How can we study the historical experience of color? This paper argues that computational methods allow us to retrieve, contrast, and compare historical color palettes from extensive collections of digitized images. We use computational methods to analyze color use in the representation of two worlds, the orient and the occident, in two early-twentieth-century collections: 6,500 photochromes (1890-1910) and 65,000 autochromes (1909-1931).