To make textiles effective in their most basic function to protect from cold, heat and wetness, it is unnecessary to dye them. Yet considering social functions of cloths - signaling a certain function, status, or attitude - colors are a key feature. And as the huge expansion of textile production marking proto-industrialization and early industrialization is equivalent to an expansion of consumption beyond basic needs, it is not conceivable without referring to those attributes of clothes that rendered them desirable as objects of such advanced consumption. In a nutshell, improvement and refinement of coloring textiles was one of the preconditions for industrialization to occur the way it did.
Before the age of synthetic dyes, dyestuffs were raw materials mainly of agricultural produce, so that production could not easily be moved to other sites - for example, from tropical islands to Central Europe. As however dyestuffs exhibited an exorbitantly high ratio of value to quantity, it was comparatively easy to transfer them even on a global scale. Hence from the very beginning, dyestuffs formed an important part of the transatlantic trade, and the competition between the different dyestuffs available - whether of European or non-European produce - was tough. The way in which these global dyestuff markets developed was heavily preconditioned by the way producers, merchants, dyers and consumers approached the dyestuffs. This not only refers to the purely technical way dyes were made and used, but more systematic patterns of behavior and knowledge:
The attempts of the 17th century, especially in France, to regulate the dyeing industry in mercantile fashion allocated industrial knowledge and dispersed it - aiming at enhancing the quality of the national produce. But also - referring to a mixture of political and technological arguments hardly to disentangle - the usage of certain dyestuffs was prescribed or recommended, thus creating path dependencies. The range of dyestuffs from the Americas remained limited to the well-known commodities of indigo, cochineal and certain dyewoods - although a deeper investigation into indigenous American dyeing might have led to the discovery of other useful dyes.
The trend of the 18th century to experimental research - encouraged by public awards -, and a dialogue within a community of experts enhanced dyeing abilities, which was a precondition to replace for example New World fabrics by European produce. Later on, the inclusion of botanic and mercantile knowledge and discourses opened up possibilities to technological transfer in the field of dyestuff production. For instance, the market position of cochineal in relation to the other high-quality dyestuff, indigo, was always hampered by the monopoly of the Mexican province of Oaxaca, which accounted for all of the world’s production. From the 1780s onwards, some attempts were made to establish cochineal production elsewhere, finally succeeding in the 1820s. The quantity of cochineal available heavily expanded, prices fell, and this excellent dye became available for mass consumption.
Consequently, the markets for dyestuffs have to be embedded in the underlying systems of knowledge and technology. Thus, investigating into dyestuffs exhibits a nexus between at least four strands of historical development: Technological change, proto-industrialization, consumer revolution, and the Atlantic economy. Recognizing this nexus and understanding the dynamic interdependence of these strands is necessary to understand the origins of industrialization. Industrialization, then, turned this whole complex upside-down, when the knowledge-based production of synthetic dyes ousted the natural dyes and centered the global production of dyestuffs in Germany and Switzerland.