Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vog O bomb here. There was a time,
Speaker 1: not all that long ago, that if you wanted your
Speaker 1: toga or whatever to be a different color, you'd have
Speaker 1: to go find something in nature to die it with,
Speaker 1: maybe mud or a more refined mineral, maybe some insects,
Speaker 1: or maybe the seed, flower root or leaves of a plant.
Speaker 1: Before eighteen fifty six, when a teenaged British chemist named
Speaker 1: William Perkins accidentally formulated the first synthetic dye while trying
Speaker 1: to find a cure for malaria um. He produced Mua vine,
Speaker 1: which is an intense purple color. Harvesting natural resources for
Speaker 1: dyes was a big deal. Perkins discovered the means of
Speaker 1: making purple cheaply and in large quantities. Before that, purple
Speaker 1: dye was very precious. The most reliable source was to
Speaker 1: extract it from the desiccated mucous gland of a sea snail.
Speaker 1: Blue was easier to come by and useful because it
Speaker 1: could be mixed with other colors to make purples and greens.
Speaker 1: But before the advent of synthetic dies, getting pigment out
Speaker 1: of the land was laborious to make anything blue, you
Speaker 1: needed Indigo, an organic compound found in the leaves of
Speaker 1: certain plants, most notably indigo plants from the genus Indigo
Speaker 1: phera from India or South America, although other plants such
Speaker 1: as woade contain indigo compounds too, just in much lower concentrations.
Speaker 1: The oldest existing piece of indigo dyed cotton fabric was
Speaker 1: found in Peru in two thousand nine. The scrap is
Speaker 1: six thousand years old. The first Indigophera used by Europeans
Speaker 1: was grown around India, which is where the word indigo
Speaker 1: comes from. Indigo was highly valued in Europe, but Europeans
Speaker 1: wanted their own source of indigo that wasn't so expensive,
Speaker 1: and that's where the America's came in. Until indigo die
Speaker 1: was synthesized in Europe in two A species of Asian
Speaker 1: Indigophera was a huge cash crop wherever it could be grown.
Speaker 1: We've spoke with Donna Hardy, president and founder of the
Speaker 1: International Center for Indigo Culture. She explained, in the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: Europeans colonized North America and immediately started trying to grow
Speaker 1: crops of economic importance. Indigo is one of the first
Speaker 1: plants the British attempted to grow when they got to
Speaker 1: North America. They tried growing it in Jamestown. The Dutch
Speaker 1: tried it in New Amsterdam president day New York City.
Speaker 1: The French had some success in Louisiana, but nobody hadn't
Speaker 1: much luck until Eliza Lucas came along in the seventeen thirties.
Speaker 1: Sixteen year old Eliza Lucas, whose father was Lieutenant governor
Speaker 1: of Antigua and who had an interest in botany, was
Speaker 1: put in charge of three of her father's South Carolina plantations.
Speaker 1: She and her father had no idea what to grow there,
Speaker 1: but he sent her seeds from Antigua, and indigo seemed
Speaker 1: to Eliza to have the most promise. She married a
Speaker 1: man named Charles Pinkney, who wrote down the instructions for
Speaker 1: how to grow in process indigo, and after a while
Speaker 1: they made enough seed to hand out to the neighbors,
Speaker 1: which started an indigo bonanza in the southern colonies. Hardy said,
Speaker 1: before indigo, rice and deer hides were the main exports
Speaker 1: from Charleston, Native American slaves were the first export. Of course,
Speaker 1: Eliza and Charles Pinckney didn't figure out how to grow
Speaker 1: and process indigo the people they enslaved did. The import
Speaker 1: of enslaved Africans began to ramp up in the southern
Speaker 1: colonies as a result of the indigo boom in the
Speaker 1: mid eighteenth century. One of the biggest indigo promoters of
Speaker 1: the time Moses Lindo, who went to Charleston from England
Speaker 1: to act as Inspector General of Indigo. Coming out of
Speaker 1: the part of Charleston, owned a slave ship called the
Speaker 1: Lindo Packet, with which he imported enslaved people from Barbados
Speaker 1: to Charlestown. And the indigo fever and the dependence on
Speaker 1: slave labor that came with it, didn't end in South Carolina.
Speaker 1: Hardy said slavery wasn't even legal in Georgia until indigo
Speaker 1: became the main export in South Carolina. The British governors
Speaker 1: in Georgia decided to legalize slavery to keep the indigo
Speaker 1: industry going. Georgia's ban on slavery ended in seventeen fifty one,
Speaker 1: and at the beginning of the Revolutionary War fifteen years later,
Speaker 1: the enslaved population of that state had grown to over
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand. Though the American colonies winning their independence from
Speaker 1: Britain tanked the indigo market. It was quickly replaced by
Speaker 1: rice and cotton. For its part, England turned its attention
Speaker 1: to India for its indigo needs, where British colonists forced
Speaker 1: sharecroppers to grow indigo for hardly any money. The legacy
Speaker 1: of slavery followed indigo around until it was replaced by
Speaker 1: synthetic indigo in the early twentieth century, when natural indigo
Speaker 1: slipped into obscurity. These days, indigo dyeing is considered a
Speaker 1: curious historic oddity, but according to Hardy, indigo has the
Speaker 1: potential to be part of the solution for the broken
Speaker 1: garment industry. Hardy said, the chemical formula for natural and
Speaker 1: synthetic indigo are the same, but the synthetic dye has
Speaker 1: stuff like formaldehyde in it, and synthetic dyes are all
Speaker 1: petroleum based. The way we manufacture and die close isn't
Speaker 1: good for people or the environment, and slavery is still
Speaker 1: a thing in the garment industry. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Jesslin Shields and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is production of I Heart Radios. How Stuff works. For
Speaker 1: more on this and lots of other topics, visit our
Speaker 1: home planet, how stuff works dot com, and for more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows