Mexican Cochineal and European Demand for a Luxury Dye, 1550–1850

Cochineal was the most expensive and most important dye exported from the Americas throughout three centuries, from the Spanish conquest down to the mid-nine tee nth century. The subject is of interest because it illustrates why and how the European demand for a particular commodity—in this case a valuable and labor-intensive dye stuff—directly affected the livelihood of tens of thousands of members of Mexican indigenous peasant communities from the mid-sixteenth century until the nineteenth century. The Mexican peasants, who devoted large amounts of labor to cultivating huge quantities of cochineal insects, actually provided the deep, red dyes that colored the finest fabrics worn by popes, kings and princes, nobles, military officers and wealthy residents of most European cities and towns of the ancien regime. Furthermore, cochineal continued to be in large demand from the textile industries of industrial and bourgeois Europe in the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, until artificial dyes—introduced by German chemical enterprises—drove natural dyes out of the market. Hence, the cochineal commodity chain, which literally lasted for all of four centuries, can help elucidate complex transatlantic dynamics with multiple economic, social and cultural implications.