ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Making Blue: Cobalt Technologies and Knowledge Transfer Across Eurasia

• In Event: Minescapes 2: Mining for Blue

English Abstract

This paper surveys the state of the art in the study of cobalt-based blue technologies and proposes new directions for tracing their origins, transmission, and transformation across Eurasia. While cobalt has often been framed as a late medieval or early modern European innovation, emerging textual, archaeological, and scientific evidence points to a far longer and more interconnected history. Cobalt-rich materials were used in Persia, Central Asia, Egypt, and the Levant centuries before their large-scale adoption in fifteenth-century Venice, where zaffer and smalt became foundational to European blue-making. Parallel traditions in China and Japan further complicate linear narratives of invention.
By situating cobalt within a broader historiography of mineral colorants, the paper highlights key debates concerning provenance, technological adaptation, and artisanal mobility. It argues that cobalt’s trajectory cannot be understood without examining the cross-regional movement of practitioners, shifts in mining and purification practices, and the entanglements of commercial capitalism, imperial networks, and craft knowledge.
The paper concludes by outlining next steps for research: integrating textual history with archaeological and materials datasets; reassessing the role of Islamic and Central Asian traditions in shaping European technologies; and developing a genuinely comparative framework for understanding how cobalt became one of the most consequential colorants of the early modern world.

Author

• Anthony T Quickel, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science