White: The History of a Color

White is often treated as the absence of colour — the blank, the neutral, the default. Pastoureau's central argument is that this is a modern misconception with a specific historical origin. Before the seventeenth century, white's status as a full colour was never contested. From antiquity through the Middle Ages, white formed a chromatic triad with red and black that was central to art and social life. The true opposite of white, in that system, was not black but red.

Newton and the physics of light changed that perception. Once white came to be understood as the sum of all colours — or their absence, depending on the medium — it lost its place as a colour in its own right and became a kind of non-colour. The symbolic history of white ran separately from this scientific demotion: it accumulated associations with purity, virginity, innocence, wisdom, peace, and cleanliness that it still carries today.

White is the most recent full volume in the series and in some ways the most quietly surprising — because white appears so simple and turns out to be so layered. The comparison with black is inevitable, and the two books reward reading together: black was always culturally overdetermined, white always considered self-evident, and both assumptions turn out to be wrong.

Part of Pastoureau's colour history series, alongside Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, and Black.

Published by Princeton University Press, 2023.