Throughout indigo’s long history, this vibrant blue has been revered. Learn about the origins of this famous blue—how it’s harvested, the role it played in the African slave trade, and more.
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What Is Indigo?
The word indigo is derived from Greek, meaning from India. Indigo cultivation is thought to have existed in the Indus Valley (present-day Pakistan and northwest India) more than 5,000 years ago. There, the color was called nila (meaning “dark blue”) and, as good things often do, it spread.
By the time European traders arrived in Goa in the early 1500s, Indian indigo was one of the goods they took home (along with embroidered silks, and nutmeg and camphor from Indonesia).
The color was so prized that indigo was considered “blue gold.” It became one of the most profitable commodities for the two largest shipping conglomerates of the day: British East India Company and Dutch East India Company.
The Intense Extraction Process
Indigo is a colorfast, plant-based dye that can come from a number of different plants. However, it’s primarily found in Indigofera tinctoria, a tropical plant that was cultivated and became a staple agricultural crop.
Flowering Indigoferra tinctoria (known as true indigo). The dye is obtained from the processing of the leaves. License these images via KorradolYamsatthm and sup10mah.
There are three steps to the traditional process of extracting the dye from the plant:
1. The leaves are fermented.
2. The extracted liquid is allowed to oxidize and a blue sediment forms at the bottom of the vat.
3. That sediment is collected and dried into cakes, which are then sold.
Broken into three steps, indigo extraction seems simple, but it was, in fact, a complex and taxing process. Extracting the sludge sediment from the vat and then hurrying the evaporation process to create a dry cake was laborious.
The chemical properties of indigo dye remained baffling well into the 19th century. It was so mysterious and challenging to work with that, in many cultures, folklore arose around the dyeing process.
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.
But for color-crazed Europe, all this trouble was worth the final result. Once dyed, indigo is so colorfast that it can last for centuries or even millennia.
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.
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. License this image via Isogood_patrick.
Left: Note both the blue worn by the lute player and the child’s underdress. Members of the Maynard Family in the Park at Waltons, by Arthur Devis, c.1755-62. Right: That fashionable blue in France: Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter, by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1872. License these images via Everett Collection and Everett Collection.
The History of Indigo
Despite 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. They already had a thriving trade in blue using woad (a flowering plant grown in the U.K.) and didn’t want another competing product—no matter how superior.
France also had well-established dying industries that utilized woad, so a ban was placed on indigo. Despite the ban, the French upper-class was obsessed with the blue hue and simply ignored any attempts at curbing their indigo obsession.
The French ban was lifted by 1737, and the French quickly achieved an indigo monopoly. (Their biggest customers? The English, of course!)
New trade routes and use of forced labor for production dropped the price of indigo. Armies began using the dye for their uniforms. Napoleon’s Grande Armée used 150 tons per year starting in 1804.
The indigofera plant required a tropical climate, making it impossible to harvest in Europe. Ultimately, the growing desire for the color fueled both colonialism and the African slave trade.
Indigo was one of the first plants the British tried to grow at Jamestown in the 1600s. Spoiler: They didn’t succeed.
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.
Napoleon’s Grande Armée in blue uniform. License this image via Everett Collection.
Indigo’s Role in the Slave Trade
When Eliza Lucas was 16 (in 1738), her father went to fight in the Spanish Empire, leaving her in charge of the family plantation. 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.
It became clear that the rice crop her family once relied on was not going to be enough to support everyone. Eliza’s father, who had been posted in Antigua in the Caribbean, started sending seeds.
First, he sent alfalfa, then he recommended ginger—both of which Eliza tried but neither of which did well. When he sent indigo, however, the family’s fortune began to change.
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. Eliza was positioned to capitalize on the vacuum in the market. But, it took a few years to get things going.
The first crop had been destroyed by frost, and the second season was even worse. 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.
Eliza gave seeds to her neighbors and offered them advice for starting their own crop. 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. Her gamble worked.
Unfortunately, this story isn’t at all as happy as it sounds. Because the American colonies didn’t just create a thriving market in blue—with indigo, came an exploitation of enslaved people. (Slavery wasn’t even legal in Georgia, for example, until indigo became the main export in South Carolina.) By the 1700s, the profits from indigo outpaced those from sugar and cotton.
Indigo production would remain dependent on slave labor until German chemist Adolf von Baeyer began marketing the first synthetic indigo dye in 1878. By 1913, the synthetic dye had almost completely replaced the natural one.
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Indigo’s Modern Impact
Indigo remained an important color in North America and around the world. Blue-collar workers wore indigo-dyed collars that showed less dirt than white collars (hence the term “blue-collar workers,” which originated in the 1920s).
In Japan and China, the dusty blue Mao suit contributed to indigo’s work-wear association.
And then, of course, there was the rise of those indigo-dyed pants that were coming out of San Francisco: Levis. Chances are, you’ve owned a pair yourself.
License these images via Pitchayaarch Photography, Hung Chung Chih, and Victoria Chudinova.
License this cover image via HUGPAP.
