A (Im)Perfect Red

After reading A Perfect Red by Amy Butler Greenfield, I was pretty let down for a variety of reasons. I thought the book was going to focus on the idea of color in history(which is a really interesting idea that I have not really considered) and the way in which a commodity was important because of the symbolic power of its color. While Greenfield gives us a smattering of this cultural construction around different colors, she did not analyze it fully. She briefly talks about the importance of red historically because of its connection with blood, power, and sex, but she never connects the dots as to how it evolved along these different lines. A book with a chapter or two on the cultural evolution of the color would have been fascinating, much more than the isolated stories of espionage involved with acquiring cochineal. This book really did not seem to have a focus. Schivelbush concentrated on commodities as lens through which to do social history, the Coes focused a lot on the physical commodity itself, and Mintz on the production process and acquiring a taste for sugar. I really struggled to figure out the focus of this book because for large parts Greenfield transports us to Europe to discuss trade and war there. Had she stuck to a thesis such as the idea of red being a symbol of power, I think this book would have had a lot more value. In fact, one of the most interesting points she makes is that "the invention of factory dyes fundamentally altered the equation. They made color cheap, in every sense of the word. To many people in the upper classes, color became hopelessly vulgar."(252) This makes me think of how many commodities start as upper class because they are exclusive, but as production processes and technology develop to cheapen the products cost, it slowly is acquired by the "masses." Once price goes down so that all classes can acquire the commodity, it becomes too common and affordable to be a marker of class. In many ways this is the same flow as Mintz describes, the differences are really in what forces the price down(demand? technology? free trade? etc.) The more I read about this same commodity chain, the more I wonder where are the commodities that may have started as lower class items and emanated up. For instance, lobster used to be considered "trash" seafood in early America because it was available in mass quantities, but nowadays it is a luxury good. Where are commodity histories of products whose "taste" flow from lower to upper classes? Moreover, I feel many histories are neglecting the role of the middle class as consumers of new products and pushing consumption in ways.

One really great argument of this book was that cochineal is the product of an "animal" and is not from a plant. This made me connect cochineal more to animal husbandry then to cotton or rice production and is an example of "domesticated animal" that the Americas contributed to Europe. I had never though of insects in the same way as animals, and this is important in the whole cultural exchange arguments in Atlantic World historiography.