Description: When blue became the most popular color for eighteenth-century textiles, the indigo used became a major component in trans-Atlantic commodity chains. Feeser tells the stories of all the peoples who made indigo a key part of the colonial South Carolina experience as she explores its relationships to land use, slave labor, and fortune building.
Brief description: ANDREA FEESER is an associate professor of art and architectural history at Clemson University. She is the author of Waikiki: A History of Forgetting and Remembering.
Review Quotes:
Locating indigo production in both a global economy and the history of enslavement in colonial South Carolina, this book gives us the first tangible explanation of why indigo was such an important crop. Feeser explains just what 'blue' meant in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and does it so well that indigo production makes sense in a way it never has before.
--Mart A. Stewart "author of "What Nature Suffers to Groe" Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920"