Brazil's name comes from the tree called brazilwood, used during 350 years to embellish with red color the clothing of powerful people in Europe, and for that reason it turned to be one of Brazil's export riches, collected to a large extent. Over those years, it even became the subject of a number of policies issued by Portuguese, French and Dutch governments; and produced funds to pay for the external debt created in order to enable the country's independence. That is why it was strongly endangered. This book tells this story and presents the present situation of the red wood, including its use for good music, onde the best violin bows in the world are made of brazilwood.
Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World. In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.
The Pigment Compendium Dictionary is a comprehensive information source for scientists, art historians, conservators and forensic specialists. Drawn together from extensive analystical research into the physical and chemical properties of pigments, this essential reference to pigment names and synonyms describes the inter-relationship of different names and terms. The Dictionary covers the field worldwide from pre-history to the present day, from rock art to interior decoration, from ethnography to contemporary art. Drawing on hundreds of hard-to-obtain documentary sources as well as modern scientific data each term is discussed in detail, giving both its context and composition.
This volume explores the global history of natural dyes from the Americas and asks how their production and trade have shaped globalisation since early modern times. From their extraction and processing to their overseas trade, it shows how this commodity contributed to the rise of the textile industry and consumption in Europe, the United States and Latin America. In doing so, it sheds new light on the emergence of a global economy. Spanning several centuries, Colours, Commodities and the Birth of Globalization takes the reader from 1500 through the industrial revolutions of Europe and the United States and culminates in the synthetic age of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Ranging from the indigo trade in the Atlantic to the secrets of the Indian production of cochineal, the chapters in this collection transcend nationally bounded historical narratives and explore transoceanic dynamics, imperial ambitions and the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge and techniques to better understand the birth of globalization.
