Indigo – History in the Margins

Eliza Lucas Pinckney Gets the (Indigo) Blues

By Pamela | August 18, 2026 |

Let’s get this out of the way up front: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) owned enslaved people, and it was her exploitation of their labor that made her achievements as an agricultural innovator possible. Eliza Lucas was born on Antigua, which was then part of the British Leeward Islands, where she grew up on one of…

Blue Mutiny

By Pamela | October 7, 2016 |

In the fall of 1859, two years after the violent uprisings in Northern Indian known as the Indian Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion,* thousands of peasant-farmers (ryots) in the Indian province of Bengal refused to accept cash advances to plant indigo crops in the spring–an act of resistance that became known as the Blue Mutiny. Property…