Yellow: The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau's Yellow, The History of a Color, published in English by Princeton University Press in 2019, continues the same historian's career long cultural history of individual colors in European tradition, here tracing yellow's association with gold and light alongside its historical use as a mark of shame and exclusion. Its authority rests on the same sustained specialization and academic publishing standing as Pastoureau's companion volumes on other colors. Its limit is the same as those companion volumes: a European centered cultural history rather than a global comparative study, so a claim about yellow's meaning in a tradition outside that frame, an East Asian association with imperial authority for instance, needs a source specializing in that tradition rather than this book's own European material.