Cochineal Husbandry in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and India

• In Event: Growing Crops in Difficult Places: Struggles to Produce in Human Landscapes

Abstract

During the eighteenth-century, the Spanish Empire held a virtual monopoly on the production of cochineal, a lucrative red dye commodity sourced from insects grown on cacti largely in the south of modern day Mexico. The cochineal insect had been domesticated and grown by the indigenous peoples of central America for centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. It was widely known as ‘nocheztli’ or ‘blood of the nopal cactus’. Cochineal was situated in a cultural matrix which influenced the insects’ complex husbandry and development as a domesticated species in southern Mexico.
In the late eighteenth-century the British East India Company attempted to turn southern India and Bengal into production zones for cochineal (Fray, 2012). In making India a major producer of cochineal the Company hoped to turn a substantial profit and break the Spanish monopoly. British promoters of this scheme assumed similarities between India and Mexico in areas of landscape, peoples, cultures, plants and insects. Critically British colonial promoters believed the landscapes and indigenous peoples of southern Mexico would be interchangeable with the landscapes and peoples of southern India and Bengal. These assumptions led to the failure of the project. Even in Guatemala, geographically next to Mexico, the cochineal industry had been impossible to transport until native Oaxacan cochineal growers had accompanied their insects and taught methods of husbandry. The movement of the cochineal industry to Guatemala in a similar time period offers a contrast to the failed British project in India. Without the technology and extensive knowledge base involved in the husbandry of cochineal insects it was difficult for the British even to identify the correct insects. The project also disregarded the complexities of East Indian cultures with their own well established local traditions of using Asian dye insects.

Author

• Deirdre Moore, Harvard University