Indigo Production and Trade in Colonial Guatemala

Abstract

RHE PROBLEM of an export economy-the dependence of an underdeveloped region upon unstable markets for a staple raw material-is not new.1 While Europe's monetary needs made the precious metals the chief medium of external payments for parts of the Empire, some Spanish colonies lacked significant mineral resources. Such was the case of Guatemala. In the formative years of the captaincy-general cacao beans provided a currency as well as a means of balancing interregional payments, but after the sixteenth century exports of indigo financed the bulk of Guatemala's import trade. At the peak, two million pesos' worth of indigo left the kingdom annually. A decline in output set in toward the end of the eighteenth century. After independence, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala continued to produce indigo in commercial quantities, although the rise of synthetic colors left only a dwindling market for vegetable dyes. Meanwhile, coffee became the mainstay of international trade in all the Central American republics. Natural indigo (atil) is a dyestuff extracted from the leaves of indigofera, of which Linnaeus identified four species. By the nineteenth century botanists had counted over 140 indigoferous plants, widely distributed in tropical and sub-tropical areas.2 In colonial Guatemala the main source of indigo was xiquilite (indigof erd tinctoria). The properties of this plant were known to the Mayans; and in 1558 the Spanish crown asked the colonial government for samples of together with an account of the methods employed by the natives in growing the plant, extracting the dye, and dyeing.3 * The author is professor of economics in Duke University. 'I have received financial support for work on this paper from the American Philosophical Society and from the Duke University Research Council. 2 Julio Rossign6n, Manual del cultivo del aiil y del nopal (Paris, 1859), pp. 43-53. 3 J. Joaquin Pardo, Prontuario de reales cedulas, 1529-1599 (Guatemala, 1941), p. 6; Manuel Rubio, El aiiil o xiquilite, Anales de la Sociedad de Geografia Copyright 1959, by the Duke University Press.