A Perfect Red

In beginning A Perfect Red, I was excited to read about a new commodity that I was completely unfamiliar with. Like those early users of cochineal, I had no idea that the dye was created by an insect, and I found the processes of raising and harvesting the animal to be fascinating. In addition, I also found the first chapters to be interesting because they included discussions about the power and importance of color in determining class status and prestige. In the modern day, we take the vast range of colors in our everyday life for granted, forgetting that producing such colors was once a difficult and expensive endeavor. For example, in opening my closet to find a shirt I could pull out twenty different colored garments, something that would have shocked people of centuries past. Five hundred years ago, owning three different shades of red would have been unheard of. The costs of acquiring the dye and the physical labor needed to color the shirt would have put it out of my price range, leaving it open for only the filthy rich of society. Nonetheless, like John, I was a bit put off by the disconnected and dizzying organization of this narrative. In beginning the book, I believed that more attention would be given to both producers and consumers of cochineal. However, as I quickly discovered, the product was absent from the narrative altogether at certain points. Discussions of espionage and trade competition sometimes overshadowed the product itself and I was disappointed by that fact. While I understand that Greenfield was attempting to make the production of color and textiles important by showing how people fought over their sources and competed to find new alternatives, I was at some points lost in her biographies of famous chemists, etc.

Overall, I am not entirely sure whether this book will stay on my list. I liked how cochineal was used to highlight the “life” of the commodity by showing its rise and fall in price and importance with changes in the production process, but I wanted the book to have more of a “why” factor. For me, while Greenfield loosely ties the product to the revolutionizing of global trade and the colonization of the new world, I think she could have done a bit more to solidify its value. Instead, it seems that she leaves readers to make their own judgments about the significance of cochineal by the examples of espionage, discovery, and competition she provides. Maybe I just wanted her to be more assertive (like Mintz) in proving that her focus on that exclusive product had a great deal of importance to the understanding and development of history and that it was worth reading about at all. People were at the center and their desires gave meaning to the commodity, but I was hoping for more reasoning behind their pursuit of cochineal. The textile industry and colonial power were motives, but why was red dye so much more important than other colors? I believe more explanation of its “power” would have left me satisfied, as John pointed out in his blog, because as a reader I could have then understood why red was the elite color of choice. To begin her epilogue, Greenfield states that Perkin’s discovery of mauve “profoundly altered the way that human perceived color – a transformation so subtle, yet so all-encompassing, that we have almost completely forgotten that bright color was for centuries a key symbol of majesty and privilege” (248). With a conclusion such as that, more time and effort should have been given to displaying the basis of that claim, and to demonstrating the importance of red in society.