My doctoral thesis will produce the first in-depth, object-driven scholarship on mother-of-pearl (or nacre) in Enlightenment France, employing this mutable, iridescent medium as a new way to understand empire and otherness during the knowledge-seeking Siècle des Lumières. Heeding Michael Yonan's call to arms to bring materiality to the centre of art historical discourse, my artefact-focused research will use this conchological periphery's pearlescence, its resilience, its evanescent beams, to illuminate the themes of (in)visibility, loss and exploitation which starkly juxtaposed this enlightened era's traditional rhetoric of dazzling human progress. Mother-of-pearl is the concealed, autonomously-generated inner layer of some bivalve molluscs and snails, its highly-grooved surface diffracting light into myriad coloured rays which simultaneously bewitch and befuddle. Each nacre unique in colour, thickness and size, this composite material is non-biodegradable, nonporous and almost as strong as silicon. This enchanting, exotic substance was then 'ennobled' by the finest Parisian goldsmiths like Joseph Vallayer and Claude de Villers. Fashioned into exquisite items of sociability such as snuffboxes and bonbonnières housing transatlantic colonial commodities, it also featured in rifle, musical instrument and furniture inlay, buttons and interior decoration. Timely and original, my project will foreground and make links to wider histories of colonialism, human and environmental exploitation, and global trade and exploration, as well as interrogating the Enlightenment itself. Significantly, La Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes held the monopoly over the sale of tobacco in France, and over the Slave Trade, just at the point when trade with both China and India flourished. Furthermore, in the century when the pearling industry (and trade in its associated 'waste product') boomed, thousands of impoverished divers (who ranged in age from 15-60 and from the nineteenth century included enslaved Africans), risked shark-infested waters and decompression sickness to meet Western demand. Moreover, nacre - a material bridging the animal and mineral worlds and impossible to capture on the page - presented a puzzling challenge to eighteenth-century natural history taxonomy, a discipline which privileged the external over the internal. And yet its universality - as a substance consumed by both the elite, the poor, and available to maritime communities around the world - and its plasticity, perfectly manifested shifting notions of empire and enlightenment thought throughout this seminal period in global and colonial history. Indeed, if shells are an apt Enlightenment metaphor - emblematic of exploration, curiosity and erudition, and themselves 'catalysts of ideation', then mother-of-pearl, part of yet removed from its conchological origin, offers an exceptionally vivid, tangible means of revealing, expressing and problematising the numerous global Enlightenments recently uncovered by scholarship. This recentring project - bringing the inside out, the periphery to the centre - will be achieved by addressing the following research questions: How did mother-of-pearl's kaleidoscopic capriciousness and ephemeral shimmer reflect the ideological dichotomies and societal inequalities of France during the long eighteenth century? Might French imperial ambitions and exploits, so inherent to this tumultuous epoch, be traced in a series of scintillating case studies? And to what extent could nacre be regarded as metaphoric of centre and periphery - speaking variously of doctrine and counter-doctrine, metropole and empire, of both Ancien Regime and impassioned revolutionary fervour?