Watercolor painting to paints that use water-soluble, complex carbohydrates as a binder. Originally (in the 16th to 18th centuries), watercolor binders were sugars and/or hide glues, but since the 19th century, the preferred binder is natural gum arabic, with glycerin and/or honey as additives to improve plasticity and solubility of the binder, and with other chemicals added to improve product shelf life. The term "bodycolor" refers to paint that is opaque rather than transparent. It usually refers to opaque watercolor, known as gouache. Modern acrylic paints use a acrylic resin dispersion as a binder. Watercolor painters before the turn of the 18th
Gum arabic supply of the commodity, providing an early spur for the conquest of French West Africa. As the Atlantic slave trade weakened in the early 19th century, The Emirate of Trarza and its neighbors, in what is today southern Mauritania, collected taxes on trade, especially gum arabic, which the French were purchasing in ever-increasing quantities for its use in industrial fabric production. West Africa had become the sole supplier of world acacia gum by the 18th century, and its export at the French colony of Saint-Louis doubled in the decade of 1830 alone. Taxes, and a threat to bypass Saint-Louis by