Bernsteinregal
Throughout history, amber and the objects made from it served as diplomatic gifts and instruments of status — luminous tokens in the play of power. Yet this radiance was often built on coercion and control.
In the 13th century, the Baltic coast — rich in amber and ruled by the Teutonic Order — became a landscape of surveillance and punishment. Even walking along the beach could cost eighteen guilders, while the “amber law” (Bernsteinregal) enforced by the Order dictated that anyone caught keeping larger quantities was hanged; smaller transgressions were punished with flogging or exile. Grunovius described the shoreline scattered with gallows, bodies left swaying as warnings to those who dared touch what the sea had offered.
By the 19th century, East Prussian law required that every piece of amber found on shore or in water be surrendered to the royal Amber Office in Königsberg, where finders received only a tenth of its estimated value. Only in 1867 were these draconian punishments replaced by monetary fines or brief imprisonment.
Amber thus moved along a long continuum of desire and domination — from sacred resin to imperial currency. Its circulation helped shape the earliest European centers of power, laying the groundwork for what world-systems theorists later called the center–periphery order: a structure where the core industrialized regions enriched themselves through the extraction of peripheral resources. The so-called “Amber Road” was not only a trade route but an early artery of empire — a luminous corridor through which inequality first crystallized in stone, resin, and gold.