The true commodity of A Perfect Red

Like the Coes’ True History of Chocolate, Butler’s popular history is an accessible but also multi-faceted (especially wide-ranging in the source material) read about an significant commodity in modern world history - cochineal.  Unlike the Coes’ book, which deals with a familiar product, A Perfect Red deals with a commodity that few of us come into daily contact with.  While the agents of change in this book are the people who produce and trade cochineal, I think an additional factor, or agent if you will allow it, is knowledge – secrets, in particular.  Much of Butler’s book is about protected knowledge like European guild secrets about dyes and methods, which were sometimes protected by the guild or municipality with threats of serious bodily harm.  In the Americas knowledge about the proper care and breeding of the cochineal insect remained in the hands of the Mexicans, often because the upwardly-mobile Spanish encomenderos were simply not interested in learning the arts of the common native farmers, and they often did not see the value in the volatile market associated with cochineal as a product.  The mysteries of the commodity next caught the imagination of the natural philosophers in European scientific societies who were fascinated with the question of exactly what cochineal is – animal, vegetable, or some strange combination of the two.  Frustrated at the limits of their scientific instruments these men debated and challenged each other toward a more focused study of the dyestuff.  And then the closely guarded secrets became linked to national economies, imperialism, - and eventually to national misfortunes.  I think such a successfully well-guarded national secret has scarcely been seen in world history!  So I believe that the book is partly about the spread of cochineal around the world via trade, but another commodity that is almost as significant is knowledge about cochineal – as with any commodity, this secret information was sought out, valued, traded, and fought over.