That's probably not a question you spend a lot of time thinking about… because finding clothes in different colors is not difficult at all. Jeans come in many different shades of blue as well as almost any other color you can think of. And other types of clothes also come in many different colors - as well as in stripes, tie-dye, pictures, and even heat-sensitive fabric that changes color when you touch it.

But, if you were trying to find something blue to wear 500 years ago, you would have had more of a challenge.

Today, blue clothes get their color from dyes made from artificial substances. But until about 100 years ago, the only way to dye cloth blue (or indigo) was by using the dye found in a plant… the indigo plant.

The indigo plant is an herb. There are many different varieties, all species of Indigofera. These plants have natural blue colors that come from their leaves and branches. This color can be used to create a deep blue dye.

The indigo plant grows in warm climates, in India and Asia and South and Central America. Indigo was also once grown in parts of the southern United States.

People who lived in Europe hundreds of years ago could make a weak indigo dye from the woad plant, but the dye that came from the indigo plant was much better. So, as you can imagine, indigo became very valuable to the European traders who traveled East to India and Asia in the 1500s and 1600s.

When traders first began bringing indigo back to Europe from India, woad growers in Europe became upset. They wanted to protect their industry from this new type of foreign dye. As a result, indigo was banned from France and parts of Germany during the 1500s. However, by the 1600s indigo was widely used throughout Europe.

Because indigo was so valuable, Spanish and French settlers started indigo plantations in Central America. At some plantations, Indians or black slaves were forced to do the work of tending the plants and then removing the leaves so that they could be fermented and turned into dye.

Indigo played a big role in our mystery country. When Spanish traders first came there, they were seeking gold and silver. They didn't find much gold or silver, but they did find rich soils that had been nourished with volcanic ash and a warm, tropical climate. In short, a place perfect for cultivating the valuable indigo. For a time, during the 1700s, in fact, indigo became the leading crop in our mystery country. It replaced subsistence farming and ranching, as Spanish traders were eager to use the country's rich soil to produce crops that could be exported to Europe.

Indigo became much less important after artificial blue dyes were created in the late 1800s. Plantation owners in our mystery country switched to growing coffee, and coffee soon became the country's number one exported crop.

Study Questions:

• What is the difference between 'subsistence farming' and 'export farming?' Use an encyclopedia or other reference materials to learn the difference between these two types of farming. Write a 1-page paper on what you learn.

• Growing coffee can be hard on the environment… and hard on the people who work with the coffee plants. Our mystery country has established a national park (called the Coffee Park), which is dedicated to the production of ecologically friendly coffee. Can you learn more about fair trade coffee or shade-grown coffee? Why should we care how our coffee is grown? Use the library or Internet to research these questions. Write a 1-page paper summarizing what you learn.

Check out past Trade Topics entries!