Brazilwood and dyeing

The Indigenous peoples of the Tupinambá and/or Tupi languages in the Americas called brazilwood Ybyrá-Pytanga , or “reddish stick”. Like the Asian peoples, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas knew cooking techniques to produce the red color from the variations of this wood, which was already used as a dye. This knowledge of the forest allowed the production of dye colors, as well as the expansion of coloring techniques. The use of brazilwood long precedes the beginning of Portuguese colonization in the New World, from Antiquity to the fifteenth century. Records of this wood tell us that it is of Asian origin, but it gained notoriety in the global dye market around the end of the fifteenth century, with predatory extraction in the Americas. Through various administrative and customs records produced in Brazil and Portugal during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as well as private documents of merchants, the goal of this chapter is to contribute to the history of the extraction and trade of brazilwood originating from the current northeastern region of Brazil, highlighting the global traces of its consumption and uses.