Perfect Red

My impressions of A Perfect Red seem to match up with what other people have already posted. As a history, it is an enjoyable work, and it is definitely something that is accessible to a lay audience. As a commodity history, it falls short of our class definition. It has a narrative structure similar to that of the History of Chocolate. In all honesty, as I began to read, I kept asking myself if I'd actually picked up the correct book, because it did not read like any of the other books that we have read so far.

Like John and Ben, I felt that there was too much background history, too much about what was going on in Europe with war and trade for this to be truly a commodity history. I feel like this book is really much more about the Spanish empire and European exploration than it is about the commodity of cochineal, or even the color red. It moves too much between different tacks. Greenfield begins with a discussion of the desire for red dye, and how it is made, to a narrative about conquistadors to a political history of the Spanish monarchy and one really wonders where her focus is. On page 166, she says "Cochineal, for these imperial powers, was part and parcel of a larger campaign of colonial development.", and I think that is the crux of her history, rather than it being a commodity history.