Peacocks and penguins: the political economy of European cloth and colors

Abstract

This paper relates color symbolism in European dress to the historical geography of textile manufacturing and dyeing, dating back to the Middle Ages. Its central concern is the widespread use of black, not only as a color of mourning, but also as a mode for communicating religious and political goals. Black clothing, it is argued, constituted both a practical and a symbolic means of resisting the luxury, polychrome fabrics that older and more developed civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean exported. Although beautiful and tempting, these textiles were instruments of hegemony, for they were produced under monopoly conditions furthered by the highly uneven world distribution of dyestuffs. In Europe they commanded basic resources — slaves and bullion — in exchange and thus created an unequal balance of trade. Black cloth, which contributed in many different ways first to arrest and then to reverse this imbalance, was a totally indigenous product that native craftsmen manufactured and brought to perfection using native raw materials. As such, it had something in common with contemporary symbols of national liberation, perhaps even when it called attention to death.