National flags play an important role in our everyday lives, and the color and design display certain aspects of the nation that it is representing. Recently, I was looking at a map when I noticed a few patterns about the color of national flags. Only one flag has purple on it, and a lot of them have the color scheme of red, white, and blue: Australia, Chile, Cuba, Croatia, France, Iceland, Laos, Liberia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Samoa, Thailand, UK, US, Slovenia, and Slovakia just to name a few. How can so many countries with seemingly no connection have the same color scheme on their flags? Well, it all started with heraldry.
European flags usually followed the practice of heraldry. In heraldry, there are two metals symbolized with white (silver) and yellow (gold). This practice discourages the use of two metals or two colors juxtaposed on a flag. This means that white could not be next to yellow, and a color (red, green, blue, purple, and black) could not be positioned next to another color. In the case of the flag of the United Kingdom (pictured to the left), the white stripes, which are metals, are placed so that none of the colors, red and blue, touch each other. This flag, however, is also a combination of three flags. The flag of England, the flag of Scotland, and Ireland. Each of these flags is a heraldic cross, meaning that even the three separate flags follow the rules of heraldry. However, this doesn’t explain why so many countries chose red, white (silver), and blue. The colors that these countries had to choose from were red, green, blue, purple, and black. Purple was exceptionally hard to make and was usually reserved for royalty, so they couldn’t mass produce it on flags. Black was also hard to make. This leaves red, green, blue, and the metals. At this point, the choice that the countries made was probably based on personal aesthetic preference, and many of the countries chose red, blue, and silver.
Another reason that this color scheme got so popular was that these big European countries were conquering other nations. For example, many countries in Oceania were conquered by England, so a lot of those countries’ flags feature the Union Jack (see above). This includes Australia and New Zealand. A lot of the newer countries abandoned the rules of heraldry, and you can only find it in the older European countries.
Many national flags use the laws of heraldry, and those laws dictated how to arrange colors and metals on a flag. These rules were lost to time, and newly formed countries began to use colors that used to be harder to make like black and purple.
Works Cited
"Flag." Britannica School, Encyclopædia Britannica, 10 Oct. 2019, school.eb.com/levels/middle/article/flag/34458. Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
"Union Jack." The Royal Household, www.royal.uk/union-jack. Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
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