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[West Indies: manufacture of indigo] – Historic Reproduction

[West Indies: manufacture of indigo], 1667 — antique engraving
[West Indies: manufacture of indigo], 1667. Antique engraving from the Historic Print Archive collection.

(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)

Description

Step back in time with [West Indies: manufacture of indigo], an antique engraving rich in period detail. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.

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[West Indies: manufacture of indigo]

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Rather than showing a single estate, this engraving depicts the step-by-step work of making indigo in the French Antilles, a dye crop that drew heavy investment across the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. It appeared in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre's *Histoire générale des Antilles*, published in Paris in 1667, a natural and moral history of the islands by a Dominican missionary who had lived there. Indigo was made by steeping plant leaves in vats, beating the liquid to aerate it, and drying the settled pigment, and the plantations that produced it relied on enslaved African labor, a reality the record's subject tracings point to. The plates present this work as orderly and technical, which makes them valuable to historians and worth reading critically today.

Created / published1667
Medium1 print : engraving.
SubjectsIllus. in: Dutertre, Histoire Generale ..., Paris, 1667, between pp. 106-107. Reference copy may be in SSF (Gr) - INDUSTRY--DYES AND DYEING--MISC.--1667. This record contains unverified, old data from caption card. Caption card tracings: Geogr.; Mills; Industry; African Americans--Slavery.
SourceLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Original scan1,536 × 939 px · prints to 5 × 3 in at 300 dpi
ReferenceAMZ-SOTP-HPA-145631

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