Domestication

After surveying early-modern gold extraction and export from the New World, this chapter discusses the contrasts Britons developed between their own and Iberia’s encounters with gold during the three centuries after the Conquest, as well as their relief at never being subjected to the temptation of possessing gold-bearing colonies. Such efforts paralleled the way they thought about the many other commodities they imported from exotic climes. In all these cases, a process of domestication converted a barbaric substance into a signifier of civilization. Throughout the century after 1750, Britons tirelessly debated the boundaries between gold’s productive, unproductive, and corrosive uses, all the while pondering what exactly rendered it so valuable.