Hey there modern vegans and vegan curious its Margaret and welcome back to ModVegan.
Today on ModVegan I'm gonna be talking about diamonds. Because diamonds
are forever, diamonds are a girl's best friend, and diamonds are behind some of
the most corrosive conflict that our world has ever known.
I'm fascinated by any time our personal values come in conflict with our
traditions. And I think this is a case where that definitely happens. We value
love and friendship and commitment and so we celebrate that commitment with
diamonds. Where does that connection come from? Why do we decide that diamonds
are the perfect way to express that commitment? And how does using something
like a diamond come into conflict with our greater values? It's a question
that's really worth pursuing. Many of you probably are aware of the issue of
blood diamonds or conflict diamonds, so you may be familiar with that idea. But
the history of diamonds goes so much deeper than that that I think it's
really worth exploring. And so I hope you'll join me on this journey as we
discuss the history of diamonds, the advertising campaign that has gone into
creating the world of diamonds as we know it today, and also modern
alternatives to diamonds that I think are a lot more ethical and friendly to
your wallet and to your ethics than traditional diamonds. This is a three-
part series. In part 1 today we're going to be talking about the history of
diamonds. Please join me for this journey. Let's get to it.
If you have a diamond
ring on your finger right now as you're watching this, you can consider yourself
one of the most lucky people in history. Not because these things are
exceptionally rare - they are not. But they used to be.
For centuries, diamonds were something that belonged on the heads of the
crowned heads of Europe. They were something that Maharaja's and royalty
the world over had. They were not something for normal people and the
reason for that was not so much because they were exceptionally prized - they
actually weren't - other kinds of gemstones were more prized than diamonds
were, but diamonds were extremely rare. They were hard to find and they usually
showed up in in places like India. And that's really
the only place you could get them. And so for centuries, about 1 or 2 pounds of
diamonds were discovered each year and those usually made their way into the
collections of wealthy people around the planet, but they didn't make their way
into the hands of normal people. That all changed in the middle of the 19th
century with the discovery of the kimberlite deposits in Kimberley South
Africa in about 1866. The Kimberlite deposits in Kimberley, South Africa, were
discovered and this changed everything. Diamonds were suddenly being found in
the 1 or 2 tonnes per year versus 1 or 2 pounds before. Diamonds went from being
something exceptionally rare, to being so common that nearly everyone could
probably have one. But there were some individuals who saw this opportunity and
realized that this was a wonderful chance to capitalize on something that
was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. One of the people who did this was Cecil
Rhodes, and he was probably the most famous of these new diamonds
entrepreneurs. He arrived in Africa in the 1870s and immediately saw what was going on
in Kimberley and was amazed at what he found. He was also devious enough to
figure out that it wouldn't be a good thing if all of these diamonds made
their way onto the world market all at once. What would happen if all of these
diamonds were readily available to people? It would cause Diamond prices to
drop significantly. Everyone could afford a diamond. And this was not something
that Rhodes wanted to happen, so what he did is he got together with some friends
and he started to purchase land from farmers and to take it forcibly
from native South Africans, and to take this land and turn them into diamond
mines. He would look for places that were likely to have kimberlite deposits and
purchase existing mines and start to create a cartel. And he went on to create
one of the most famous or infamous cartels in history, one of the most
successful monopolistic organizations that the world has ever known which
today is known as De Beers. Now the De Beers brothers were a couple
of South African farmers. Then Rhodes bought their mine from them he paid them
6,400 British pounds, which was a fantastic deal for him, since they
discovered millions of dollars worth of of diamonds on these people's property
later, but the farmers at the time were quite content to sell their land to him
and hightail it out of town. He got their land and created more mines. That was
just the very beginning for him. He purchased many many mines after that. He
also went on - if you're familiar with Rhodes at all you've probably heard of
the Rhodes Scholarship, you may have heard of Rhodesia which is now Zimbabwe,
which was an entire country that he basically used to enrich himself by
taking the land away from its native inhabitants and lining his own pockets.
Rhodes certainly was an explorer and a hand of the British government - he helped
to expand imperialism and he was extremely successful in the things that
he did. He died at the age of 48, but his ideas did not die with him - sadly - and his
stranglehold on the world diamond market only grew after his death. The De Beers
company was later purchased by the Oppenheimer's, and it is still today one
of the largest cartels in the world. All diamond prices in the world are pretty
much set by De Beers, although now they only control about 60% of the market.
They used to control closer to 90% of the world diamond market, but they still
help to establish a lot of the prices, and they do this by buying up all the
diamonds that are available in the world market as much as they can, and then
controlling the prices from there through some of the ways that they sell
diamonds around the world. Of course, Russia and Canada are also large players
on the diamond scene today as well, but all of these companies in a way owe some
of their structure to the De Beers company and to the history that Rhodes
set in place when he first purchased those mines in South Africa. Now a lot of
conflict has been started because of diamonds. You could argue that the first
and second Boer Wars in South Africa were started because of diamond
discovery, and the fact that the British Empire immediately saw the value of this,
thanks to people like Cecil Rhodes. They saw the value of the diamonds and
gold in South Africa and in Zimbabwe - former Rhodesia - they saw the value of
those things and they wanted to get this land and get this power and they were
willing to fight for it. And there's plenty of
to suggest that the wars fought in South Africa - the Boer Wars - were largely
influenced by this rise in raw minerals in South Africa and the
discovery of these amazing deposits like the kimberlite mines and also of course
gold as well. What does all this history have to do with us today? Well it turns
out a great deal. It shows the conflict has been part of
the discovery of jewels for many many years,
and it also shows that there is a relationship between current conflicts
and past conflicts and the way that this all works. Diamonds have funded conflict
for a long time, arguably going back to the Boer Wars, but in the end of the 20th
century this became even more pronounced. We've all probably heard about the blood
diamonds coming out of Sierra Leone, Angola, the Congo, places like this that
have funded the conflicts in their areas using diamonds. You might wonder exactly
how this works. If you're not familiar with it, what happens is that rebel
leaders will take over land from its native inhabitants, they'll push
farmers and other people off of the land, begin farming diamonds there if
there weren't existing diamond mines - they will then use those raw materials
in order to purchase guns and ammunition. And in some ways it's a bit of a
never-ending cycle. A lot of these revolutionaries might have started out
with some sort of revolutionary principles or some idea about changing
their government - maybe they just wanted a power grab - but eventually it always
seems to end in a never-ending fight for these resources. I've seen in my own
experience a very similar story play out in Latin America. I did my master's
degree on Colombia and the drug war there, and it's very interesting to see
how in Colombia as well what may have started out as a civil war eventually
led to a never ending guerilla war where groups just fought over control of drug
manufacturing facilities and drug manufacturing areas and and areas where
drugs were grown, where coca was grown. So that's something that you see in in
South America. And you see a very similar story playing out in
Africa, but with diamonds instead. Of course, Columbia also has emeralds and
gold. That story has also been very similar. Again, a lot of these raw sources
of wealth are often used and exploited by people in order to fund conflict. Why
is that? Well, the answer is that whenever you have something that is almost
inherently worthless and you can make it worth a lot just by controlling the
supply, you have a very powerful weapon in your hands. You see this with diamonds
- after the discovery of Kimberley, diamonds were plentiful. They may have
been just like any other gemstones so it's not the diamonds would have been
worthless, but after the discovery of Kimberley and other mines in South
Africa, it soon became apparent that a diamond shouldn't be worth much more
than any other precious gem. If you think about sapphires or even jewels like
topaz's, they shouldn't be worth much more than those even if they're perfect
clarity, cut, etc. There's not much reason for them to be worth much more than that,
and so the way to make money off of that product is to control the supply. It's
very similar to the story with drugs. It's very inexpensive to make and manufacture
something like cocaine, but what happens is if you can control the supply then
you can make more money off of it. And a lot of that control in in the case of
drugs is done by making drugs illegal. By making drugs illegal, we help to control
the supply that is able to hit the market, because obviously you have people
capturing drugs and taking them off the market. And a very similar story
plays out with diamond smuggling. By having diamonds bought up by these large
cartels, they are able to control the amount of diamonds and to agree upon the
amount of diamonds that go out into the market. And, as we'll see in the next
episode, there's a way in which some of the control of blood diamonds and some
of this this additional regulation actually helps to support the price of
diamonds, which helps, again, the cartels. So it's a very interesting story.
It's something you should always keep in mind when you see a product that is not
inherently useful - you think about something like water, and this is the
classic economic example, you know - when is water worth more
than diamonds? Well when it's more scarce. Because even though water may be more
useful to you, if it's very abundant, it's not that valuable. Same with diamonds.
Diamonds can be useful for industrial purposes, but other than that they don't
have much intrinsic value. And so it's easy to control and manipulate their
value based on supply and demand, as we'll get into next time when we discuss
the advertising campaigns that have led to the rise of diamonds as this
universal symbol of love and affection. This has been a difficult subject to
research. I must say that reading the history of these stories about what
happened in Sierra Leone and conflicts like that that have been created by
diamonds, it's really worth reading about I would encourage all of you to to do
more research on this. And I'm gonna put some links in the description box below.
I also encourage you to read the article on ModVegan.com I have references
that will take you to certain articles that will explain this in more detail.
It's a difficult topic, but one that I really hope that you guys will take a
look at. If there's anything that I would like to come out of this video, it's that
you will be more interested in this and want to learn more. I'm always amazed at
the popularity of diamonds, especially among women, and it's something that
concerns me. And it's something that I really hope that women, in particular,
will take a look at and decide that this is something that they don't want in
their lives, or that they want alternatives in their lives instead.
Which is why I'm gonna be talking about that in future episodes. But I think much
in the same way that I advocate for veganism - because we don't need to kill
animals in order to eat food, that's not necessary, and it's not desirable - it's
the same with with diamonds it's not necessary to dig these rocks out of the
ground and to enable these large cartels to make money off of human misery it's
something that I hope all of you will take a bit of a closer look at. And in
our next episode on Wednesday, I'm gonna be talking about the advertising
campaign that really led to the rise of diamonds in the first place. I hope
you'll join me on this journey. Thank you so much for watching. If you like this
video, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe and like this page on Facebook -
if you're watching on Facebook - and I will see you in my next video.
Take care, bye.
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