This Colors has only a little history, but is mostly an excuse for gloriously vivid pictures, themselves often of dyestuffs or pigments - from an ancient Egyptian tomb or Roman shipwreck, or the chemical corporations of the nineteenth century. Some pictures of people dying or printing cloth, too.
Uneasy precedent for hyperneoliberal trade prescriptions: after Germany
(with twenty years' work) developed cheap synthetic indigo,
Once again whole regions were ruined, this time in India and the
Caribbean; the English indigo trade disappeared and the shipping trade
of Marseilles, wholly dependent on it, also collapsed.
If I
were a third-world country being told to abandon local food security in
order to specialize in growing export crops - palm oil, say - I'd worry
about this. Some Monsanto chemist is thinking about how to synthesize a
cheaper replacement from corn or kudzu. if my only foothold in the
market is to always be the cheapest option, I think I'd better leave a
fair amount of my land in local crops and go for the slower growth
method of educating everyone (as Amartya Sen says somewhere, that's
least expensive early on, while wages are low) and having the family
farm as a fallback when the global economy won't pay to feed the
cities. ...My grandfather thinks the same tactic is sensible in the
US, because he remembers the Great Depression.
See also: 20,000 Years of Women's Work; 's Niccolo series, mostly the first books; Mauve.
ISBN 0-8109-2872-8
So wrote clew in
History (commodity).