Economies of Color: Capital, Dye Commerce, and the Making of a Global Economy (1450–1650)

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the quest for color transformed local economies and integrated them into more global networks between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It focuses especially on the color worlds that emerged synchronically with textile production in Italy’s industrial hubs and the role of Italian capital in shaping “economies of color” – the economies that formed around the cultivation of dyes, their trade and use in production, and around the consumption of color. Before the advent of synthetic dyes in the nineteenth century, plants, insects, and minerals gave cloth its color. These natural dyes were some of the most crucial raw materials in textile production, itself a powerful engine of economic growth in Europe since the Middle Ages. The specific materials required in dyeing were found in disparate ecological niches around the world, inextricably binding the production of color to long distance trade and merchant capital. The profits to be had from dye commerce and coloring textiles drove capitalists not only to invest in textile production, but redirected capital to local economies where dyes could be supplied. However, dyes were also some of the most defining inputs to textile production, and the resulting colors that they produced were instrumental in the emergence of new forms of consumption as well. Thus, consumer taste, manufacturing, and exchange usefully converge around dyes, making them ideal lenses through which to approach the relationship of these key elements of the early modern economy and windows onto the early emergence of circuits of capital accumulation. Employing an archive-driven and structural analysis that moves between the local and the global, the dissertation reconstructs the commodity chains of key plants, insects, and minerals used in dyehouses before the influx of New World dyes to European manufacturing. Through a study of the dye sector, it shows how capital reformatted local structures of production and consumption, integrated them into expansive international networks of commodity exchange, forged powerful monopolies, and expanded industry in the early modern period. At the dissertation’s heart are case studies that explore key aspects of these capitalist dynamics, each through a different class of dye: they focus on the use of herbal dyes in Italy’s wool and silk industries; on the rise and fall of old world cochineal – a response to the silk manufacturing boom in Renaissance Italy and then the reorientation of capital to American markets in the search for a superior substitute; and on the large scale mining enterprises that supplied Europe’s dye houses with alum, an essential mordant that bound color to cloth.