![]() Because the American colonies didn’t just create a thriving market in blue-with indigo, came an exploitation of enslaved people. Unfortunately, this story isn’t at all as happy as it sounds. Her theory was that in order to establish an export market in South Carolina and have enough indigo to meet the needs of the British, she would need help. The third crop was sabotaged by an indigo export competitor. The fourth crop was eaten by caterpillars, but finally, the fifth crop was just right.Įliza gave seeds to her neighbors and offered them advice for starting their own crop. The first crop had been destroyed by frost, and the second season was even worse. But, it took a few years to get things going.Ī montage of engravings illustrating the cultivation of indigo. Eliza was positioned to capitalize on the vacuum in the market. When Eliza Lucas started her business in 1745, the British were at war with the French and were looking for a new source for the nation’s favorite blue. It was designed by Samuel Chester Reid of the US Navy in 1818. Indigo was used to dye the blue in the early flags, while cochineal was used for the reds. The pattern is known as the Grand Luminary or Great Star pattern. When he sent indigo, however, the family’s fortune began to change. Eliza’s father, who had been posted in Antigua in the Caribbean, started sending seeds.įirst, he sent alfalfa, then he recommended ginger-both of which Eliza tried but neither of which did well. It became clear that the rice crop her family once relied on was not going to be enough to support everyone. Just the year before, Eliza had arrived to South Carolina from her English finishing school, and now was in charge of a 600-acre estate (with sixty slaves,) her little sister, and her ailing mother-who died shortly thereafter. When Eliza Lucas was 16 (in 1738), her father went to fight in the Spanish Empire, leaving her in charge of the family plantation. In fact, no one succeeded at indigo production in North America until Eliza Lucas, an 18th century teenage girl in South Carolina, gave it a go. Indigo was one of the first plants the British tried to grow at Jamestown in the 1600s. ![]() Ultimately, the growing desire for the color fueled both colonialism and the African slave trade. The indigofera plant required a tropical climate, making it impossible to harvest in Europe. Napoleon’s Grande Armée used 150 tons per year starting in 1804. Armies began using the dye for their uniforms. New trade routes and use of forced labor for production dropped the price of indigo. (Guess their biggest customers? The English, of course!) The French ban was lifted by 1737, and the French quickly achieved an indigo monopoly. Despite the ban, the French upper-class was obsessed with the blue and simply ignored any attempts at curbing their indigo obsession. ) and didn’t want another competing product-no matter how superior.įrance also had well-established dying industries that utilized woad, so a ban was placed on indigo. They already had a thriving trade in blue using woad (a flowering plant grown in the U.K. Image via Everett Collection.ĭespite the superiority of indigo over other dyes, Europe was relatively slow to import the dye. English dyers, for example, were initially quite resistant to using indigo. Wearing fashionable blue: Helena Catharina de Witte, the wife of Iman Mogge, by Caspar Netscher, 1678. Still vibrant blues in this tapestry detail of “David Sees Bathsheba Washing and Invites Her to His Palace.” It is thought to have been woven for Henry VIII of England in 1528. Today, museums are filled with tapestries that are said to suffer from “blue disease”-all this time later, the only thing that remains of them is their blue indigo. Once dyed, indigo is so colorfast that it can last for centuries or even millennia. In Bhutan, pregnant women were not allowed near the vat in case the unborn baby stole the blues, and women in Morocco believed the only way to deal with a particularly challenging vat was to start telling outrageous lies.īut for color-crazed Europe, all this trouble was worth the final result. It was so mysterious and challenging to work with that, in many cultures, folklore arose around the dyeing process. The chemical properties of indigo dye remained baffling well into the 19th century. Extracting the sludge sediment from the vat and then hurrying the evaporation process to create a dry cake was laborious. That sediment is collected and dried into cakes, which are then sold.īroken into three steps, indigo extraction seems simple, but it was, in fact, a complex and taxing process. The extracted liquid is allowed to oxidize and a blue sediment forms at the bottom of the vat.ģ. An early, unattributed engraving describes the indigo manufacturing process.
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