Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Perhaps no other color in history has been so celebrated and so reviled as the color purple. Although it has come to be known as the shade of royalty, the workers who labored to make the mucus-based dye in the Roman Mediterranean were often viewed as lowly and as smelly as the mollusks they harvested. During the later Roman empire, these workers were even subject to state control within a caste-like system that made their jobs hereditary. If we look to the history of another purplish hue, indigo, we see a similar regulation of the labor force — and the very bodies — of those enslaved workers used to produce it in the Antebellum South. From diamonds to coal to Tyrian purple to indigo, the workers who create luxury goods often do not enjoy the same status as their products. This lecture looks at the archaeological and literary evidence for these often-invisible workers in order to reconstruct the lives of ancient dye workers, while also reminding us of the enslaved labor that continues to create the products we use or the buildings we admire even today.

Sarah Bond, Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa

Please email Prof. Eleanor Laughlin (elaughlin@ufl.edu) for Zoom link.

Image citation: Blue kerchief from Tutankhamun’s embalming cache (working Date: 1336–1327 B.C.); the linen kerchief, dyed with indigo, may have belonged to Tutankhamun when he was a child; Egyptian ArtCulture (photography by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)