms; Bahrain's pearl economy never recovered, though small-scale fishing for natural pearls continued informally. Pollution and overfishing in the postwar decades finished what economic competition began.
The cultured era
From the 1950s onward the cultured-pearl industry expanded geographically. Tahitian black-pearl culture in French Polynesia using Pinctada margaritifera began commercially in the 1960s. Australian and Philippine South Sea white and golden pearl culture using Pinctada maxima matured through the 1970s and 1980s. Chinese freshwater pearl production using Hyriopsis mussels expanded explosively from the 1990s, eventually displacing Japanese Akoya as the volume leader. Today the cultured-pearl industry produces well over 99 percent of pearls in trade, with natural-pearl supply confined to occasional finds in artisanal fishing and to the resale of older inventory.
Natural pearls today
The market for surviving natural pearls is a specialty trade dominated by auction houses, by fine-jewellery dealers in London, Geneva, and the Gulf, and by Indian and Gulf private buyers reconstituting historical collections. Authenticated natural pearls of substantial size and matched colour command prices that occasionally exceed $1 million per strand at auction. Bahrain, having retained the cultural memory of the Gulf fishery, has positioned itself as a centre for natural-pearl certification, and the BIGN (Bahrain Institute for Pearls and Gemstones) certificate is one of the documents most respected in the trade.