ABSTRACT
In English, the word “orange” designates the color phenomenon that occurs, in the visible spectrum, at a wavelength of about 585–620 nanometers. The word “orange” designates also the fruit of the citrus species in the family Rutaceae. The fruit names the color and vice versa. The same co-naming of fruit and color is true of many European languages. But the correlation stops there. Elsewhere in the world, oranges are not always “orange” in color and they have different names. The fruit and the color diverged or never in fact coincided. From a global perspective, the word “orange” does not designate a single phenomenon. That phenomenon differs from place to place. The word “orange” designates a story of travel and translation. It is the story of a fruit and a plant in motion. This entry tells the story of oranges in the Renaissance World, with particular attention to their migration from Southeast Asia westwards to the Americas by way of southern Europe. Taking the segmented form of the orange for its inspiration, it tells this story in six segments, each keyed to different aspects of the fruit and the color as a phenomenon: Origins; Name and color; Cultivation; Trade and transport; Consumption; Anecdote/story. Informed by approaches in environmental history and anthropology, this entry maps the elaborated use values of orange, literal and figurative, to tell the story of how humans and oranges remade one another.
