Pearls, technology, and petroleum

We like to think that ours is a world where, for the first time, technological innovation in one corner of the globe can have repercussions many thousands of miles away.  Historians would beg to differ.  From The Prize:

“The local pearling trade had been Kuwait’s number-one industry and principal source of foreign earnings.  Whether or not he knew the name, Sheikh Ahmad [the owner of Kuwait at the time] had good reason to be intensely annoyed with a Japanese noodle vendor from Miye prefecture, one Kokichi Mikimoto, who had become obsessed with oysters and pearls and had devoted many difficult years to developing the technique for cultivating pearls artificially.  Eventually, Mikimoto’s efforts paid off, and by 1930 large volumes of Japanese cultured pearls were beginning to appear on the world’s jewelry markets, practically destroying the demand for the natural pearls that divers brought up from the waters off Kuwait. Kuwait’s economy was devastated; export earnings plummeted, merchants went bankrupt, boats were laid up onshore, and divers returned to the desert. … The little country faced a number of other economic dificulties [in the early 1930s].  The Great Depression had more generally crippled the economies of Kuwait and the other sheikhdoms. So bad had conditions become that slaveowners along the Arab coast were selling off their African slaves at a loss, to avoid the maintenance costs.”