Summary
The transnational chain De Vries traces from mining and collecting rough diamonds, through the London Diamond Trading Company’s allocation to sightholders and middlemen, to cleavers, sawyers, cutters and polishers, the Antwerp and Amsterdam exchanges, and finally jewelry consumers and industrial users (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.20-21).
Details
- The chain persisted from the 1870s take-off in diamond mining, trading and finishing “without national borders seriously bounding it”, carried in part by ethnic networks of Jews and Palanpuri Jain families (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.21).
- Palestine was not part of the chain until the late 1930s, chiefly because of Jewish immigration patterns and Labor Zionist preselection of immigrants (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.35).
- Map 1 of the book shows the chain as it reached Palestine: rough from the Belgian Congo and Sierra Leone to the DTC in London, distribution to Netanya and Tel Aviv, export of cut diamonds to New York (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.18).