Sense of History's Reviews > Color: A Natural History of the Palette

You can approach colours in a thousand different ways: purely visual, of course, but also emotional, aesthetic, chemical, and so on. But behind the colours of objects and works of art there is also a whole material production process of pigments and dyes, and this is related to trade networks and often also cultivation processes. If this book by Victoria Finlay taught me anything, it is that the materials for making dyes were often based on a specific local economy, which in general was kept very shielded: the recipe for the production of certain dyes often remained a secret for generations, and the book is full of references to monopolies on raw materials for those pigments and paints that have been maintained for centuries. At the same time, this whole traditional craft was accompanied by an enormous network of trade, certainly of those raw materials. For example, I learned that materials such as malachite and others were at least as valuable and expensive as spices, and often followed the same trade routes: from China and the Middle East to Europe and later America. Or from the Middle East to China: with cobalt, for example, which was mainly mined in Persia, and exported to China where it became the secret ingredient for the beautiful Chinese porcelain.

And of course, it is all the more striking that when it comes to the production of synthetic paints and dyes, the reverse traffic routes suddenly arise. Because that chemical discovery, usually the petrochemical treatment of coal tar, was made in the West, in Europe and the United States, just after the middle of the 19th century. Finlay zooms in on this a little less, but it is clear that these synthetic paints pushed the old, traditional dyes out of the market, and therefore also destroyed the local economies based on them. It is a part of the "Great Divergence" process that usually remains underexposed. And it also underlines that the Western dominance chronologically should certainly not be situated too early.

Maybe Finlay's book is not a work of reference. At times it is too much of a travelogue, a search for the remote areas where the basic products for traditional dyes could be found. But it surely is worth the prize of a very interesting pioneering study.