Indigo in the Atlantic World

Hundreds of plants contain the basic chemical elements of indigo, a dye used widely since prehistoric times. Prior to the sixteenth century, several species of Indigofera were grown for dye in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. In Europe and Britain, blue dye was obtained from locally grown woad. Imperial powers jettisoned woad when they grew Indigofera in their American colonies, with Spain, Britain, and France doing best with indigo. Spain did so first in Central America from the 1500s, and Britain and France followed suit from the 1600s in the Caribbean and southern continental North America. Spanish Guatemala and French Saint-Domingue produced high-demand, high-quality indigo. Inferior British South Carolina indigo succeeded once Britain dominated textile manufacturing in the Atlantic world. Colonial indigo growers fared well with good environmental conditions, plantation provisions, labor forces, and guaranteed markets—requirements destabilized by war and competition from other staples. Although indigo grown in the Americas remained viable into the nineteenth century, its manufacture declined when Britain and France invested heavily in sugar plantations, Britain suffered defeat in the American Revolutionary War, France lost Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, and Spain was invaded by Napoleon and consumed with the Peninsular War. After Britain turned to colonial India for indigo in the late eighteenth century and synthetic blue dye was invented in late-19th-century Germany, Atlantic world indigo appeared much less frequently in global markets. Spanish, French, and British indigo plantations in the Americas were built on indigenous peoples’ homelands and propelled by forced Indian labor in Spain’s colonies and African slave labor in those of France and Britain. Although the Spanish Crown ostensibly protected Indians from abuse, their lands, lives, and knowledge of indigo were taken to enrich colonizers and fill Spain’s coffers. Spain decimated indigenous populations upon colonizing the Caribbean, and when France and Britain took over Caribbean islands with gravely reduced Native populations, each imported thousands of African slaves to work indigo plantations. Many of these people made chattel, ripped from their homelands, communities, and families, had their understanding of indigo put to use for imperial gain. Such colonizer-Native-slave dynamics also played out in British and European colonies in continental North America, notably in British South Carolina, where indigo plantations fueled by African slaves fanned out into Indian country. An integral part of colonization, indigo generated wealth for planters and merchants while feeding imperial economies, doing so at huge cost to Indians and African slaves.