Indigo

A dye crop, Indigofera tinctoria, true indigo, likely domesticated in India, cultivated for centuries for the deep blue dye extracted from its leaves through a fermentation and oxidation process. Indigo became a major export and plantation crop under European colonial rule, and in British-administered Bengal during the nineteenth century its cultivation became infamous for coercive contract systems that forced peasant farmers to grow indigo on their best land at unprofitable fixed prices set by European planters, conditions that provoked the Indigo Revolt of 1859 to 1860, a significant episode of organized peasant resistance to colonial agricultural policy. Natural indigo cultivation declined sharply after the invention of synthetic indigo dye in the late nineteenth century, though a smaller natural indigo industry persists in India and elsewhere.