The spice trade

For thousands of years, spices such as black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger were among the most prized goods in world trade. They flavoured food, but they were also used in medicine, perfume, religious rituals and embalming, and they signalled wealth and status.

Their value came from scarcity and distance. Many spices grew only in particular tropical regions: black pepper in southwestern India, cinnamon in Sri Lanka, and cloves and nutmeg only on a few small islands in the Moluccas, now part of Indonesia. By the time they reached distant markets, they had passed through many hands, each adding to the price.

Spices reached Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean in ancient times. Arab and Indian traders controlled much of the maritime trade, sailing the Indian Ocean with the monsoon winds, which blow from the southwest in summer and the northeast in winter.

The Roman Empire imported large quantities of pepper from India. Roman writers such as Pliny the Elder complained about the gold flowing east to pay for luxuries, and hoards of Roman coins have been found in southern India.

• Muslim merchants dominated trade across the Indian Ocean, linking East Africa, Arabia, India and Southeast Asia.
• Spices passed through ports such as Calicut, Malacca, Aden and Alexandria.
• Venice grew rich as the main European distributor, buying spices in Egyptian and Levantine ports.
• Chinese fleets under Admiral Zheng He visited Indian Ocean ports in the early fifteenth century.
• Each intermediary added cost, so spices sold in Europe at many times their price at the source.

The desire to bypass these middlemen motivated European voyages of exploration. Vasco da Gama's arrival in India in 1498 opened a direct sea route for Portugal, which then seized key ports including Goa in 1510 and Malacca in 1511 to control the trade by force.

Christopher Columbus's westward voyage was also meant to reach the spice lands of Asia. The chilli pepper he encountered in the Americas became a new spice that spread around the world within decades, transforming cuisines from India to Thailand to Hungary.

In the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, founded in 1602, displaced the Portuguese in much of Asia. It fought ruthlessly for monopolies. In 1621 VOC forces under Jan Pieterszoon Coen conquered the Banda Islands, the only source of nutmeg, killing or enslaving much of the population and replacing them with plantations.

The English East India Company, founded in 1600, competed with the Dutch. In the 1667 Treaty of Breda, England kept New Amsterdam in North America, renamed New York, while the Dutch secured the nutmeg island of Run, a sign of how valuable spices were then considered.

Monopolies eventually broke down. In the 1770s a French official, Pierre Poivre, smuggled clove and nutmeg seedlings out of Dutch-controlled islands and established plantations in French colonies such as Mauritius. Spices began to be grown in many tropical regions, and prices fell.

As spices became cheap, they lost their status as luxuries, and European trade turned toward other commodities such as tea, coffee, sugar and cotton. The spice trade left lasting legacies: global culinary exchange, the growth of joint-stock companies, and the colonial rule that shaped much of South and Southeast Asia.