early modern period

The Early Modern Period

From the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and Back

Indigo dye paste entered long distance trade well before the Early Modern period. However, limited production and high demand in India and the Islamic empires meant that only small quantities reached Europe before 1500. Furthermore, due to transportation costs, only the wealthiest Europeans could afford this versatile dyestuff. Early expansion of European sea powers into Asia enabled a new network of indigo trade to develop. The appearance of indigo dyed cotton textiles in Europe created a boom in demand. Labor on indigo plantations was harnessed through slavery and debt peonage. Credit structures elevated the status of some and bound others to poverty. A combination of merchant access to labor, capital, and markets led to a restructuring of the relationship between humans and indigo. By the end of the nineteenth century, efforts to enforce cultivation of indigo led to greater involvement of state power in the Indian market, and greater influence of the nation-state in the lives of its citizens.

Indian Ocean Commerce

Vasco de Gama meets the Zamorin of Calicut

Once the Portuguese rounded Africa, the supply of exotic eastern goods reaching Europe increased significantly. The Portuguese began their trade with India demanding a legal monopoly on indigo and pepper, due to the high value to weight ratios of both commodities. Between 1580 and 1600 indigo averaged over 20% of a ship’s cargo. Sometimes it accounted for up to 75% of the total spices on a ship.[1] Lisbon vied with the Italian cities as the principal redistribution center for indigo into Europe. However, given that indigo was more highly valued than cloves, the Portuguese soon faced competition from other European powers.[2] In the 1630s the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie began importing indigo into Europe from the Coromandel Coast, and also from Java where they soon transformed local indigo production into cash crop production. In 1608 the British East India Company established commercial relations with Surat and sought to wrest control of the indigo trade from the Portuguese.

For the first decades of the seventeenth century, indigo was the British East India Company’s most valuable export commodity, followed by calico, saltpeter, and sugar.[3] On a few of the earliest voyages indigo was the entire cargo and produced a 400% profit return.[4] By 1620 the Company was importing approximately 200,000 pounds of indigo annually into Europe and making additional deliveries to Arabian markets.[5] (To understand the value in context, consider: In 1661 Parliament under Charles II established that a hundred weight of indigo was worth three ounces of silver bullion. By comparison, a hundred weight of saltpeter was worth only one ounce of silver bullion.[6])

Indigo was grown in Gujarat and the Sindh, but the best quality came from near Agra. There, approximately 10% of the arable land was used to grow indigo.[7] The British acquired this indigo through trading markets in Lahore. Merchants faced many challenges in procuring this indigo, including disease, wild animals, dangerous sandbanks, and local hostility. One merchant created a scandal when he inadvertently offended the Mughal emperor by daring to outbid the royal mother. Merchants faced further challenges in the form of fluctuating prices in London due to speculation, ship wreck, or efforts to undercut prices when indigo from other sources arrived on the market. (Particularly indigo brought in by Italians, overland through the Levant).

After the British acquired Bombay from the Portuguese in 1661, Bombay became the preeminent port for indigo trade. There was even a “Keeper of the Blue Warehouse” appointed by the East India Company. In 1677 an indigo dyer’s high status helped him escape a murder charge. Diary records show that a dyer, Anthony Smith, threw a pot of scalding liquid at a weaver, Michael Lovenay, killing him during a quarrel. To avoid the loss of a skilled dyer, higher officials described the death as an accident.[8] After the London Fire of 1666, one expert dyer, despite his much-advanced age, managed to command a salary of 60 pounds per annum for a new position in India.[9]

However, indigo exports from India declined in the eighteenth century as colonial plantations relying on forced labor were formed in the Americas.[10] The pre-eminence of India in indigo production would not return until after revolutions disrupted production in the Americas in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.

Atlantic Ocean Trade: Indigo, Slavery, and Revolutions

Starting in the mid sixteenth century, the story of indigo becomes inextricably entwined with slavery and capital. Motivated by an expanding market for indigo as dyers sought (often illegally) to take advantage of the dye’s versatility over woad, merchant capital was increasingly invested into a reorganized production process. Indigo cultivation, like sugar, requires an intensive use of labor as well as investment in equipment. In order to increase production levels, plantation systems were introduced and labor was coerced. Hence, despite high transport costs, American grown indigo was still able to undercut the price of woad grown in Europe as well as indigo imported from India. Trade in indigo became so profitable that indigo itself became a vehicle for credit. It financed great plantation wealth, but, ultimately, it also financed revolutions.

Indigo in Central America

Diego Rivera Mural showing Aztec Dye and textile works

Early in their colonial adventures, the Spanish required the indigenous Pipil Indians on the coastal plains of El Salvador to gather wild, native indigo as part of their tax obligation.[11] More productive varieties of indigo were introduced and plantation systems were set up. In 1609, approximately 300,000 pounds of indigo were sent from Veracruz to Spain. In the peak years of the seventeenth century, close to half a million pounds of this “Guatemalan Indigo” were exported annually.[12] However, the decline of the native population due to disease quickly led to labor shortages. Waste from the processing of indigo attracted flies and spread illness. The Spanish Crown banned the use of indigenous labor in indigo production. However, as free labor was difficult to attract and slaves were as yet still too expensive to purchase, Spanish indigo planters exploited indebted Indians and bribed officials to illegally circumvent crown policy. In 1738 the crown ended the ban on the use of indigenous labor, and in 1760 use of repartimientos labor was allowed.[13]

Starting in the early eighteenth century, Bourbon reforms liberalized Spanish commerce and shipping, and attracted a new class of immigrant merchants to Guatemala City. These indigo merchants provided a major source of capital for economic development.[14] A merchant would loan credit on European and domestic goods to a planter through the use of a libramiento, or a “warrant to pay”. This authorized repayment to the merchant’s creditor in indigo. Such payment structures freed the intermediary merchants from reliance upon minted coins.[15] Since specie access was limited, indigo thus became a vehicle for credit exchange. Investment further improved both the quality and quantity of indigo produced.

Successful merchants diversified their export activities to engage in other lines of commerce as well. Furthermore, producers and buyers in the indigo industry were related to producers and buyers in the cattle industry through intermarriage. Annual fairs were held in the capital where indigo planters and merchants would negotiate a satisfactory price (and introduce their daughters). These transaction fairs also included exchanges of cacao, iron, clay, cheese, and other commodities.[16] By the 1760s, indigo merchants were the primary suppliers of wholesale goods and credit to Spanish provincial officials in a regular contractual arrangement.

However, the industry was plagued by problems. It was impossible for the indigo merchants to sustain continued growth given the limited capacity for consumption of imports. Furthermore, movement of indigo to the capital was hindered by a scarcity of mules, a problem created in part by the shift to indigo planting by some former mule raisers.[17] As more planters shifted to growing indigo, production of subsistence crops also declined; the scarcity of these commodities added to their expense. Planters also suffered from a locust plague from 1769 to 1775. Merchants, however, were unsympathetic as they lost enormous capital when the 1773 earthquake destroyed many warehouses, stores, and homes.[18]

As tensions grew between the planters and merchants, bargaining assemblies were established to determine fair prices. While these boards helped ease bitter feelings, they did not address the underlying economic imbalances. Indigo producers convinced Captain General Galvez that the mercantile community was destructively pursuing their own ends. They pressured him to establish a legal minimum price for indigo, set up a planters loan system, and freeze their debts. In a letter to the crown, the merchants’ association warned that a debt freeze would cause a collapse of the credit structure. Indeed, when the “Montepio de Anil” (“Indigo Charitable Fund”) collapsed in 1780, many planters had to forfeit their land to the Guatemala City merchants.[19] Sales of indigo stalled. Ironically, this led many remaining planters to return to raising subsistence crops, solving the problem of food scarcity and high prices. Planters and merchants began to interact outside the government controls, which were eventually nullified in 1792. Increased competition led to a decline of the indigo economy in Central America. By 1805 the British were importing to Europe five million pounds of indigo produced in India using new processing techniques.[20]

Revolutionary conflicts in Central America further interfered with indigo production. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, the indigo merchant elite became increasingly involved in Guatemalan civic affairs, buying offices, taking part in councils, and lending money for building up the infrastructure of the capital. The names of indigo merchants can be found on the boards of hospitals and universities. However, indigo planters on the coastal plains saw their wealth and status diminish, and grew increasingly resentful of Spanish interference. Insurrection against Spain began in 1811. The United Provinces of Central America that existed from 1823-1838 continued to be strained by the internal division between coastal planters and urban merchant elite. El Salvador eventually established its independence from Guatemala. During the height of indigo sales, indigo had been responsible for the greatest prosperity Guatemala had known. It motivated the Creole elite to defy Royal authority. However, it also created lasting socio-economic divisions.

Indigo in St.Domingue-Haiti [21]

An indigo Factory. First published in Pere Labat's 1724 Book

Despite objections from the woad industry, the French allowed indigo to be introduced to its New World colonies. In the 1720s seed was also brought to the Mississippi delta area. By 1738 there were fourteen indigo plantations near New Orleans, exporting approximately 80,000 pounds of indigo annually by 1754.[22] However, the real indigo powerhouse in the French colonies was Saint Domingue. By 1775 there were 3,160 indigotiers, and the colony was legally exporting more than two million pounds of indigo annually.[23] However, it is very likely that the colony was illegally exporting larger quantities of indigo, and that the wealth from this illicit trade enriched a class of free mulattoes that became leaders in the Haitian Revolution.

On the island of Hispanola, the indigenous people, the Taino, died out early in colonial history. French pirates settled the western half in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the area was incorporated as Saint Domingue in 1697. Plantation owners soon settled there and began importing African slave labor to work the plantations. Productivity was high, and the colony soon became known as ‘the Pearl of the Antilles.” Sexual contact between European men and African women was widespread, and paternity was often recognized with manumission of the offspring. By the mid-eighteenth century a wealthy class of free mulatto plantation owners had emerged that owned one third of the land and one quarter of the slaves. Much scholarship has pointed to the role of coffee in producing the wealth of these gens du coleur. However, a lucrative trade in contraband indigo was also instrumental.

Visiting the Southern coast in 1701, Pere Labat identified indigo as a crop that enabled planters to build their wealth. Describing the process of preparing the ground, he writes, “The ground where one wants to plant the indigo seed is hoed and cleaned five times…sometimes cleanliness is taken so far that the ground is swept as one would sweep a room.”[24] Unlike coffee, it did not require a long startup time. It grew in sandy soils that were not as desirable for sugar, and like coffee, indigo did not require large numbers of slaves. Newly freed mulattoes could stake a claim along the southern peninsula and, by starting with indigo, work their way up to becoming major plantation owners. In 1702, before the southern peninsula had been opened for settlement, a population of freedmen had already settled there in a spot still called Fond des Negres. When Pierre Raymond, a Frenchman, arrived in the area in 1726, he married a wealthy and literate mulatresse named Marie whose father was an indigo planter. Documentary evidence suggests that all ten of their children became wealthy and educated, but their son Julien Raimond is most famous for his role as a leader in the Haitian Revolution.

Gens du Coleur acquired wealth from indigo

By 1713 over a hundred dye works were operating on the Southern Peninsula. Indigo prices increased 150% from 1749 to 1790, while coffee values increased only 30% in the same period. In 1774 it was estimated that a single slave could produce enough indigo in one year to repay half his purchase price. Statistics show that indigo plantations were numerous and productive, yet official export numbers are surprisingly low. This supports the assertion that much of the indigo produced in Saint Domingue entered the world market illicitly. Further evidence of receipts in Curacao and Jamaica prove that an illicit indigo trade through the Windward Passage existed. Colonial administrators were unable to enforce the French monopoly along the southern peninsula. The gens du coleur profited from trade with the Dutch and the British. In 1782 after selling a load of indigo in Curacao, Julien Raimond bought sheet music, crystal carafes, silver salt dishes and oil decanter, and a pair of matched beds. The following year he purchased a slave skilled in making pastries and confectionery sculptures.[24b]

In 1789 when the French Revolution began, the indigo planters Guillaume Labadie, Julien Raimond, and Thomas Ploy challenged the racially discriminatory laws that kept freeborn men of wealth such as themselves from accessing the same rights of citizenship as the white plantation owners. When they won the right to vote in 1791, it sparked a civil war with white plantation growers that destabilized the colony. Both sides armed their slaves, fatefully enabling the eventual slave uprising that produced the world's first successful slave revolt.

Indigo in Brazil [25]

Slave hunter in Brazil. Painting by Jean Batiste Debret

In 1642 the Portuguese colonial council authorized the planting of indigo and ginger in Brazil. However, it was not until the 1760s that colonial government actually began to invest in production. The explosion of textile manufacturing in Europe had led to an increased demand and higher prices for indigo. Although the Portuguese textile market needed only 7,000 lbs per year, the crown hoped that surplus Brazilian production would fill royal coffers by re-exporting indigo to the Netherlands. By 1780 there were 406 indigo works near Rio, using imported and native slaves, and exporting close to 110,000 lbs of indigo annually.

Unfortunately, the local treasury was notorious for insolvency. In 1786 debt forced the colonial authorities to halt all payments. Many producers were stuck having to sell their stocks on the open market. Some planters switched to new crops such as sugar and coffee, but speculation kept other planters in indigo. When Saint Domingue dropped from the indigo market, merchants increased their purchases from Brazil. In 1796 over 264,000 lbs of indigo dye was exported, mostly from the Rio area.

By 1818 multiple factors had caused indigo exports to drop to only 7,000 lbs. First, the indigo produced in Brazil had a bad reputation amongst buyers for adulteration with ash, sand, and brick dust. Secondly, the deleterious effect on the health of slaves motivated planters to switch to crops that would not destroy their investment in labor. And finally, the Portuguese were not able to compete with the closed circuit between the British textile industry and Bengali production. Brazilian indigo production thus fit a general pattern of decline in the new world due to British East India practices in the Indian Ocean.

The British in the Atlantic Indigo Trade

Indigo served as a pioneering plantation crop in British colonial territories of the New World. Small planters would start with indigo and a slave or two. Then, by annually clearing a few more acres and buying a few more slaves the planter would eventually have enough labor and land to convert to more lucrative sugar production.[26] When the British captured Jamaica in 1655 indigo had been minor crop, but by 1672 there were 60 indigo works exporting 50,000 lbs year.[27] However, to encourage sugar production, Parliament established a stiff export tariff on indigo, and indigo production in the British Isles declined. Afterwards, British merchants along the Windward Isles trade route picked up contraband indigo from colored planters on the southern coast of Haiti. This contributed, ultimately, to the Haitian Revolution.

Indigo was also a pioneering crop in British South Carolina. Whereas the low swampy areas were ideal for rice cultivation, the higher, sandier areas were ideal for indigo. As rice and indigo required labor at different seasons, farmers could keep their slaves occupied year round. Smaller, inland farmers were able to earn money from supplementing their subsistence crops with indigo. Thus, slavery followed indigo and spread into the interior of South Carolina. From 1750 to 1775 indigo crops brought great wealth to South Carolina planters. On the eve of the American Revolution the area was exporting 1.1 million pounds per year.[28] However, after independence the British lost access to the market. With the loss of direct access to indigo in the Americas, the British shifted their attention back to India.

The reasons for shifts between production areas were as much political as economic. When plantations in the West Indies combined slave labor with improvements upon the traditional Indian indigo production processes, they were able to draw trade away from India. Trade see-sawed back after revolutions disrupted access to supplies and the British developed methods to reduce labor costs on plantations in India. Although the Revolutions in the Americas reduced the dependence of indigo production on slavery, labor continued to be coerced and land co-opted. However, just as slavery followed indigo into South Carolina, revolution followed indigo into Bengal.

Trade Returns to the Indian Ocean

Indigo as Monetary Media

The British conquest of Bengal coincided with the increased demand for indigo in the European textile industry. Disruption of indigo supplies from the Americas motivated the British East India Company to promote indigo production in territories where the soil and climate were ideal. Originally the company bought indigo from local growers on the open market. Eventually, in a drive to attain a regular and uniform supply, the company became involved with production via an infusion of capital and technology. European experts from the West Indies were brought over to organize and supervise more efficient factories, and by 1802 over 4.3 million pounds of indigo were being exported from India. [29] Thereafter, the Company ceased to control the factories directly, and instead financed private planters through Agency Houses. However, this new financial relation invited speculation on the market and led to abuse of peasant farmers.

The Agency Houses, called nilhat (nil being the Sanskrit word for indigo), were trading organizations established and financed with the savings of company employees. Nilhat enabled money transfers between England and India. Indigo’s high value to weight ratio made it an ideal vehicle for the company and its employees to return profits home. Because the company (and Europe for that matter) suffered a drain of silver to the China market, indigo became the primary tool for remittances. Hence, the need of private business interests and individuals to remit payments and profits drove the London indigo market, rather than demand from the textile industry. Consequently, there was a tendency of agency houses to finance overproduction of indigo. From 1805 to 1814 East India Company indigo exports averaged 5.6 million pounds per year.[30] If an independent planter had no contract with the East India Company, he could sell his product on the spot market or transport the indigo to London and sell it there. In 1815 over 7.6 million pounds of indigo were exported from Bengal.[31] Huge fluctuations in the production and price of indigo led to vast amounts of speculation, causing the indigo market to temporarily collapse in the early 1830s[32] However, between 1834 and 1847 indigo still managed to account for almost half the value of all the goods passing through Calcutta.[33] In the 1850s, indigo production declined in part because farmers were shifting to the more lucrative production of opium which requires similar growing conditions.[34]

Bengal village 1863. Photo by Samuel Bourne. Smithsonian Collection

The Blue Mutiny [35]

British settlement policy, together with the fluctuating financial market, impoverished peasant farmers in Bengal. In the 1790s, in an effort to prevent European settlement (and another possible revolt like the Americas), the British colonial government forbade European indigo planters from leasing or purchasing lands outside their immediate factory grounds. Revenue collectors, or zamandari, were identified as Indian landowners. This reduced the cultivators, or ryot, to the status of tenants. In Bengal most farming had taken place on small family plots. Henceforth, a ryot had to purchase the right to work the land from a zamandari, who contracted from a European “planter” (who was really just a processor of indigo). This planter, in turn, owed debts to the Agency Houses. Since the zamandari paid the planters in indigo leaf, they demanded that their tenant farmers grow only indigo. The ryot were further indebted to the zamandari for advances to pay for irrigation systems necessary to grow indigo, since the river topography had been undergoing a long-term change that resulted in drier land. Consequently, farmers were financially tied to indigo production despite the fact that they could profit more from production of rice or opium. Furthermore, they could no longer rotate their crops to nurture their soil. Thugs (lathiyals) in the service of zamandars made sure no other crops were planted, and that leaves were delivered on time.

Abuses by indigo planters and zamindars were notorious. Planters forged documents and swindled the illiterate ryots. They lowered prices and raised charges. Zamindars employed thugs to force ryots to cultivate at a loss. There were documented cases of kidnapping, uprooting of gardens, and carrying off of cattle. Village headmen would be jailed until they forced all their villagers to grow indigo. A committee reporting to the government testified that accounts of the behavior of planters in Bengal were “painful to read.”[36] On the heels of the Sepoy Mutiny, the indigo growing peasants revolted against this forced cultivation of an unprofitable crop. From 1859 to 1860, they caught the newly established colonial government off balance, creating conflict between concerns for public security and support for laissez-faire economic policies. Following the disturbances, British merchants pressed the nascent colonial administration to change property laws to allow direct ownership by planters, thus displacing native land ownership by zamindars. They also pressed the government to make peasant violation of an indigo contract a criminal offense. However, the new government simultaneously assured cultivators that they were not bound to accept the contracts. New administrative and judicial centers were established to hear grievances and process claims. Thus, the indigo disturbances led to increased involvement of the state in the indigo market.

In 1860, Dinabandhu Mitra wrote in Bengali a play called Nil Darpan about the indigo disturbances and exploitation by the British. Its publication roused debate in the press and heightened awareness about the suffering of the farmers. A Scottish missionary, James Long, published English translations of the play in Britain in order to champion the cause of the ryots. Long was charged with libeling the planters and inciting violence and imprisoned.

Early in the Indian Independence movement Gandhi championed the cause of oppressed indigo workers. In 1917 he launched an inquiry into the treatment of indigo farmers in Champaran, Bihar. While meeting with the indigo peasants and recording their grievances, a large crowd formed. Gandhi was ordered to leave the area but refused and was arrested. He willingly obeyed the order to go to jail. (Some identify this event as Gandhi's first exercise of Satyagraha in India.) Gandhi recognized a connection between the poverty of indigo farmers and their dependence upon an export oriented commodity. He would later emphasize this aspect of the Indian textile industry, and call upon the people to wear undyed homespun cotton.

The European Market

William Morris indigo resist printed calico 1883

In the late seventeenth century, Indian textiles took the British market by storm creating a ‘calico craze.’ The most common color found on these popular imports was a richly dyed indigo blue, but all the shades of blue, as well as greens and purples, involved the use of indigo dye. Originally, the British used chintzes for bed hangings and then for furnishings in general. The variety of beautifully printed, colorfast, light weight materials caused a sensation, as the European woad plant was unable to produce such rich hues, and European dyeing technology was not advanced enough to create such complex patterns. The availablity of cheap Indian imports blurred social distinctions in dress as more and more middle class women adopted the foreign styles. The imports also threated the domestic wool industry, which led to a temporary backlash in the 1720s.

In France the indigo and white patterned calicos, called indiennes, were imported by the Compagnie des Indes Orientales. Even the aristocracy at the court of Louis XIV began to decorate their homes and dress in this fantastic new fabric. The high demand inevitably threatened established industries. Skilled artisans left their jobs at silk and wool factories to staff ateliers that sought to copy the Indian products. The skill shortage at powerful companies was potentially catastrophic for the domestic textile industry. So, in1686 the King issued a royal decree forbidding the production of importation of indiennes, but this only added to their allure. Both the Duc de Bourbon and the Marquise de Pompadour invested in clandestine ateliers that experimented with indigo fabric printing.[37]

In the early 1700s European manufacturers experimented with methods of painting blue pigment patterns onto calico fabric using arsenic trisulphide added to vats of indigo thickened with gum from the Senegalese acacia tree. Other methods of directly painting with indigo were explored before the secret of resist dyeing was discovered In the 1730s by a French naval officer. Antoine De Beaulieu, engaging in what today would be considered industrial espionage, made a detailed record of the production process used in Pondicherry, accompanied by fabric samples.[38] This information, along with increased availability of both cotton and indigo, allowed European manufacturers to copy Indian styles. (The first Europeans to succeed were the Dutch, as they had no domestic woad industry to protect and thus were able to import and experiment with indigo much sooner.) The process of block printing a resist and dyeing with indigo came to be known as imprimerie de porcelaine in reference to the popular blue and white porcelains imported from China.

The French produced indigo resist printed cloths became highly popular in England and the Americas.[39] Blue, along with grey and black, was one of the three most commonly worn colors in France, Britain, and Germany. Hitherto a sign of peasant clothes poorly dyed with woad, light blue clothing became more reputable with the advent of richly hued and detailed prints in indigo. This change in impact also affected the French language; whereas in 1665 there were only thirteen common terms for shades of blue, by 1765 there were twenty-four.[40]

Despite growing competition from European production, Indian textiles still accounted for 60% of the British East India Company’s sales in 1750.[41] The Company sought to off-set bullion losses through the use of a re-export trade that brought indigo dyed Indian fabrics to West Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves to labor in the Americas. Since a domestic African indigo industry had already established a fondness for blue textiles, Africans were willing to engage in this trade. Thus, indigo helped put Africans into slavery in the Americas, where they helped produce indigo for the European market.

As British textile manufacturing swelled demand for indigo, merchants sourced indigo from distant lands, reorganized labor, and established new markets for their products. In the nineteenth century, British military were called upon to defend trade routes and British citizens were tapped to work the mills. Indigo was necessary for the dyeing of British military uniforms as well as the clothes of much of the factory workforce. Hence, we find the English expressions “navy blues” and “blue collar worker”.[42] The global reach of capital investment in indigo reshaped the lives of people in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

William Morris Medway printed textile 1885