Substitutes for Colonial Goods

The question of the dye industry led one naturally to the problem of finding substitutes for the more or less inaccessible, and always condemned, colonial goods. It was quite natural that the work of the French government and its organs, perhaps Chaptal above all, should be directed primarily to this point.

That measures were urgently needed here with regard to dyeing substances can be deduced from the great rise in prices, which, at least at Leipzig, was sometimes more marked than for raw cotton: for indigo the price was ordinarily twice as high, but sometimes even three, four, or five times as high, while for cochineal, dyewood and other dyes the price was usually doubled. By far the most important dyeing substances were the two first-named: indigo and cochineal. As a matter of fact, this was no great novelty in either case, for people had long used two native dyeing plants, woad (Isatis tinctoria) and madder (Rubia tinctorum), for the production of blue and red, respectively, but it was now regarded as a great advance that the chemists had been able to establish the presence of the same dyeing substance, indigo, in woad as existed in Indian and American indigofera. Expectations, particularly as to the domestic production of indigo, were raised extremely high. People expected to be forever independent of the colonial product, and even as late as 1818, that is to say, after the Restoration, Chaptal cherished the hope that France, by means of her domestic production of indigo, would even get an export article that might compensate her for the profitable trade in colonial goods that she had lost when in 1814 and 1815 she had had to sacrifice the greater part of her colonial empire. In reality, however, the results were very small, and they had no importance whatever for the future. The cultivation of 32,000 hectares with woad had been prescribed; Indian indigo had been declared an English product and its importation had consequently been forbidden; three imperial indigo factories had been founded and prizes had been awarded to private individuals; but even as late as 1813 the output came to only 6,000 kgs., apart from 500 kgs, of Indian indigo (called 'anil indigo') from an Italian plantation. Only one single factory survived 1814; and the whole episode vanished without leaving any traces behind. As is well known, it is by synthetic methods that substitutes have been found in our own day for the natural dyeing substances, indigo and alisarin (the dyeing substance contained in madder); and during the recent war the reverse state of things prevailed to such an extent that Great Britain had sometimes to fall back on natural indigo to take the place of the unobtainable synthetic indigo from Germany.

With regard to the other colonial goods, the substitutes for coffee and tobacco offer us no interest other than that which lies in 'looking into one's own windows'. Among coffee substitutes were included chicory, dried carrots, acorns, sunflower seeds, and sugar beets; as substitutes for tobacco were used leaves of gooseberries and chestnuts and milfoil (Achillea millefolium); and the scope of the production of Europe as a whole is illustrated by the fact that Denmark alone had seventeen factories for making coffee substitutes.