Black: The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau's Black, The History of a Color, published in English by Princeton University Press in 2008, is a scholarly cultural history of the color black and its neighboring neutrals, gray and white, in European history, by a historian whose career has specialized in exactly this kind of study across individual colors. Its authority rests on that sustained specialization and on Princeton's standing as an academic publisher, and the book is used as a reference for how a specific period and culture actually understood, produced and valued the color rather than for a timeless or universal symbolism. Its limit is scope: it is a European centered cultural history, so a claim about black's meaning in a tradition well outside that frame needs a source specializing in that tradition directly.