| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

José Antonio Fernández Molina. Pintando el mundo de azul: El auge añilero y el mercado centroamericano, 1750–1810. El Salvador: Biblioteca de Historia Salvadoreña. 2003. Pp. 367.
When small, hard cakes of indigo first arrived in the West, Europeans knew so little of the dye that they imagined it to be a mineral. But demand grew quickly, and indigo soon figured among the exports of Spanish America. By the second quarter of the seventeenth century, however, population declines and transport problems in Central America allowed dye from India and the French West Indies to dominate European markets. Mainland production, now from South Carolina and El Salvador, rebounded in the second half of the eighteenth century but by 1800 had again fallen behind a revived Indian industry. José Antonio Fernández Molina addresses the rise and collapse of Salvadorian indigo exports in the years 1760 to 1840 and the effects that this had on the broader political and economic development of late colonial and early independent Central America.	1
The central thesis of Fernández's book is straightforward. For the first time in two and a half centuries of colonial rule, a crop—indigo—integrated large parts, if not all, of Central America's economy. During the half century after 1750 El Salvador produced the dye; Nicaragua and Honduras supplied the export districts with food and animals; Guatemala City merchants financed the crop, exported it, and brought in European imports for the growers and workers; and capital artisans manufactured consumer goods for colony-wide markets. Mule trains and ox carts laced this economy together. Only Costa Rica seems to have remained largely isolated by distance.	. . .

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