Spice trade

• 1. Introduction

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  The spice trade carried cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and other fragrant goods across oceans and deserts for thousands of years. For most of that time, buyers in Europe had no real idea where any of it actually grew. Spices such as cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, star anise, clove, and turmeric had already reached the Near East before the Christian era began. The merchants who carried these goods told deliberately fantastic tales about their true origins. Hiding the source was good business, since a myth could be worth as much as the cargo itself.

  Who first dared to sail the open routes that carried these goods from island to island, and continent to continent? Which empires, cities, and merchant families fought hardest to control the flow of pepper and cloves? What happened once European sailors finally set out to find the source for themselves? And what survives today, in the words people speak and the food they eat, from a trade that once reshaped the map of the world?

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• 2. Sailors Before History

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  Long before anyone wrote it down, people around the Indian Ocean and across Island Southeast Asia were already trading spices alongside obsidian, seashells, and gemstones. That practice reaches as far back as the 10th millennium BC. The first written record of the trade comes from the ancient Egyptians. In the 3rd millennium BC, they traded with the Land of Punt. That region is thought to have covered northern Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, and the Red Sea coast of Sudan.

  By around 1500 BC, Austronesian sailors from Maritime Southeast Asia had built the first true maritime trade network across the Indian Ocean. They reached south India and Sri Lanka by roughly 600 BC. They brought new kinds of watercraft with them: catamarans, outrigger boats, lashed-lug boats, sewn boats, and sampans. Alongside these came crops like coconuts, sandalwood, bananas, and sugarcane, plus spices native to the Maluku Islands, cloves and nutmeg. The same network eventually linked the material cultures of India and China, through what became known as the Maritime Silk Road.

  Indonesian sailors carried cinnamon and cassia to East Africa in catamarans and outrigger boats, steering by the westerly winds of the Indian Ocean. Their network stretched further still, reaching the Arabian Peninsula. It helped drive the Austronesian settlement of Madagascar by the first half of the first millennium AD.

  By the first millennium BC, Arabs, Phoenicians, and Indians were trading gold, precious stones, exotic animal leather, ebony, and pearls, by both sea and land. One sea route ran through the Red Sea, from Bab-el-Mandeb to Berenice Troglodytica in Upper Egypt, then overland to the Nile, then by boat to Alexandria. A parallel overland path, the Incense Route, carried Indian spices, ebony, silk, and fine textiles toward the Mediterranean.

  In the second half of the first millennium BC, tribes across South and West Arabia seized control of the overland spice route to the Mediterranean. Among them were Ma'in, Qataban, Hadhramaut, Sheba, and Himyar, and the trade made them rich. Ancient Greeks called South Arabia Eudaemon Arabia, meaning the elated Arabia, and it reportedly stood on Alexander the Great's agenda before he died. In the north, the Nabateans controlled the route crossing the Negev from Petra to Gaza.

  In the late 2nd century BC, Greek sailors serving Ptolemaic Egypt learned a new trick from Indian navigators. One of these navigators, Hippalus, showed them how to sail directly from Aden to India's west coast using the monsoon winds. The Greeks then took over the sea trade running through Red Sea ports. Spices turn up in biblical narratives, and in Greek and Roman literature alike. Tamil texts record Greeks buying large sacks of black pepper from India. Many recipes in the 1st-century Roman cookbook Apicius call for the spice as well. The trade shrank after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But renewed demand for ginger, black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg brought it back in the centuries that followed.

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• 3. Arab Middlemen

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  Rome held a share of the spice trade during the 5th century. That role did not survive into the Middle Ages. The rise of Islam changed the trade significantly. Radhanite Jewish and Arab merchants, many of them from Egypt, took over moving goods through the Levant to Europe. At times, Jewish merchants held a virtual monopoly on the spice trade across large parts of Western Europe.

  The spice trade poured wealth into the Abbasid Caliphate, wealth substantial enough to help inspire the legend of Sinbad the Sailor. Merchants and sailors of the period would often set out from the port city of Basra. After calling at many ports along the way, they would return to sell their goods, spices included, in Baghdad. The reputations of nutmeg and cinnamon in particular trace back to these early merchants.

  During the 7th and 8th centuries, merchants in Arabia and Persia depended heavily on India's commercial ties with Southeast Asia. Arab traders, mostly descendants of sailors from Yemen and Oman, came to dominate the maritime routes across the Indian Ocean. They tapped source regions in the Far East and linked to the secretive spice islands, the Maluku and Banda Islands. A Javanese chronicle from 1365 mentions the Moluccas by name, calling them Maloko. Navigational works from the 14th and 15th centuries contain the first clear Arab references to the islands.

  The Arab navigator Sulaima al-Mahr described the source of these goods directly. "East of Timor, where sandalwood is found, are the islands of Bandam, and they are the islands where nutmeg and mace are found. The islands of cloves are called Maluku."

  Moluccan spices travelled first to trading hubs in India, passing through the port of Kozhikode in Kerala and through Sri Lanka. From there they moved west across Arabian ports, to Ormus in the Persian Gulf and Jeddah on the Red Sea. Sometimes they continued on to East Africa, where they were used for purposes that included burial rites. The Abbasids relied on Alexandria, Damietta, Aden, and Siraf as entry points for trade with India and China. Merchants arriving in Aden paid tribute in musk, camphor, ambergris, and sandalwood to Ibn Ziyad, the sultan of Yemen.

  Indian spice exports appear in the writings of Ibn Khurdadhbeh in 850 and al-Ghafiqi in 1150. They also appear in the works of Ishak bin Imran in 907 and Al Kalkashandi in the 14th century. The Chinese traveler Xuanzang even mentions a town called Puri, where, in his words, merchants depart for distant countries.

  From the 8th to the 15th century, a cluster of maritime republics held a monopoly on Europe's trade with the Middle East. They included Venice, Pisa, Genoa, Amalfi, Gaeta, Ancona, and Ragusa. Their trade in silk and spices, along with incense, herbs, drugs, and opium, made these city-states extremely wealthy. Spices ranked among the most expensive and sought-after goods of the Middle Ages, prized in medicine as well as in the kitchen. Every bit of it arrived from Asia or Africa, distributed through Europe by Venetian and other navigators. That Arab-to-Venice relay held until the Seljuk Turks rose to power in 1090. The Ottoman Turks seized the route again by 1453, a squeeze that would soon send European sailors looking for another way in entirely.

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• 4. Portugal's Ocean Gambit

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  The Crusades, and then Europe's Age of Discovery, turned the spice trade, black pepper most of all, into a prize that European nations fought hard to control. Portugal was the first country to attempt a full sea route around Africa. It had explored the northern African coast since the early 15th century, under Prince Henry the Navigator. In 1488, an expedition led by Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope for the first time.

  Nine years later, in 1497, Manuel I of Portugal sent four vessels east under the command of the navigator Vasco da Gama. The fleet sailed on past the Cape, along Africa's eastern coast to Malindi, then across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. Calicut sat on the Malabar Coast in Kerala, South India, and served as the capital of the local Zamorin rulers. The wealth of the Indies now lay open to Europeans, and the Portuguese Empire became the earliest European seaborne empire built on the spice trade.

  In 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca for Portugal, seizing what was then the center of Asian trade. From there he sent diplomatic and exploratory missions further east, including to the Moluccas. Learning the secret location of the Banda Islands, then the world's only source of nutmeg, he dispatched an expedition led by António de Abreu. Abreu's ships reached Buru, Ambon, and Seram before arriving at Banda in early 1512, becoming the first Europeans to set foot there.

  Between 1507 and 1515, Albuquerque tried to choke off the old Arab-controlled routes running from western India to the Mediterranean. He did this by capturing strategic bases in the Persian Gulf and at the mouth of the Red Sea. By the early 16th century, Portugal held complete control of the African sea route. That network linked three oceans, running from the Moluccas in the Pacific through Malacca, Kerala, and Sri Lanka, all the way to Lisbon. Yet Portugal's grip still depended on ancient ports and hostile territories that were never easy to hold. That left an opening a rival crown was eager to exploit.

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• 5. Spain's Westward Gamble

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  The Crown of Castile funded Christopher Columbus's expedition specifically to compete with Portugal for access to Asia's spices. Columbus instead made landfall on the island of Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti, rather than reaching the Indies. The search for an Asian route was postponed for several more years.

  After Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, the Spanish Crown backed a westward voyage under Ferdinand Magellan. The goal was to reach Asia by sailing across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans instead. On the 21st of October 1520, Magellan's fleet crossed the strait at the southern tip of South America that now bears his name. That crossing opened the Pacific Ocean to European ships for the first time.

  On the 16th of March 1521, the fleet reached the Philippines, and soon after, the Spice Islands themselves. Magellan died in the Philippines, and the navigator Juan Sebastian Elcano took command of what remained of the expedition. Elcano drove the ships across the Indian Ocean and back to Spain, arriving in 1522 aboard the last surviving vessel, the Victoria. Decades later, this voyage led to the Manila Galleon trade, the first westward spice route to Asia.

  In 1571, Spain opened the first trans-Pacific route, linking its territories in the Philippines and Mexico and served by the Manila Galleon. That route lasted until 1815. For the next two and a half centuries, Spain controlled a trade network spanning Asia, the Americas, and Europe. A single global spice route now ran from Manila in the Philippines, through Acapulco in Mexico, to Seville in Spain. The Dutch, meanwhile, found a way around both empires' bottlenecks. They pioneered a direct ocean route from the Cape of Good Hope straight to the Sunda Strait in Indonesia.

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• 6. Cultural Currents

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  Channels such as the Bay of Bengal served as a bridge for cultural and commercial exchange between very different peoples. This happened even as nations fought for control along the many spice routes. Traces of that exchange survive in language itself. The words Tamil pandavu, Telugu padava, and Kannada padahu, all meaning ship, trace back to a shared Austronesian root, Proto-Hesperonesian padaw, meaning sailboat. Related words include Javanese perahu, Kadazan padau, Maranao padaw, Cebuano paraw, Samoan folau, Hawaiian halau, and Maori wharau. The underlying technology spread from Austronesian sailors to India, the Middle East, East Africa, and China. That technology included plank-sewn hulls, catamarans, outrigger boats, and possibly the lateen sail.

  Austronesians also introduced a wide range of crops to southern India, Sri Lanka, and eastern Africa. These included bananas, Pacific domesticated coconuts, Dioscorea yams, wetland rice, sandalwood, giant taro, and Polynesian arrowroot. They also brought ginger, lengkuas, tailed pepper, betel, areca nut, and sugarcane into these same regions.

  Hindu and Buddhist religious establishments across Southeast Asia became closely tied to trade and commerce. They were entrusted with large funds, later used for estate management, craftsmanship, and the promotion of trading activity. Buddhism in particular travelled alongside the maritime trade, spreading coinage, art, and literacy as it went. Islam reached maritime Southeast Asia in the 10th century, and Muslim merchants became central to the trade. Christian missionaries, including Saint Francis Xavier, later helped spread Christianity through the East. Christianity and Islam competed to become the dominant faith of the Moluccas, though the islands' own people accommodated aspects of both with ease.

  Portuguese colonial settlements drew traders from across the region: Gujarati banias, South Indian Chettis, Syrian Christians, Chinese traders from Fujian province, and Arabs from Aden. Southeast Asia in turn borrowed epics, languages, and cultural customs from India, and later from China. Knowledge of Portuguese became essential for anyone doing business in the trade. The colonial pepper trade reshaped everyday life in both Europe and Kerala. Along with colonialism, it brought early capitalism to India's Malabar Coast, changing local cultures of work and caste.

  Indian merchants carried Indian cuisine to Southeast Asia, especially to what is now Malaysia and Indonesia, where spice mixtures and black pepper became popular. Southeast Asian cuisine and crops moved the other way too, reaching India and Sri Lanka. Rice cakes and coconut milk-based dishes remain dominant there to this day. Intermarriage between Europeans and Indians spread culinary skills such as baking into Indian kitchens. By 1811, Indian food adapted to European tastes had become visible in England. Exclusive establishments began catering to the curious and to those returning from India.

  Opium moved through these same networks, alongside the pepper and cinnamon. Some of the merchants who built fortunes on spice grew just as dependent on the drug they carried beside it.

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