The commodity most often associated with the South is cotton, and understandably so. During the early nineteenth century, cotton reconfigured the region economically, politically, and demographically. It spurred expansion of plantation agriculture to the south and west, as well as exponential growth of chattel bondage. But cotton, Andrea Feeser argues, was only one of several commodities that shaped southern slavery. Before it, and then alongside it, was indigo.

Indigo's utility as a blue dye had been known since ancient times, but not until the late sixteenth century did western European nations experiment with commercial production in Indonesia, India, the Caribbean, and ultimately southern North America. Interest in the crop expanded, Feeser suggests, when blue became the color of couture in the eighteenth century. Although Carolina indigo suffered from an “uneven reputation” compared to French or Spanish sources, demand was high enough to ensure a ready market (p. 17). In large part, Feeser asserts, this was because blue was so universally desirable. It appeared on the embroidered silk gowns of the elite as well as on naval uniforms, Native American trade goods, and even—although less often—the clothing of the enslaved workers who grew and processed it. All of these peoples, as well as the planters and merchants who organized local manufacture and transatlantic distribution, figure into Feeser's narrative. So too do the lesser-studied economic impacts of indigo, including the forced acquisition of Native territory, the physical toll on enslaved workers, class emulation and subsequent policing of sartorial self-fashioning, and the concentration of capital from the work of the many into the hands of a few.

At first glance, indigo seems an unlikely subject for a commodity history. While a key secondary industry in many tropical and subtropical regions, it never approached the profitability of sugar, rice, coffee, or cotton. But what indigo did well was grow alongside all of these goods, and many more besides. It required little land or start-up capital and did not rely on elaborate milling and distilling technologies. In this sense, it was the perfect starter industry for prospective planters seeking a foothold in land ownership, particularly in the hardscrabble, largely unsettled colony of South Carolina in the early eighteenth century.

Red, White, and Black Make Blue is an ambitious project, particularly for a slim volume. The book is divided into three broad sections, each less than fifty pages. The first sketches out the Atlantic textile market, especially Native American and enslaved participation in this system. Section two focuses on indigo production and what it required from planters (botanical knowledge and financial backing), Native peoples (land), and enslaved laborers (preexisting knowledge about dye cultivation). Section three revisits the input of Native and African peoples through two case studies.

On the one hand, this concise volume is ideal for undergraduate teaching. The writing is clean and accessible, and chapters rarely exceed twenty pages. But it also means that some sections pose more questions than they can answer. In chapter two, for example, Feeser argues that clothing was both a system of social control and a form of agency. To illustrate her point, she draws on two descriptions of livery, the embellished uniforms worn by servants in England and slaves in the American colonies. In Europe, livery was a visible sign of servitude, intended to bolster the reputation of an employer at the same time that it demeaned the person stationed to open his door or drive his carriage (p. 31). On the next page, however, livery still enhanced the status of slave owners, but it also became an important marker for the enslaved who wore it, serving to “separate house slaves from field slaves” (p. 32). How does the same costume humble a servant and elevate a slave? More problematic, however, is that eighteenth-century livery was as likely to be red, yellow, or brown. Blue was not the exclusive—nor even the dominant—color. So what does a discussion of livery contribute specifically to a study of indigo or the color blue? It is difficult to know for certain, and Feeser devotes only three pages to the subject.

The same concerns arise in Feeser's assessment of Native American trade goods and the sartorial expression of the enslaved. On the one hand, colors and animals clearly embodied particular ideas or qualities. East is yellow, red is family, green is nature, and black is the setting sun and illness. Blue is important, too: it (or purple) “is attached to winds, cold, or calm” (p. 33). But often the association between the color and the main subject of Feeser's argument, be it Cherokee belief systems or West African beads, seems coincidental rather than fundamental. Southeastern Native Americans clothed themselves “in part in blue,” and the Cherokee associated a great many objects, plants, and meanings “directly or indirectly with blue” (pp. 33, 35). Likewise, West Africans might have desired richly dyed blue cloth, but they also sought green and yellow, and most coveted was a vibrant red. Feeser's rich descriptions of fashion, in other words, sometimes overshadow the central thrust of her thesis, which is the significance of indigo in shaping the power relations between red, white, and black people in South Carolina.

That being said, Feeser's work makes two important scholarly interventions. First, she specifically moves beyond the experiences of planters to explore how Native Americans and African slaves contributed to the success of both indigo and South Carolina. Second, she makes important use of microhistory. Indeed, it is when she focuses on particular people that this book is at its best. Her final two chapters—which flesh out the stories of Indian Johnson, a mixed race overseer for the Laurens family in Florida, and John Williams, an enslaved man trusted by and integral to the success of the Pinckney family in South Carolina—are marvelous recoveries of the kinds of people whose lives are far too often lost in the historical and archival record.