this picture shows some of the stages of indigo farming . Study it carefully and then write two different short stories from the point of the people in the pictures.
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Answer:
The tropical climate is good for indigo plantation. By the thirteenth century, Indian indigo was being used in Italy, France and Britain. But the price of indigo was very high and hence a small amount of Indian indigo could reach the European market.
Woad is another plant which is used for making violet and blue dyes. Wood is a plant of temperate zones and hence was easily available in Europe. Woad was grown in northern Italy, southern France and in parts of Germany and Britain. The woad producers in Europe were worried by the competition from indigo and hence pressurized their governments to ban the import of indigo.
But indigo was preferred by the cloth dyers. While indigo produced a rich blue colour, woad produced pale and dull blue. By the seventeenth century, European cloth producers pressurized their governments to relax the ban on indigo import.
This engraving, also from the 1785 Henry Mouzon map cartouche shows all the main steps in the production of indigo. The plants were harvested in bundles before the stems became woody, then immediately soaked in vats of water, where they quickly fermented in the summer heat. The foul-smelling fermented liquid was then drained off into a second set of vats, where it was beaten with paddles to stir air into the mixture and speed up the oxidation process. When small particles of a blue precipitate formed, the beating stopped, the dye master let the particles settle to the bottom of the vat, and the liquid was drained off the top into another vat. The blue mud-like sludge at the bottom of the second vat was then shoveled into sacks to squeeze out liquid, was dried, and cut into small cubes and packed in barrels for shipment to England. Production of indigo created enormous wealth for many South Carolinians in the last half of the 18th century, particularly in the Winyah Bay area of Georgetown. The American revolution made indigo less profitable, because it ended both the English bounty system and access to the English market to sell it.
Courtesy of the Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina.