Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vog O bomb here. There was a time, not all that long ago, that if you wanted your toga or whatever to be a different color, you'd have to go find something in nature to die it with, maybe mud or a more refined mineral, maybe some insects, or maybe the seed, flower root or leaves of a plant.
Before eighteen fifty six, when a teenaged British chemist named William Perkins accidentally formulated the first synthetic dye while trying to find a cure for malaria um. He produced Mua vine, which is an intense purple color. Harvesting natural resources for dyes was a big deal. Perkins discovered the means of making purple cheaply and in large quantities. Before that, purple dye was very precious. The most reliable source was to extract it from the desiccated mucous gland of a sea snail.
Blue was easier to come by and useful because it could be mixed with other colors to make purples and greens. But before the advent of synthetic dies, getting pigment out of the land was laborious to make anything blue, you needed Indigo, an organic compound found in the leaves of certain plants, most notably indigo plants from the genus Indigo phera from India or South America, although other plants such as woade contain indigo compounds too, just in much lower concentrations.
The oldest existing piece of indigo dyed cotton fabric was found in Peru in two thousand nine. The scrap is six thousand years old. The first Indigophera used by Europeans was grown around India, which is where the word indigo comes from. Indigo was highly valued in Europe, but Europeans wanted their own source of indigo that wasn't so expensive,
and that's where the America's came in. Until indigo die was synthesized in Europe in two A species of Asian Indigophera was a huge cash crop wherever it could be grown. We've spoke with Donna Hardy, president and founder of the International Center for Indigo Culture. She explained, in the sixteen hundreds, Europeans colonized North America and immediately started trying to grow crops of economic importance. Indigo is one of the first plants the British attempted to grow when they got to
North America. They tried growing it in Jamestown. The Dutch tried it in New Amsterdam president day New York City. The French had some success in Louisiana, but nobody hadn't much luck until Eliza Lucas came along in the seventeen thirties. Sixteen year old Eliza Lucas, whose father was Lieutenant governor of Antigua and who had an interest in botany, was put in charge of three of her father's South Carolina plantations.
She and her father had no idea what to grow there, but he sent her seeds from Antigua, and indigo seemed to Eliza to have the most promise. She married a man named Charles Pinkney, who wrote down the instructions for how to grow in process indigo, and after a while they made enough seed to hand out to the neighbors, which started an indigo bonanza in the southern colonies. Hardy said, before indigo, rice and deer hides were the main exports
from Charleston, Native American slaves were the first export. Of course, Eliza and Charles Pinckney didn't figure out how to grow and process indigo the people they enslaved did. The import of enslaved Africans began to ramp up in the southern colonies as a result of the indigo boom in the mid eighteenth century. One of the biggest indigo promoters of the time Moses Lindo, who went to Charleston from England
to act as Inspector General of Indigo. Coming out of the part of Charleston, owned a slave ship called the Lindo Packet, with which he imported enslaved people from Barbados to Charlestown. And the indigo fever and the dependence on slave labor that came with it, didn't end in South Carolina. Hardy said slavery wasn't even legal in Georgia until indigo became the main export in South Carolina. The British governors in Georgia decided to legalize slavery to keep the indigo
industry going. Georgia's ban on slavery ended in seventeen fifty one, and at the beginning of the Revolutionary War fifteen years later, the enslaved population of that state had grown to over eighteen thousand. Though the American colonies winning their independence from Britain tanked the indigo market. It was quickly replaced by rice and cotton. For its part, England turned its attention to India for its indigo needs, where British colonists forced
sharecroppers to grow indigo for hardly any money. The legacy of slavery followed indigo around until it was replaced by synthetic indigo in the early twentieth century, when natural indigo slipped into obscurity. These days, indigo dyeing is considered a curious historic oddity, but according to Hardy, indigo has the potential to be part of the solution for the broken
garment industry. Hardy said, the chemical formula for natural and synthetic indigo are the same, but the synthetic dye has stuff like formaldehyde in it, and synthetic dyes are all petroleum based. The way we manufacture and die close isn't good for people or the environment, and slavery is still a thing in the garment industry. Today's episode was written by Jesslin Shields and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff
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