Spices

A Global History
Fred Czarra

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 Spices
A Global History

Fred Czarra

 
 Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
 Great Sutton Street
London  , 
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 

Copyright © Fred Czarra 

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Czarra, Fred R. (Fred Raymon), ‒

Spices: a global history. – (Edible)
. Spices – History . Spice trade – History
I. Title
.

-:     

 Contents

Introduction 
1 Spices in the Ancient World 
2 Spices in the Medieval World 
3 The Age of Exploration 
4 The Age of Industrialization 
5 The Twentieth Century and Beyond 

Glossary 
Select Bibliography 
Spice Companies 
Acknowledgements 
Photo Acknowledgements 
Index 
 Introduction

Peppercorn, which has the ability to sweat your secrets out of you.
Peppercorn, where are you in my time of need?
The Mistress of Spices, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

We often marvel at the fascinating stories of spices and the

exotic lands and peoples with which they are associated. At
the same time, however, it is easy to overlook the historical
context of these once highly prized commodities and the sig-
nificance of the spice trade that developed around them.
Spices are important in history for several reasons. First, on a
large scale, they brought together diverse cultures of the west-
ern, southern and eastern worlds, encounters that could be
positive and harmonious but were sometimes harmful and
even disastrous. Second, the exchange of spices stimulated
the first global age and the beginnings of economic globaliza-
tion, wherein actions in one area of the world greatly affected
people and events on another, far-off continent. Third, spices
forever changed the eating habits of people who discovered
new culinary experiences as a result of the trade, which in turn
changed the way they prepared, ate and appreciated food.
Spices and their travels across the world have created
new legends as well as enhancing the many tales and miscon-

ceptions that had preceded them. Spices stimulated new
knowledge about the world, a knowledge that resulted in
great advances in mapmaking, science, seamanship and basic
cross-cultural awareness. They also created competition
among nations, which improved the economic conditions of
some countries and peoples but also caused great harm to
others and to the cultures they encountered.
Spices had had a long history in South and East Asia
long before Europeans arrived in these regions. During
antiquity, the Old World had limited supplies of spices which
were experienced by only a few cultures. Hearing of or sam-
pling spices from places that the Europeans had never seen
inspired numerous legends and tales – many of them of the
tall variety – that fuelled misperceptions about these exotic
lands and peoples. Such stories were sometimes tied to
religion and the idea of paradise and where this land of per-
fection might be located. Spices conjured up the idea that
exotic plants such as cinnamon were part of the scents of
paradise. Once the Europeans encountered Asia, the reali-
ties of spices such as pepper coming directly home to a
nation were more and more commonplace. The prices for
these spices brought great riches. Additionally, when the
word spread about these newly acquired products, competi-
tion became a strong motivator for nations to vie for both
the prize and the profits.
In recent years, many excellent books have been written
on spices. Titles such as Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, The Scents of Eden,
Spice: The History of a Temptation, The Spice Route, Dangerous
Tastes, The Taste of Conquest and Out of the East: Spices and
the Medieval Imagination have explored numerous avenues of
spices and their lore. Most of these writings have offered a
unique perspective on spices and, for the most part, have
dealt with the spice trade in the ancient and early medieval

world and from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries,
when there was great competition between nations of
Western Europe for these exotic and valuable products.
These periods of history are the most engaging for story-
telling, but more modern aspects of the spice story are also
worth exploring.
The extensive focus of this general history of spices will
range from antiquity to the present day. Its five chapters will
explore the ancient world, the medieval world, the Age of
Exploration, the Industrial Age and, finally, the age of global-
ization, extending through the twentieth century and beyond.
Spices will be ‘a global history’ in the sense that different, at
times contradictory, points of view about the spice saga will
be presented, along with discourses on how diverse cultures
have viewed and used spices in their lives. Finally, there will be
an extensive bibliography of books on the history of spices,
as well as on the spices themselves.
What are spices? A spice is usually defined as an aromat-
ic part of a tropical plant, be it its root, bark, flower or seed.
With the exception of vanilla, chilli pepper and allspice,
nearly all spices are of Asian origin. Other spices such as
frankincense and myrrh are only used for their aroma.
Spices and herbs are sometimes viewed as the same thing
but this is a fallacy. A herb is a plant that does not have a
woody stem and dies at the end of each growing season.
Most herbs derive their medicinal and seasoning qualities
from their leaves.
To conclude, this section will take a first look at the five
spices that are the focus of this book. This quintet, some-
times called the ‘premier spices’, have served as the motiva-
tors for the legends, the global searches and the economic
competition that fuelled this trade.


 The Premier Spices
There are many spices and mixtures of spices, but we will
focus on the foremost five: cinnamon, cloves, black pepper,
nutmeg and chilli pepper. Detailed coverage of their discov-
ery, trade and uses will serve to illustrate the global move-
ments of spices over time and the roles they played in world
history. Other spices are mentioned in passing (cardamom,
ginger and turmeric, for example), but this quintet provided
the gold standard of the spice trade – not to mention heaps
of gold and other riches for those sailors and merchants
whose livelihoods depended on them.

Cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum, C. zeylanicum)

Cinnamon is derived from the Greek word for spice and the
prefix ‘Chinese’. The Greeks in turn got the word from the
Phoenicians, who were most likely involved in sea trade with
Eastern caravan routes controlled by the Arabs. Cinnamon
and cassia are mentioned in the Old Testament and Sanskrit
texts as well as in Greek medicinal works. Cinnamon is
indigenous to the island nation of Sri Lanka (Ceylon), where
it is grown on the coastal plains to the south of the capital
city, Colombo. It comes from the bark of an evergreen tree
of the laurel family. Tan and pale brown strips of dried bark
are rolled into each other to form the cinnamon quills, or
sticks. The seedlings grow in dense clumps of thumb-sized
thickness. During the rainy season the shoots are cut off at
the base and peeled. It is quite an art to cut the paper-thin
strips of cinnamon from the bark and curl them into quills
over  feet in length; these are then dried in the sun. The
lighter the colour, the higher the quality. This spice has a sweet,

Laurus cinnamomum.

woodlike aroma with a taste that has elements of clove and

citrus. Cinnamon is distinguished from cassia by an oil called
eugenol. Cinnamon loses its flavour quickly, so it should be
purchased in small amounts – though if the quills are kept in
an airtight container, the flavour can last for a few years.

 Cinnamon is very well matched with many desserts as
well as cakes and breads. This spice goes well with apples,
bananas and pears and is particularly suited to chocolate. Use
cinnamon with bananas fried in butter with a little rum, or in
apple pie. Cinnamon is used to flavour meats in India and in
masalas, with other spices, and also in chutneys. In Morocco,
the spice is used in lamb and chicken dishes. Cinnamon,
especially from Sri Lanka, supplies the alcohol industry.
Many liqueurs and bitters contain this spice. Cinnamon oil is
made from the waste products of cassia and cinnamon.
In world history, the cinnamon trade out of Ceylon exist-
ed for centuries. Then, from the beginning of European
expansion into the spice trade, control of the cinnamon mar-
ket passed from the Portuguese to the Dutch and finally to
the English. Because of an increased worldwide demand at
the end of the eighteenth century, cinnamon was success-
fully replanted to the north in India as well as to the east in
Java and in the Indian Ocean islands of the Seychelles, east
of Zanzibar. Today Great Britain is a leading consumer of
cinnamon, along with the United States and Spain.

Clove (Syzygium aromaticum, Eugenia aromaticum)

Cloves are native to the Moluccas, a group of volcanic

islands that are now part of Indonesia. The clove tree is tall
and ladders are needed to pick all of the clove flower buds,
which are harvested when pink at their base and before they
can open. The buds are dried in an open, sunny area on
mats, losing most of their weight and turning a red to dark
brown colour, at which point they are sorted. Clove buds
appear in small clusters twice a year, from July to September
and from November to January. All the work is done by

A clove branch. The clove flower is shown with its buds to the lower right
and a parasitic worm on the left.

hand in a traditional manner. The scent of cloves has hints

of camphor and pepper. They have a fruity taste that is also
bitter and hot, and can make the mouth feel numb. In the
seventeenth century a German botanist, Jiři Josef Kamel,
identified the clove as a very powerful antiseptic useful for
toothaches. As with cinnamon, the oil eugenol is essential to

the taste that makes cloves unique. Good cloves should emit
a small amount of oil and should break easily. They can be
stored for a year in an airtight jar. The best cloves should
have a red-brown stem with a lighter top, or crown.
Cloves can be used with both sweet and savoury foods.
However, they have a very strong presence so should be
used sparingly. Cloves are good with roasted meats such as
pork or spiked on a ham with brown sugar (my favourite),
with apples, beetroots, cabbage, carrots, onions, oranges or
sweet potatoes. Cloves also mix well with other spices, such
as cinnamon, chilli and nutmeg. They are used all over the
world in mostly savoury dishes. In France a single clove is
placed in an onion to flavour a stew or sauce, and in the
Middle East and North Africa cloves are used in spice
blends and for meat dishes and rice. In China and much of
Asia they are used in spice blends, one of the best known
of which is India’s garam masala. In Indonesia, which uses
most of the cloves it produces, the spice and tobacco are
the main ingredients in the cigarettes known as kreteks (so
named because of the crackling noise of the burning cloves).
Today, cloves are grown on Madagascar, Zanzibar and the
hilly island of Pemba (part of present-day Tanzania), north
of Zanzibar.

Chilli Pepper
(Capsicum annuum, C. frutescens, C. chinense et al.)

The chilli is native to Central and South America and the

Caribbean islands. There are so many variations of chillies,
and they come in so many shapes and colours, that it is
impossible to define them as a unique spice, as is the case with
nutmeg. Most chillies are grown as annuals. Green chillies

are picked three months after planting. Chillies that are eaten
ripe are left on the vine longer. Normally chillies are dried in
the sun, but they may also be dried artificially. They affect the
taste buds in a variety of ways: as a fruity or flowery taste, or
perhaps in a pungent, smoky, nutty sense, or even with a
liquorice or tobacco taste. The degree of heat in a chilli can
vary from mild to extreme. The heat of chillies is measured
by the Scoville Heat Index, named after the pharmacist
William Scoville, which measures the capsaicinoids in a pep-
per by looking at their heat-creating molecules. In  Paul
Bosland, a professor of horticulture and the director of the
Chilli Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University in Las
Cruces, established the hottest chilli on record. A chilli pep-
per called Bhut Jolokia (or Naga Jolokia), from the Assam
region of north-eastern India, registered on the heat index at
,, Scovilles. By comparison, the New Mexico green
chilli registers at , Scovilles and the jalapeño at ,.
Chilli peppers contain two valuable vitamins,  and ,
and will keep in a cool place for a week or so. If stored in an
airtight container, they may keep for an indefinite period of
time. The Spanish were the first to bring chilli peppers to
Europe, but it was most likely the Portuguese who helped
spread them into South and East Asia, where they are used
more than anywhere else in the world today. India is the
largest producer and user of chillies; the Chinese include
them in a number of sauces; while the Koreans make a
sticky condiment, called gochu-jang, by mixing chillies with
soya paste and rice flour. In Mexico the chilli is used as a
vegetable, as a sauce and in salsas, pickles and stuffings. In
the Caribbean the very hot Scotch bonnet is used in sauces
and jerk seasoning. To the north in the United States, the
tabasco chilli (from which the eponymous hot sauce gets its
name) and the chipotle are used in many commercial sauces.

In Europe it is Spain, Portugal and Hungary where peppers
are most integrated into the cuisine – and culture.

Nutmeg and Mace (Myristica fragrans, M. argentea et al.)

Nutmeg is native to the Banda Islands of Indonesia and

grows on an evergreen tree that can reach as much as  feet
( metres) in height. Nutmeg is round and shaped like a
small peach or apricot. In harvesting, the outer flesh and the
interior covering of lacy red mace are stripped off, leaving a
hard black/brown shell. The shell is dried on trays for one
and a half to two months until the internal kernel, the nut-
meg, rattles in the shell. The nut is then taken out and either
grated or kept whole. The red mace is removed, flattened
and dried for a few hours until it takes on an orange-red hue.
The nutmeg kernels can be kept fresh in airtight jars for very
long periods of time. You can also buy nutmeg graters con-
taining a storage area with lid where you keep the nut, ready
for use. The nutmeg yields about ten times the volume of
mace, making mace more costly and less used in some
nations. Nutmeg/mace is also grown in Penang, Sri Lanka,
Sumatra and the West Indies, where Grenada once produced
one-third of the world crop. In , however, Hurricane
Ivan swept through this island nation and devastated the
nutmeg industry, which is expected to take almost a decade
to recover.
Nutmeg and mace are highly versatile spices that com-
plement many foods and combine well with other spices.
Nutmeg is used on vegetables such as cabbage and cauli-
flower and on fruit puddings, all of which are Dutch
favourites. Italians, along with others, like to put ground nut-
meg on spinach. Malaysians use half-ripe nutmeg, boiled and

Nuez Moscada, from
Colloquies on the
Simples and Drugs
of India by the
Portuguese physi-
cian and naturalist
Garcia de Orta,
c. s.

soaked in syrup, as a sweetmeat. The Arab world has long

used both nutmeg and mace to spice up lamb and mutton
dishes. Consuming too much nutmeg, especially in combina-
tion with alcohol, can cause the same reaction as a powerfully
toxic drug. Today, because of this, nutmeg is banned in Oman
and Saudi Arabia.

Pepper (Piper nigrum et al.)

The black pepper we know as Piper nigrum had its origins on the
Malabar coast of south-western India. It was known for thou-
sands of years across the world, making it to various points of

Fanciful view of a black pepper harvest on the Malabar Coast of India,
from an early th-century French manuscript, the Livre de Merveilles.
Harvesting black pepper is never this neat and clean. Pepper vines attach
themselves to nearby trees and produce their green berries.

the compass by way of trading caravans and a seaborne net-

work of small ships that visited ports from the Indian Ocean
eastwards. Pepper grows on vines that are attached to trees.
The leaves are a pointed -shape with a long, dangling string
of pendant berries parallel with the leaves. These immature
berries are picked, very quickly fermented and then dried.
During the drying process, the pepper becomes shrivelled and
wrinkled and turns a dark brown or black colour. For white
peppercorns, the berries are picked when yellow-red, and then
soaked to get rid of the outer skin; once done, they are rinsed
and sun-dried. Warm and woody on the tongue, black pepper
has a sharp, biting taste sometimes with a lemon fragrance.
White pepper is less aromatic because its oils are removed
during soaking, but it is sharper to the taste.
This spice is also grown in Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam
and Malaysia. With its fruity aroma and clean bite, the Indian

pepper of Malabar is still considered the best black pepper.
Indonesian Lampong pepper has less oil, which makes it
more pungent and less fruity. The best white pepper is con-
sidered to be Muntok from Indonesia. Pepper should be
bought as peppercorns, since the spice retains its freshness
longer in this form.
Pepper is neither sweet nor savoury but is used in
numerous savoury dishes. Pepper can also be an ingredient
in sweet foods such as breads and cakes, and it can be served
with fruit. Simply put, it goes well with most foods, which is
why it is so popular. It is also mixed with other spices to
create the spice blends baharat and garam masala which are
popular in Arabic and Indian dishes respectively.


 1
Spices in the
Ancient World

Be still! Oh north winds, and come, oh southern breezes,

and blow upon my garden, that the spice trees therein may
blossom and bear fruit!
The Song of Solomon

The ancient world was a hotbed of spice trading. It was a

thriving parallel universe of sorts that Western Europe knew
little about, stretching from China south to South East Asia
and west to India and Arabia. For more than , years
this world existed on its own and was connected with the
Mediterranean from the south-west to Arabia and Africa
and from the north-east by way of the Silk Road across
Central Asia. The spice trade was underpinned by a complex
system of sailing ships and overland caravans. The ships
were driven by the monsoon winds, which blew south in the
winter and north in late summer. These seasonal winds set
the timetable for trade and established a strong pattern for
the exchange of spices.
In the  years before the Common Era () began, the
Greeks and Romans were at the height of their power, while
in Asia Confucius had developed his ethical system and the
Han Dynasty had become a dominating force in China. The

Saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, was used by the Persians as
a flavouring and dye. Starting in the Near East, the spice was later grown
in Europe. In the ancient and medieval world it was one of the few spices
exported to China and India.

Greeks had established strong city-states and defeated the

Persians. Philip of Macedonia and his son Alexander con-
quered the Greeks and Persians and extended their empire
from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas. Rome became a
major urban centre and was soon to expand its empire west
into Spain, then into North Africa and Eastern Europe, and
later north to Germany.

 Cinnamon
During this era, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of
cinnamon which he had learned about from the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians had claimed that cinnamon sticks were
brought to Arabia by large birds that carried them to their
nests on mountain precipices. In order to get the cinnamon,
Arabians cut up the bodies of large animals and placed them
on the ground near the nests. When the birds picked up the
food and returned to their nest, the weight of the meat
broke the nest and the cinnamon fell down the mountain,
where the Arabians ran to pick it up. The spice was then
exported to other countries. Another variation of the tale
has the cinnamon used by birds as nest-building material in
trees, with the natives shooting arrows tipped with lead to
break up the nests and bring the cinnamon down. These stor-
ies are perhaps a little far-fetched but, for those who traded
these spices to people from far-off lands, such hyperbolic
tales of hardship may have increased a product’s value to the
consumer and hence brought more profit to the trader and
his supplier.
Cinnamon, in these times, was known to come from
India and was later found on the island of Ceylon (present-
day Sri Lanka), south of India. By the nineteenth century the
cinnamon legend still persisted, as demonstrated by the Irish
poet Thomas Moore:

Those golden birds that in the spice time, drop

About the gardens, drunk with that sweet food
Whose scent hath lured them o’er the summer flood,
And those that under Araby’s soft sun
Build their high nests of budding cinnamon.


Canela (cinnamon).

In the ancient world, cinnamon was the most sought-

after spice. It was known in China as ‘Kwei’ as early as 
 and was introduced into Egypt around  .
Throughout South and East Asia, China controlled the trade
on cinnamon, even though it was not grown in that country.
Ceylon emerged as a major source centuries later, when cin-
namon was exposed to a wider world.
Other tales of cinnamon in the antiquity came from a
Greek student of Aristotle, Theophrastus, who later became
known as the ‘father of botany’. He claimed that this spice

Ancient spice routes: land and sea routes between east and west in the
ancient and medieval world. Notice how the sea routes take advantage of
the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to bring spices close to the Mediterranean,
where European traders took them north.

came from Arabia, where it grew on bushes in ravines

guarded by poisonous snakes. Those who got the cinnamon
divided it into three piles and then chose two of the piles by
drawing lots. What remained was left as an offering to the
sun god, who would then protect them from the snakes on
return visits. One Sicilian claimed that there was so much
cinnamon in Arabia that it was used as fuel for cooking.
The ancient world had its legends of the ‘Cinnamon
Route’, which began in northern Indochina and southern
China and moved down through the Philippines. It then
went into the East Indies to pick up more cinnamon and
other spices and moved west across the long expanse of the
southern Indian Ocean. Heading north-west, the route
found land just off the north-west coast of Madagascar in
an area known in Greco-Roman literature as Rhapta, near
the present-day border between Tanzania and Mozambique.

The cinnamon was subsequently taken up the coast and
dropped off at ports on the Red Sea.

Cassia
A spice closely related to cinnamon is cassia. It is native to
Assam in northern India and Burma (known today as
Myanmar) and on some Indonesian islands where it grew
wild. Records on this spice go back about , years. Cassia
is thicker and coarser than cinnamon, although the two are
sometimes sold as the same product. The taste of cassia is
less delicate than that of cinnamon and, because of this
pungency the buds or dried unripe fruit of the cassia tree are
used in pickles in the Far East. Cassia has its own, probably
apocryphal, tales from the ancient world. According to
Herodotus, the Arabs

wrap their entire bodies and faces with skins and leather,
except the eyes, and go out looking for cassia. It grows in
a shallow lake, whose waters and borders are inhabited by
a kind of winged animal, most like a bat. These creatures,
squeaking loudly, defend themselves and their cassia with
great courage. One must shield one’s eyes from their
attacks while gathering the cassia.

Clove
The clove had its origins in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands,
of present-day Indonesia (they are called the Maluku Islands
today). Its growth was originally confined to five of these
volcanic isles, including Tidore and Ternate, both east of the

 Clavos (clove).
‘Clavos’ also
means ‘nails’ or
‘spikes’ in Spanish.

northern spine of Sulawesi. The clove tree, an evergreen,

loves a tropical climate with rich soil. It does not prosper near
the sea, where there is too much moisture, nor in higher ele-
vations, where it is too cold. Sloping land with clean water
suits it best. One description, from the Summary of Marvels by
Ibrahim ibn Wasif-Shah, written around  , reads:

And somewhere near India is the island containing the

Valley of Cloves. No merchants or sailors have ever been
to the valley or have ever seen the kind of tree that pro-
duces cloves: its fruit, they say, is sold by genies. The

 sailors arrive at the island, place their items of merchan-
dise on the shore, and return to their ship. Next morning,
they find, beside each item, a quantity of cloves . . . The
cloves are said to be pleasant to the taste when they are
fresh. The islanders feed on them, and they never fall ill
or grow old.

Spices in the Roman Empire

As the Roman Empire grew, the need for more spices
increased as well. Of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and black
pepper, the latter was the flavouring mainstay of the Romans
(who did not use nutmeg in their dishes). The clove came late
to Rome, in the second century , and was mostly used in
incense and perfume. There was also a ‘Clove Route’ that
progressed from the East Indies, through South East Asia to
the area near present-day Bangladesh and then down the east
coast and up the west coast of India, from where it either
went north to the top of the Persian Gulf at Basra or west to
the Red Sea and its ports. Cinnamon was extremely expensive
and was bought up by the perfume industry and favoured in
wine and in some sweet and savoury dishes. One Roman
emperor returned from Palestine with garlands of cinnamon,
enclosed in polished gold, and Nero supposedly burned a
year’s supply of cinnamon and cassia at his wife’s funeral rite.
The Romans also used a perfume and salve called malabathron
made from a form of cassia. Although available throughout
the empire, nutmeg, as far as we know, did not appear in
Roman dishes. One writer who researched Apicius’ Roman
Cookery Book found that  per cent of the  recipes in his
book called for costly imported spices, especially black pep-
per. In  , when Aelius Gallus was the Prefect of Egypt,

Anise is one of the oldest known spices and is related to caraway, cumin,
dill and fennel. It is native to the Middle East.

the Emperor Augustus tried to break the Arab monopoly by

using his Egyptian troops to take over those commercial
routes from the East that were not controlled by Rome. It
turns out that Gallus did not ask enough questions of local
merchants about where the commercial routes were so he
covered the coast with his army and missed out on the lucra-
tive spice sites in the interior. Strabo points out in the

When the spice trade moved west, Mare Erythraeum, the ancient name of
the Arabian Sea, bordered by India, Persia and Arabia, formed an active
shipping area that transported spices north.

Geography that sickness, fatigue and hunger defeated the

Roman soldiers more than any enemy. It was soon after this
incident that emissaries from India, hearing of the fame of
Augustus, came from India to Rome to meet with him and to
set up trade networks.
Pepper, in at least two varieties, was the most widely
used spice in the Roman world. Pliny the Elder described
long pepper (Piper longum), grown in northern India, as a
major source of Roman spice. Black pepper was not as
popular as long pepper, which was much hotter to the taste.
One Roman dish was chopped mushroom stems mixed
with honey, garum (a sauce made of fermented fish) and
pepper ground with lovage and then cooked in oil over low
heat until the moisture had evaporated from the mush-
rooms; it was served with bread. Pepper was so important

 Ginger plant. Both
ancient China and
India used ginger.
Rich in Vitamin ,
it was eaten by early
Chinese mariners to
ward off scurvy.

that it had a custom duty attached. This tax was levied in

Alexandria where the pepper came into Egypt from Arab
traders. Keeping in mind how long the spices had to travel
to reach Rome, across damp seas and dry land, it is no
wonder that many of the spices that reached the centre of
the Roman Empire may have been contaminated with bac-
teria and mould spores as well as dirt after much handling
and storage.

 Earlier, in the first century , when the Romans were
in Egypt, they discovered a new world of spices that the
Egyptians had been using for centuries in various rituals and
ceremonies, among them burials. Of special importance
were frankincense, myrrh and cassia, all of which came from
southern Arabia, where the air was scented with their aroma.
Historically, the Egyptians had an exchange not only with
Arabia but also with South and East Asia. At one point Egypt
had built a canal connecting the Nile with the Red Sea to
speed up the importation of spices from the Indian Ocean.
Cinnamon can be traced to Egypt in c.  . Recently, an
archaeologist claimed to have smelled cinnamon when work-
ing on an ancient Egyptian mummy, but real evidence for very
ancient traces of this spice are hard to come by.
On the Red Sea in the far south of Egypt’s Eastern
Desert is the site of Berenike. In the Roman period, this
place was a trade emporium for spices coming up from the
south. Five hundred miles south of Suez, Berenike was a
major hub of trade with the Roman Empire. Emperor
Augustus established a fleet of ships to bring black pepper
and other exotic goods back to Rome. Recent excavations
at Berenike have uncovered numerous peppercorns.
Peppercorns of the same vintage – first century  – have
been found as far north as Germany, indicating that trade
in spice had widened its geographical reach in Europe.
Cloves were praised early in the Sanskrit literature of
India. They were called katukaphalah, ‘the strong scented’.
Pliny the Elder writes of them as only being imported for
their aroma. In   Constantine the Great sent  kilo-
grams of cloves to Pope Sylvester , neatly packed in jars.
Over time the clove came to be used in food and drink. In
the ninth century, in the Gallen monastery in Switzerland,
monks put this expensive spice on their fasting fish. In the

Cumin. This spice is a native of the Nile Valley and was widely known in
the ancient world. The Greeks used the word ‘miser’ to apply to someone
who counted cumin seeds.

late th century an Arab traveller saw the burghers of

Mainz seasoning their meals with clove. St Hildegard dis-
cussed it in her book about medical plants, Liber subtilatum
of . Even as far north as Norway and Sweden Queen

Fenugreek is a kind
of pea plant. Its
name is from the
Latin for ‘Greek
hay’. It is used in
injera, a sort of
leavened pancake
unique to Ethiopia.

Blanche’s estate listed three-quarters of a kilogram of cloves

– a large amount for .

Pepper and Other Spices in China

Far to the east, in China, records of the Han Dynasty from
around the second century  indicate knowledge of a plant
known as Piper nigrum, which was supposed to be from the

west of China. It is most likely that the pepper had come
from the opposite direction, east from India. Five centuries
later, in the late Han Dynasty, pepper is clearly identified as
having originated in India. Early records also indicate that
pepper was also grown in household gardens in what is
northern Vietnam today.
These were not the only sources of pepper in Asia.
Historians say that black pepper was first cultivated in Java by
Hindu colonists, who carried it there in around  . Java
may have been the main source for Chinese pepper, since it
was more accessible than western India by sea. However,
pepper in China was not easily available and was considered
valuable and suitable for hoarding. It is a known fact that
pepper was part of the diet of the Chinese people. They
also used long pepper, which was hotter, in their dishes.
Over time, pepper in Chinese dishes served as a substitute
for fagara, which we know as Sichuan (formerly, Szechwan)
pepper (Zanthoxylum piperitum et al.). The Chinese used pep-
per in medicine as a stimulant, tonic for digestion and relief
from colic and flatulence.
Cinnamon first enters Chinese records as cassia cinna-
mon, grown in gardens around present-day Hanoi during
the Han Dynasty. Cassia was also grown in southern China in
Guangdong (Kwangtung), the geographic area that encircles
modern Hong Kong. The name of the countryside city of
Guilin (Kweilin), in north-east Guangdong, is translated as
‘cassia forest’.
Cloves enter Asian history growing wild in the forests
of New Guinea and on many of the Moluccas, where they
are thought to have been domesticated. It does not appear
that the natives of these clove islands had much desire to
use them. However, the Chinese and Indians were interest-
ed and they initially stimulated and then conducted the

Pimienta (black
pepper).

clove trade throughout Asia. Cloves appear in India in the

literary classic Ramayana somewhere in the  years
before  . Nan-Yueh seafarers from the modern
Guangzhou (Kwangchow) area of southern China – long
known in the West by the name Canton – brought cloves
there from the Moluccas in the first millennium . In
the third century , cloves are suggested as a breath
freshener to be used by courtiers in the presence of the
Han emperor. Their early name in China was ‘chicken-
tongue fragrance’.

Myristica fragrana. Nutmeg was native to the East Indies but has been
successfully grown in the Caribbean on the island of Grenada.

There is a possibility that nutmeg was used in ancient

China. During the Tang Dynasty (– ), this central
seed of the fruit of an evergreen may have functioned as

a medicine for diarrhoea and digestive problems. It is also
possible that the Hindus of Java conducted a trade in nut-
meg, as well as cloves, during this period, moving westwards
from Indonesia to India. From this point the Arabs took
the spices north-west to Europe. Nutmeg was cultivated
much later in the Canton region (by the eleventh century).
One of the mysteries surrounding nutmeg is whether it
grew wild or not. This has been difficult to establish, one
reason being that during the seventeenth century the Dutch
went to other islands where it was grown and destroyed the
nutmeg trees – in order to preserve their monopoly on the
product.

Chillies, or Chilli Peppers

Many of the aforementioned spices that were used in the
ancient world have had a lasting effect on food and medi-
cine across the globe. But the chilli pepper, the most
ancient and far-flung of spices, has had the most dramatic
impact of all on comestibles and cultures worldwide.
History – from ancient to recent – has shown this spice to
have far more variations and types, and to have a wider
range, from the Caribbean to China, than any other such
aromatic seasoning.
There is evidence that chillies were eaten by Native
Americans in what is now Mexico as early as   and
cultivated a few centuries later. They were also indigenous to
Central and South America and the Caribbean islands. Their
debut on the world spice stage would not happen until the
fifteenth century and the dawn of the Age of Exploration,
but all their various types were growing wild and cultivated
for food millennia earlier.

 The ancient world has left its legends and uncovered
many mysteries of spices. In the Middle Ages the West, under
the banner of religion and in the form of the Crusaders,
marched south-east and a new chapter on spices in world
history was written.


 2
Spices in the
Medieval World

Robbed of your bark in masses large,

It’s sent abroad by ship and barge;
And India’s fragrance you bestow,
In summer climes and frigid snow.
Spices and How to Know Them, W. M. Gibbs

The early modern world and the world of spices were shaped
by several significant events. The first was the decline of
Rome’s empire by   and the subsequent loss of the spice-
trading networks that the Romans had established. Next was
the birth of Muhammad in c.  . By the end of the first
decade of the seventh century, Muhammad was preaching in
Mecca, asking Arabs to throw away their old idols and demons
and to follow one god, Allah. By the year , Islam had
spread north to southern Spain and east to the Malay
Peninsula. In Europe, the continuous warring between differ-
ent tribes and geographic areas in their quests for power was
finally subsiding, leading to the establishment of more stable
political regions. Near the beginning of the eleventh century,
the Roman Catholic Church had grown in size and power and
was asking rulers of these regions to band together to focus on
recapturing the Holy Land, with its key city, Jerusalem, from

Spice trading areas during the Crusades. This area of the Mediterranean was
vital to the shipment of spices west to Europe.

Islam. The Church had divided into an Eastern (Orthodox)

and a Western (Roman) branch but, despite this split, and until
, the Crusades consumed both factions, greatly influenc-
ing as well the ebb and flow of spices. Finally, this period of
history produced two renowned and prolific ‘reporters’, the
near-contemporaries Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, from the
Christian and Muslim worlds respectively. Both travelled
widely throughout the East and West, all the while describing
new worlds and networks across Europe, Asia and Africa.
Muhammad was a spice trader who married a spice
trader. This fact is indicative of the trading world that Islam
had already established after the eighth century. With the
growing strength of Islam came the rise of cities, first in
Syria and then Baghdad, located on the Tigris, and north-
west of Basra, which had been a major hub of the eastern
spice-trading route for centuries.

 In  Tariq ibn-Ziyad and his Muslim army had crossed
the Mediterranean into southern Spain to establish a region
that remained under Arab control until . New Muslim–
Arab cities grew up in this area, which was called Al
Andulus, or Andalusia. By the s, Cordoba was one of
the great world cities, a Muslim centre of learning and a
northern terminus of the Arab world. From Baghdad to
Cordoba, these metropolises became not only producers of
manufactured goods but also major consumers of Eastern
spices. And throughout this part of the world there was
continuous growth. Basra’s population exploded from zero
to , in three decades, its streets filled with Arabs,
Persians, Indians and Malay-speakers from Indonesia. This
was a place where information about China and the Spice
Islands worked its way into legends and there was an over-
all expansion of geographic awareness. In The Book of One
Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad the Sailor recounted his
journey to the Spice Islands:

I went down to Basra with a group of merchants and

companions, and we set sail in a ship upon the sea, and at
first I was seasick because of the waves and the motion of
the vessel, but soon I came to myself and we went about
among the islands, buying and selling.

Sinbad was describing a route that had existed for over ,
years. From Basra, the Arabian Gulf was easy to sail since
sailors never were out of sight of land as they moved east.
The trade with the East was carried on by Arab, Iranian and
Jewish merchants. These traders sailed on Arab ships that
had gone as far as China but later concentrated on India
and the East Indies. Over time it was found to be more con-
venient to arrive at some halfway point such as Ceylon or

An Arab spice merchant weighing spices in a marketplace. Long before the
Portuguese sailed to India, Arab merchants and middlemen facilitated the
spice trade between East and West.

Malacca on the Malay Peninsula to receive goods from China.

Certainly this was a more practical and cost-effective way of
doing business.

 While spices are the focus of this book, it should be
noted that the great majority of ships in the Indian Ocean car-
ried textiles, rice, hardwoods, iron ore, tin, horses and rope. To
get a sense of the nature of international trade in the ninth
century, consider this account by Ibn Khurradadhbih, a postal
official in Baghdad, of a group of traders comprising Jewish
merchants from the Frankish Empire (present-day France
and western Germany):

These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin,

Frankish, Spanish, and Slavic. They travel from West to
East and from East to West, sometimes by land and
sometimes by sea. From the West they bring eunuchs,
female slaves, young boys, brocades, beaver, marten and
other furs, and swords. They sail from the land of the
Franks on the Western Sea [Mediterranean], and make for
al-Frame [on the Isthmus of Suez]. There they transfer
their merchandise to camels and go overland to the Red
Sea port of Qulzum . . . From there they set sail and make
for al-Jar and Jiddah. Then they sail to Sind, India, and
China. On their return from China, they bring musk,
aloeswood, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of
the East. They return to Qulzum, then back to al-Farama,
where they take ship once again on the [Mediterranean]
Sea. Some sail to Constantinople, to sell their merchan-
dise to the Greeks, others go to the capital of the king of
the Franks to sell their goods.

These tradesmen also might have taken another, more

eastern, route, heading south on the Euphrates to Baghdad,
then down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf and on to India
and points east. Either way, there is a historical issue about
whether these long-distance travels were factual, especially

before the tenth century , when knowledge and networks
became more established. Trade also existed to the west into
Arabia and East Africa, where the Ethiopian Christian king-
dom of Aksum existed. This was the place where, according
to biblical tradition, descendants of Solomon and the Queen
of Sheba brought the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem.
It was also here that gold and incense came out of Africa
and moved on to other ports.
All of the trade between this Middle Eastern Arab–
Muslim world and East Asia continued until the time of the
Portuguese, which began in the last decade of the fifteenth
century. These trading traditions also helped to spread Islam
into present-day Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula as well as
to solidify the spice-trading networks. Prior to the Crusades,
European views about spice-growing areas of the world were
mostly founded on tales and rumour. The historian Paul
Freedman notes that, as far back as the seventh century,
Europeans believed that pepper in India grew on trees
‘guarded’ by serpents that would bite and poison anyone who
attempted to gather the spice. The only way to harvest pep-
per, they thus concluded, was to burn the trees, an act that
would drive the snakes underground. This also helped to
explain the long-held misperception that peppercorns were
black as a result of burning trees. Until about , people
thought that black and white pepper were separate plants.
One fourteenth-century monk wrote that black pepper came
from the south side of the Caucasus Mountains where they
grow in the hottest sunshine.
In  a cookbook entitled Kitah el-Tahih appeared,
describing  recipes for ‘meats, poultry, fish, vegetables,
dairy products and sweets’. Authored by Mohamed ben el
Hassan el Baghdadi, this classic work outlined the herbs and
spices used in Arab cooking. Among the spices saffron,

coriander, cumin, ginger and cardamom were nutmeg, pepper,
cinnamon and cloves. Hassan el Baghdadi also described
the use of perfumed liquids such as rosewater and orange-
flower water as well as pomegranates and the use of lemon
and honey. Such an array of flavourings would have been
overpowering to the mind and mouth of a European person
living many degrees of latitude to the north in comparison
with their usual diet. This cookbook was a testament to the
established role of spices in the Arab world of the Middle
East, which they had played for centuries.
The Crusades – the West’s largely military response to
its desire to free the Holy Land from Islamic influence –
became a focal point in the history of spices in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. As a result of the Crusades, the
West experienced a religious revival that strengthened the
power of the popes in Rome and also created an increase in
self-awareness and a new confidence among Europeans.
When the Crusaders ventured south-east to the Holy Land,
they found a people and culture that were far more advanced
than their own in terms of ideas and technology. Over time
the Arab and Muslim numerical system had been derived
from Indian mathematics, their astronomy from the
Babylonians, philosophy from the Greeks which, along with
Arab advances in business organization and nautical know-
ledge, helped the West advance into the Renaissance and lead
the way to the Scientific Revolution. However they were also
bent on spreading dar al-islam, the house or domain of Islam
and achieving that through dar al-harb, the domain of war.
When, at the end of the First Crusade in , the
Crusaders entered and conquered the Holy Land, the thou-
sands of pilgrims who came with and after them witnessed
first hand wondrous new ways of life in Syria and Palestine.
Merchants in Venice and Genoa were promised landing rights

An exaggerated view of a cinnamon merchant from a th-century Italian
manuscript. If cinnamon ever grew this large, legends about birds carrying
the cinnamon to line their nests would be difficult to imagine.

to set up trading centres, where metals, wool and clothing from

Europe were exchanged for spices, fruits and jewellery. Over
the next century, while the Crusades continued, European eat-
ing habits slowly began to change. Pepper, nutmeg, cloves and
cardamom entered the diet of the Crusaders, at the same time
that other tantalizing foodstuffs such as figs, dates, almonds,
lemons and oranges migrated north to European tables.

 For Europeans of this era, spices were used both as a
medicine and in the preparation of foods. One of the myths
about spices was that they were used to preserve meats, but
this idea has been mostly discarded for a number of reasons.
Foremost among these was the fact that there was an abun-
dance of meat in the medieval West, with animals routinely
being killed, prepared, cooked and eaten, thus obviating the
need for preserving. Secondly, spices are not particularly
useful as a preservative. Salting, smoking or drying meat is
much more effective, with salt being an excellent preserva-
tive that was readily available.
Over time, spices came to be related both to medicine
and food consumption. This was specifically in terms of
their relation to bodily fluids or the humours of dry, wet, hot
and cold. ‘Hot’ spices, for instance, might be used in a sauce
for a meat dish to counteract the ‘wet’ qualities of meat, thus
enabling the body to remain healthy with a balance between
the humours. Spices were considered to be either hot or dry.
Pepper was rated as the hottest spice. An examination of
medieval pharmacies reveals records that show pepper,
cinnamon and ginger used in many medical prescriptions.
There are numerous medieval cookbooks that give an
idea of the importance and multitude of spices in Europe at
that time. One tells, for example, of a fifteenth-century
Polish–Bavarian wedding that included the consumption of
 pounds of cinnamon,  pounds of nutmeg,  of
cloves and  of pepper. In another cookbook comprising
some  recipes,  of them required cinnamon. In 
Saint Hildegard, the ‘Sibyl of the Rhine’, wrote a book
about healing which praised the pharmaceutical qualities of
nutmeg. Whoever received a nutmeg on New Year’s Day
and carried it in a pocket for a year could fall and never
break a bone. Additionally, such a person would never suffer

a stroke, or be burdened with haemorrhoids, scarlet fever
or boils.
Nutmeg and mace were brought by Arab merchants to
wealthy Constantinople in the sixth century and by the
twelfth century nutmeg was mentioned in various
European countries as far north as Scandinavia. Nutmeg
was also used as an incense. In , when Henry , a holy
Roman emperor, was crowned in Rome, nutmeg was
burned in the streets, along with other spices, for days
before the coronation. According to Chaucer, people liked
to put nutmeg in their beer. Today Bavarians use nutmeg in
a root beer and at least two North American brewers,
Dogfish Head and Samuel Adams, use nutmeg in selected
beers. Nutmeg was also a vehicle for promoting sexism in
the s: Levinus Lennius, a Dutch physician, the author
of Nature’s Secret Powers, extolled the power of men over
women by claiming that a nutmeg carried by a man would
swell up and become juicy, pretty and more fragrant but one
carried by a woman would wrinkle and become dry, dark,
dirty and ugly. Once again the medieval idea of bodily fluids
and humours play a role in these tales as man is endowed
with better bodily qualities which make him strong and
superior.
The Crusades also saw the importation of Arab cooks
into the kitchens of Frankish high society in Middle Eastern
cities such as Jerusalem and Acre. Music, dancing and litera-
ture were often linked with food at banquets during this time.
The Crusading Franks also used spices such as cloves, cinna-
mon and saffron to demonstrate their great wealth. Ready-
cooked foods were available in the markets of Jerusalem, a
forerunner of the food stalls and markets of today. In ,
when William  of Scotland paid a visit to his fellow monarch
Richard  of England, he received a daily allotment of two

A medieval print of a nutmeg. After Europe discovered the nutmeg it
became fashionable to carry strings of the nut around the neck accom-
panied by a grater.

pounds of pepper and four pounds of cinnamon. As to

cloves, traditional herbal books claimed that a man who lost
his potency could regain it with sweet milk embedded with
three grams of crushed clove. In Moluccan folklore, villagers
treated blossoming clove trees like pregnant women. No man

Islamic map of the world by Al-Qazuini, c. . North is at the bottom, as is
fairly common to early maps made in Europe and the Islamic world. West is
to the right with Rome as a black square and Constantinople as a circle.

could approach them wearing a hat, no noise could be made

near them and no light or fire could be carried past them at
night for fear they would not bear fruit. Some Moluccans still
plant a clove tree at the birth of a child, with the belief that
if the tree flourishes, so will the child. A clove tree was con-
sidered to be so hot that nothing could grow under it. Even
a pitcher of water left near cloves would evaporate in less
than two days. In recent times in the East Indies some native
inhabitants put cloves in their nostrils and between their lips
so that demons would not enter their bodies.

A th-century woodcut depicting the gathering of cinnamon.

Besides being used in ceremonies and presented as

gifts, spices were also collected as valued objects. At meals
for the wealthy, spices were passed around the table on a
gold or silver tray. This ‘spice platter’ may have contained
sections with different spices that guests would put over
their food, which may have already been flavoured with
spices. At times food for the wealthy would be buried
under layers of spices, in a medieval version of the ‘con-
spicuous consumption’ of today. Spices were also consumed
in wine.

 The rise of Venice and Genoa as ports, sea powers and
conduits of the spice trade may have been a gift of geogra-
phy and a strongly evolving merchant class located in well-
situated places between northern Europe and the Middle
East. Traders from Venice, on the Adriatic Sea, could sail or
row south-east down the Mediterranean to Acre, the seaport
long known as the ‘key to Palestine’ on the coast of present-
day Israel and then move goods overland to Jerusalem. By
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europe was experi-
encing great economic growth. Now the West had goods such
as textiles and metals that could be traded for the spices of
the East. The marketplace at the foot of the Rialto Bridge in
Venice saw the Lombards, Florentines and Germans dealing
in a new world of banking, international finance and trade,
the headquarters of which replaced the meat-packing and
fish-sorting buildings by the famous span. The Germans
brought their linen to trade and, after the discovery of silver
mines in Saxony and elsewhere, bartered this precious metal
for spices that eventually made their way north to influence
the eating habits of Germany and other parts of Europe.
Had there not been a demand in China and the Indian
Ocean world for silver coin, the history of the spice trade
might have taken a different turn. Additionally, merchants in
Flanders and England brought copper and woollen cloth to
the markets in exchange for pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nut-
meg and ginger. Eastern spices were brought into Western
Europe by sea, with Bruges, in Flanders, evolving as a major
port. First the Genoese and later the Venetians would sail
out of the Mediterranean, call at Lisbon and then proceed
north into the English Channel east to Bruges.
The spices that came out of the East over the Indian
Ocean usually were unloaded at the Straits of Ormuz on the
Persian Gulf or at Aden on the south-eastern corner of

Arabia. More often than not, the spices were carried on the
backs of camels. These ‘ships of the desert’ set off from
Mecca and Medina, heading up the Arabian Peninsula to
Cairo, Alexandria or Acre. The route from Ormuz either
went west on camels to the Black Sea or east over water to
Aleppo or other ports nearby, then on to Cyprus and west to
Europe.
Although operating on the Ligurian coast side of the Italian
‘boot’, the Genoese had an equal footing with Venice in trade
along the coast of Israel, as well as in Acre and, further north,
Tyre, in Lebanon. They had been very helpful in supporting the
Crusaders and thus enjoyed inroads into the spice trade. The
competition between the two cities remained strong and even-
tually Venice and Genoa went to war with each other, but profit
prevailed in the end and the trading continued. Over time
Venice replaced Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) as a
major trading centre. Not only were the Venetians getting vari-
ous goods from northern Europe but also wine, oil, honey, wax,
cotton, wool and hides from Eastern Europe. While Venice’s
traders still ventured east to retrieve spices, they were less
dependent on going in that direction to obtain the products that
came to them naturally as denizens of a trading centre.
An interesting aspect of the East–West spice trade was
that traders from Europe needed to have someone based in
Cairo, Tyre, Acre or Aleppo (in Syria) that they could trust,
usually a relative. The Venetians were particularly good at set-
ting up these family partnerships, in which one relation lived
in the Levant. Confronted with the Arab and Muslim trading
networks that had existed for centuries and had their own
‘trust’ systems, the Europeans had to learn to set up similar
enterprises.
The trading system was a long, drawn-out process from
beginning to end. The French historian Fernand Braudel,

Ming painting of black pepper, mid-th century. Pepper was grown in
north-west China and called melluzhi by the Chinese. The pepper leaves curl
up at night and cover the berries and then unfurl in the morning.
considering the East–West spice trade, wrote in The Perspective
of the World: ‘One has only to think how many times a sack
of pepper from India, or a sack of cloves from the East
Indies, must have been handled before it reached a ship, first
in Aleppo, then in Venice and finally in Nuremberg.’
While the Europeans viewed spices as exotic, they also
saw them in a religious context. These fragrant commodities
not only came from far-away places such as India and the
Moluccas, but they were also from a fabled world. In his
book Tastes of Paradise, Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes:

Pepper was envisioned by Europeans growing in a bam-

boo forest, on a plain near Paradise. Ginger and cinnamon
were hauled in by Egyptian fishermen casting nets into the
Floodwaters of the Nile, which in turn had carried them
straight from Paradise. The aroma of spices was believed
to be a breath wafted from Paradise over the human
world. No medieval writer could envision Paradise with-
out the smell or taste of spices. Whether the poetically
described gardens served saints or lovers, the atmosphere
was inevitably infused with the rare, intoxicating fragrance
of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. On the basis of
such fantasies, it was possible for lovers and friends to
exchange certain spices as pledges of their relationship.

A simple look at many early maps gives a second-millen-

nium viewer a window onto what someone in the Middle Ages
saw as the relationship between the known and unknown
worlds and the belief that both paradise (and hell) existed at
some other, unknown, but identified space on that map.
Spices were an integral part of the growth of the
European economy. Values were relative. A pound of nutmeg,
in the Germany of , was worth seven oxen.

 In the eleventh century ships at Billingsgate paid part of
their toll to King Ethelred in pepper. Peppercorns were
accepted as a payment for rents and taxes and some
European towns kept their accounts in pepper. In England
some farm workers could pay their rent with one pound of
pepper, about three weeks’ wages for that profession. Out of
this grew the custom of handing over a single peppercorn as
a token for a relationship of tenancy. This led to the expres-
sion ‘a peppercorn rent’. When Prince Charles took posses-
sion of his Duchy of Cornwell in , a pound of pepper
was part of the tribute he received.
Standards of living had improved after the Crusades.
Aside from Bruges, Genoa and Venice, cities such as
Nuremberg, Augsburg, Bordeaux and Antwerp developed
their own trade monopolies. In the late twelfth century, the
Guild of Pepperers, a social and religious fraternity of whole-
sale merchants and bankers, was set up in London. The
group merged with a spicers’ organization and eventually
evolved into the Worshipful Company of Grocers (mem-
bers bought and sold ‘in gross’, hence the noun ‘grosser’
and then ‘grocer’), the community that managed the trade
in spices for the English monarch. In the early seventeenth
century, some members of the grocers’ guild were granted
a royal charter to form their own guild, the Worshipful
Society of Apothecaries (or pharmacists), a group that con-
tinued the link between spices and medicine – and also
challenged the long-held hegemony of the Royal College
of Physicians.
The two greatest travellers of the early modern world,
the Venetian Marco Polo (–) and the Moroccan Ibn
Battuta (–/), are a study in contrasts. Ibn Battuta
travelled much further than his European counterpart, from
West Africa to South and East Asia, in what would constitute

Marco Polo’s travels across Central Asia into China were not as extensive
as those completed by Ibn Battuta, who travelled more miles, but did not
experience the level of culture shock that Polo did.

 modern nations. Marco Polo was literally ‘a stranger in a

strange land’, crossing a wide Mongol landscape and spend-
ing decades in China. Ibn Battuta conducted most of his
travels in a Muslim world or Dar al-Islam. He mostly covered
the proceedings of the educated, cultural class, writing about
subjects that would interest those people. In at times a florid,
fanciful style, he portrayed a world where the values were the
same as his, but where regional customs were different.
When Ibn Battuta got to China he experienced culture shock,
noting: ‘Every time I left my house, I saw reprehensible
things. I was so disturbed that I stayed home most of the
time, only going out when necessary.’ But later he altered this
view, writing, ‘China is the safest and pleasantest country in
the world for the traveller.’
Marco Polo has given us an accurate description of
medieval China and other parts of Asia towards the end of

As spices such as pepper, cloves and cinnamon travelled westward from
South and East Asia, buyers needed to be wary of adulterated sacks.

the thirteenth century. While writing his account in a Genoese

prison during the Venice–Genoa war, he limned an exotic
world that was totally new. Marco Polo had started his journey
going east to China, where he remained for almost twenty
years. On his return trip he took a southern route through
South East Asia, India and Persia. He described the amount
of pepper that came into Chinese ports as a hundred times

greater than that which came to Alexandria from India. He
reported on plants such as cassia and ginger and described
different foods and drinks that contained spices. In the city
of Hangchow (Hangzhou), south-west of Shanghai, an offi-
cial told him that , pounds of pepper were brought into
that city every day. He also described, on his return home, the
plantings of cloves, pepper and nutmeg in the East Indies.
Ibn Battuta started his trip in various ports in Arabia
such as Aden. He then visited East Africa, where he described
some eating habits he saw in Mogadishu:

They eat rice cooked with ghee . . . on top they set dishes
of kushan. These are relishes composed of chicken, meat,
fish and vegetables. In one dish they serve green bananas
in fresh milk, in another yogurt with pickled lemon,
bunches of pepper pickled in vinegar and salt, green
ginger and mangos.

The Muslim explorer was one of the first observers to

record information about the cinnamon trade of Ceylon:

Puttalam [north of present-day Colombo] the capital, is a

small and pretty town, surrounded by a wall and palisades.
The whole of the coast near here is covered with the
trunks of cinnamon trees brought down by the rivers.
They are collected in mounds on the seashore. People
from Coromandel and Malabar take them away without
paying for them, but they give the sultan cloth and such in
exchange.

The writer also described a meal in Kerala, the most

south-western state of India in the centre of India’s pepper-
growing area:

 A beautiful slave girl, dressed in silk, places before the
king the bowls containing the individual dishes. With a
large bronze ladle she places a ladleful of rice on the plat-
ter; pours ghee over it, and adds preserved peppercorns,
green ginger, preserved lemons and mangos. The diner
takes a mouthful of rice and then a little of these con-
serves. When the helping of rice is all eaten, she ladles out
some more, and serves a dish of chicken, again eaten with
rice.

In his book The Spice Route, John Keay points out that Ibn
Battuta gets some of his botanicals mixed up when he
writes, ‘As for the fruit of the clove, it is none other than the
nutmeg; and the flower which is formed within it [the nut] is
mace. I have seen all this and been witness to it.’
Because the writings of Ibn Battuta were done mostly
within and intended for readers of the Islamic world, spices
and spice routes were already known there, so he was not
imparting any new facts. Marco Polo, on the other hand,
provided a narrative that brought new and fascinating infor-
mation to the West, thus whetting its denizens’ collective
appetite for spices.
In the early modern world of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries and during the height of Mameluke power
in North Africa and the rise of the Ottoman Empire out
of Turkey, the European lake known as the Mediterranean
became an Ottoman body of water. It was not until , at
the naval battle of Lepanto, off western Greece, when the
Ottoman domination of trade on the Mediterranean ended.
However, that control of the Mediterranean by the Ottomans
motivated Western Europe to find a new way to bring
spices to their markets. The Western Age of Exploration was
dawning.

 3
The Age of Exploration

Thus to the Eastern wealth through storms we go,

But now, the Cape once doub’led, fear no more;
A constant trade-wind will securely blow,
And gently lay us on the spicy shore.
Annus Mirabilis, John Dryden

The ‘Age of Exploration’, a West European expression,

involved the nations of coastal/continental Europe and the
British Isles. From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centu-
ry, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England and, to a less-
er degree, France and Denmark, competed for the market in
spices in two areas of the world, South Asia and South East
Asia. These countries’ efforts to capture one or more parts
of the spice trade were global, involving both the western
and eastern hemispheres. There were also attempts to find
northern and southern routes to the lands of spices. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as nations competed,
the quest for spices evolved into what can truly be viewed as
the ‘First World War’.
In the millennium before Europe encountered South
Asia, the south-west – or Malabar – coast of India flour-
ished as a fecund realm of spices and scents – the first key

to unlocking the story of this age of converging cultures. At
least  years before Europe ventured eastwards, Christians,
Muslims, Jews and Hindus formed the basis of a society in
Kerala, on the Malabar coast. It was here that ‘black gold’
grew as a vine-gripping plant that attached itself to trees and
formed bunches of small green buds called pepper. The
pepper grows in this south-western part of the Western
Ghats, the mountain range that runs north to south astride
the Arabian Sea. It is a rainforest land of waterfalls, lakes,
apes and elephants, where soft mists fill the air; in short, an
ideal atmosphere for the pepper to grow. One spice trader
described it as ‘beautiful and peaceful’. The green bunches
are picked, separated from the stem and allowed to dry in
the sun until they shrivel and turn black. Also grown in
south-western India were ginger, turmeric and cardamom,
all staples of the Indian diet. However, pepper was the sov-
ereign spice that was known in the Arab world to the north-
west and to traders from East Asia centuries before the
Europeans came at the tail end of the fifteenth century.
In South East Asia, the position of the Spice Islands
(formerly the Moluccas, present-day Maluku Islands) is the
second key to the Age of Exploration. These are a small
group of volcanic land masses in present-day Indonesia,
south of the Philippines, east of Borneo and Java, north of
Australia and west of New Guinea. The archipelago
includes five islands – Ternate, Tidore, Motir (Moti), Makian
(Machian) and Bachan (Bacan) – which are the original
sources of the clove. The source of nutmeg and mace was
the Banda Islands. Larger Indonesian islands such as Bali
and Timor also had spices, but nutmeg and cloves were limit-
ed to those areas mentioned above. Europe got a first-hand
account of these islands and India from an Italian, Ludovico
Varthema, in his Itinerary of . According to Donald F.

The Molucca Islands (from Insviae Molvccae by Peter Plancius) The original
source of nutmeg and cloves, the name of these islands, known as Moluku
to the Arabs, meant ‘land of many kings’, an apt description, since there
are over , Molucca Islands. Note the nutmeg and cloves at the
bottom of the map.

Lach in Asia in the Making of Europe, Varthema went to the

East through the Levant, learned Arabic and acknowledged
Islam. He left Venice in  and arrived in India in ,
coming into Calicut (now Kozhikode) early in . Here he
devotes most of his writing to the pepper-growing and cul-
ture of the people in this Malabar region of West India.
Subsequently he rounded the southern tip of India at Cape
Comorin and ventured up the east coast of India. Lach
writes that it is at this point that the Italian’s Itinerary
becomes vague and his descriptions inaccurate. However,
later in his journal he notices the nutmeg tree and gives a
description of the clove tree, which indicates that he might
have been in the Moluccas. Varthema returned to Europe
from the west coast of India on a Portuguese ship and
ended up in Rome, where his travels were published.

Malacca: Malacca was vital to linking the Indian Ocean to the Spice Islands.
Located on the lower western side of the Malay Peninsula astride the narrow
strait bearing its name, Malacca was historically a major trading hub linking
China with the West. Both the Portuguese and the Dutch have controlled it.

As with India, there was an extensive spice-trading net-

work throughout this area for centuries. Spices were bought
with Chinese silks, Indian cottons, Arabian coffee and African
ivory. The distances involved were vast, considering that
Indonesia, south of Singapore, is about , miles from top
to bottom, roughly the distance from Los Angeles to New
York City.
As the trade in spices intensified, this became a signifi-
cant region for the Portuguese, Dutch, English, Spanish and,
later, French and Danish. By the middle of the sixteenth
century, as a result of the Portuguese trade route around
Africa to India and the Moluccas, and the Spanish moving
west into the Pacific from Mexico through Manila, the West
covered the middle latitudes of the major world oceans.
These subtropical lanes of the sea were sailed by the two
Iberian powers and caused the English, in particular, to seek
a northern route to the lands of spices.

 The Portuguese Enter the East
This historical and large-scale encounter between the worlds
of Europe and Asia begins with the Portuguese in .
Imagine visiting a new culture where you have no knowledge
of the language or the culture of the people you encounter.
In our modern world of instant translation of languages and
cross-cultural knowledge, as well as rapid movement from
place to place by land, sea and air, the enormity of this may
be difficult to grasp. In , when the Portuguese explorer
Vasco da Gama arrived at the port of Calicut on the west-
ern Malabar coast of India, he was had the enormous chal-
lenge of acquainting himself with the nature of the world in
which he found himself.
This quest for knowledge and power continued between
 and , as the Carreira da India (‘course to India’)
route operated from Lisbon, down to the east coast of
Africa at Mozambique and on to the west Indian ports of
Cochin in the south and Goa to the north.
When da Gama arrived in India, it was  years before the
Mogul conquest of this subcontinent. In Calicut and Kerala,
the Hindus were the ruling class. However, Muslims, Arabs
and Persians, who did not look favourably upon outsiders,
controlled the export trade. Da Gama and some of his crew
met the Calicut Hindu leader (or ‘Samuri’), who had been told
that King Manoel of Portugal was very rich. Da Gama gave
the Samuri leader some trinkets such as striped cloth, scarlet
hoods, hats, strings of coral, washbasins, sugar, oil and honey.
The Samuri, who received this ‘bounty’ while sitting on his
throne chewing on betel nuts and spitting the juice into a
golden spittoon, was very disappointed with the gifts and this
gave his Muslim advisers the opportunity to characterize da
Gama and his crew as nothing more than marauders.

Goa: this land-locked island became the centre of the Portuguese spice
world on the Malabar coast of India as well as its only shipbuilding port
in Asia.

The Portuguese were then taken to a Hindu temple

where da Gama, seeing a statue that resembled the Virgin
Mary (which he later sprinkled with water), assumed the
structure was a different type of Catholic Church. On their
way back to the ship, the export traders detained da Gama
and his crew and held them for days. Da Gama was almost
assassinated, but his group was saved by the Samuri. A legend
from this encounter was that before da Gama left India he
asked for a pepper stalk to take home for replanting. The
Samuri’s advisers were outraged, but the ruler calmly told da
Gama, ‘You can take our pepper, but you will never be able
to take our rains.’ After a few months, da Gama was able to
secure some peppercorns and gems and he headed west to
Portugal. His trip was not easy, resulting in the loss of crew
members, mostly to scurvy, and the need to dismantle one
of his ships on the East African coast. After other stops for

water and food, da Gama’s ships rounded Cape Horn, with
two of the vessels separately making it back to Lisbon after
an absence of over two years.
Looking back on da Gama’s meeting with the Samuri,
it is hard to believe that the Portuguese were so naive as to
expect to gain shiploads of pepper for such paltry gifts.
After all, there had been legends about the Eastern world
known by Europeans for centuries. Even if they did not
believe all of the tales of Eastern riches, the travellers
should have been better prepared for an exchange of a
valued product such as black pepper. Time would prove
that only silver, gold and other valuable commodities would
suffice for an exchange of spices.
Da Gama realized that the Portuguese would not have
success in India and elsewhere unless they broke the monop-
oly of the Arab, Muslim and Persian merchants. These groups
had controlled the export trade for centuries in the Indian
Ocean, and Calicut was the centre of it all where east and

Noble Portuguese in India. A th-century Indian artist’s depiction of
a Portuguese official and his followers on the Malabar coast of India.

west trading met. In March  a Portuguese fleet set out

for India with thirteen fully armed ships and , men.
Under the leadership of Pedro Alvares Cabral, the expedi-
tion headed south-west to find the point of sail that would
allow them to sail east around the Cape of Good Hope. In
doing so they came very close to land and ended up disem-
barking on Brazilian soil, thus becoming the first Europeans
to do so. Was this a planned attempt to find a new continent
or an accident? Historians are not sure. Cabral sent one ship
back to Portugal to announce the news. A horrible storm
separated and wrecked some of the fleet as it left Brazil. The
seven surviving ships met in East Africa and then went on to
Calicut, arriving within six months of leaving Lisbon.
The Portuguese were received by the Hindu Samuri, who
allowed them to build a factory. To repay this debt to the
Samuri, Cabral seized a Muslim ship in order to transport
an elephant to the Samuri as a gift. The Muslim merchants

retaliated by storming the factory and killing some fifty
Portuguese. Cabral then burned ten of their ships with their
crews and bombarded Calicut with all of his guns. This was
the first act of war against the Muslims, and the Hindu
Samuri was angered by the damage done to his city. The
Portuguese left and moved south, and then later went back
north up the coast, where word of their firepower had
spread. In both places they met docile leaders and were able
to load pepper and other spices onto their ships and head
home. Merchants and investors from all over Europe
descended on Lisbon to support the Portuguese and their
trading ventures. Meanwhile, in Venice the news was not
good. The overland trade routes from India that had given
‘the Queen of the Adriatic’ a European monopoly for cen-
turies were damaged.
The Portuguese successes were to continue, although
they became bloody cross-cultural encounters. Vasco da
Gama returned to Calicut after Cabral as a last-minute
replacement for the discoverer of Brazil, which made Cabral
resentful of da Gama and forced him into retirement. Da
Gama returned with more pepper and later Afonso de
Albuquerque firmly established Portuguese dominance in
India with the building of a fort at Cochin.
Between  and , the Portuguese supplied Europe
with most of its pepper. By  there were over , peo-
ple of European descent living on the west coast of India.
Although Portugal had established a spice base in Asia, it was
unable to capture the Muslim ports at the entrance to the Red
Sea. If the Portuguese had been successful here, they could
have dominated much of the spice trade moving from east to
west by land and sea. Although Portugal was the principal
supplier of spices in the northern hemisphere at this time, its
inhabitants did not take to spicy dishes as easily as the South

 Afonso de
Albuquerque: the
conqueror of Goa
and the first Viceroy
of the Portuguese
empire in India, he
was responsible for
breaking the Muslim
monopoly on the
spice trade in the
Indian Ocean.
He also captured
the vital port of
Malacca in 
and the Straits of
Ormuz four years
later, which enabled
control of the
Persian Gulf.

Asian Indians who supplied them or the Portuguese who

resided in India. However, over time, Portuguese dishes such
as Toucinhodo Ceú (Bacon from Heaven) and almond cake
used cinnamon. In pork dishes such as Carne de Vinhoe Alhos,
which is pork braised in white wine with herbs and orange
wedges, cloves are used for additional flavour.
The Italians were European leaders in the use of spices
during this period. Perhaps this was because of the east and

west ports of Venice and Genoa that had a long tradition of
importing spices. As early as the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, cinnamon, cloves and pepper were used in spice
mixtures. Jill Norman outlines the ingredients for ‘Scappi’s
Spice Mix’, produced by Bartolomeo Scappi, the cook to
Pope Pius  in his Opera dell’Arte del Cucinare, an influential
cookbook of the sixteenth century. This mix includes 
cinnamon sticks,  ounce of cloves, ½ ounce of dried gin-
ger and ½ ounce of nutmeg as well as ¼ ounce of grains of
paradise (a West African plant that grows in large pods
whose pungent seeds are used for flavouring), ¼ ounce of
saffron and ½ ounce of brown sugar. The book recom-
mends that the cinnamon sticks be broken up and all other
ingredients ground into a fine powder which should be
stored in a jar and would keep for three to four months.
During the remainder of the sixteenth century, the
Portuguese continued to move to the east, seeking out the
Spice Islands and the spice-trading routes of East and
South East Asia, an attempt that proved successful. At the
south-west tip of the Malay Peninsula, the Portuguese cap-
tured Malacca, a vital chokepoint to the straits that bear its
name and the entry to South East Asia and the Spice
Islands. The Portuguese continued to have success in the
spice realm by force of arms, but they also realized that
many of the native land-based powers in Asia did not con-
cern themselves with the sea, or else they were engaged in
rivalries with other land-based regions and kingdoms. This
allowed the Iberians to flourish on the sea. It should be
noted that the dominant Muslim trading networks the
Portuguese entered in South and East Asia continued with
a great deal of success. The Portuguese did not control the
trade in spices; they merely got their share. Additionally, at
their base in Macao and for their trading with the Chinese,

Earth Protected by Juniper and Juno. This th-century tapestry woven in
silver, gold, silk and wool shows the Portuguese King and his Queen
displaying their domain over their Portuguese overseas empire. Note the
small gold coloured circles and squares denoting Portuguese presence in
Africa and South Asia.

the Chinese dictated the terms of trade. Along the Malabar

coast of India, the Portuguese only controlled about  per
cent of the spice trade. As for pepper, they only procured 
per cent of that trade. Profits were good for the merchants
in Portugal who invested in the spice trade, but the Estados
da India venture of the Portuguese crown was a losing

An th-century map of India showing the Malabar coast (a source of
black pepper) on the left, the Coromandel Coast on the right, and Madurai
in southern India.

proposition. The Portuguese did gain profit from their sea

voyages to India, but most of the European profits were
made by those merchants who took their spices from the
overland Red Sea route.
Nevertheless, the world was changing, and east to west,
as the historian C. R. Boxer wrote, the Portuguese empire
gathered the following products: gold from Guinea, south-
east Africa and Sumatra; the sugar of Madeira, São Tomé
and Brazil; pepper from Malabar and Indonesia; mace and
nutmeg from Banda; cloves from Ternate, Tidore and
Amboina; cinnamon from Ceylon; gold, silks and porcelain
from China; silver from Japan; horses from Persia and
Arabia; and cotton textiles from India. In The Lusiads, the
late sixteenth-century epic verse of Portuguese exploration

by Luís de Camões, the poet writes of the glory of his com-
patriots’ venture to the east:

This celebrated coast of India, as you see, continues to

run southward till it ends in Cape Comorin, once Cape
Core, facing Taprobana or Ceylon. Everywhere along
these shores Portuguese soldiers still to come will win vic-
tories, lands, and cities, and here, for long ages they will
make their abode.

The dream of ongoing glory was to fade. It was during

the seventeenth century that Portuguese dominance would
be eroded by the Dutch and the English as well as by local
leaders who began to assert themselves in a more dynamic
fashion. By the end of the s, Portugal had lost most of
its Asian bases.

The Spanish Connect East and West

After the voyages of Christopher Columbus of , the
Spanish focused their efforts on the western hemisphere – in
Mexico and Central and South America. However, this did not
mean that the Spanish crown did not have an interest in the
spice trade. The major motivation for Columbus’s voyage, in
fact, was to locate this Eastern spice trade. Later, when
another Spanish explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, had circum-
navigated the globe, he explored the Philippines where he met
his death. The Spanish searched the Philippines for spices and
gold but did not find much of interest. However, there were
no Portuguese or Dutch there, and they were near the
Spice Islands, so they established settlements. Spain then
started a trade route, called the ‘Manila galleon’, between the

eponymous Philippine city, its major settlement in the island
nation, and Acapulco in Mexico. It is known that some cin-
namon crossed the Pacific to Mexico along this route, but
most of the spices that reached the Americas from Spain
came from the traditional itinerary west across the Indian
Ocean to the Atlantic, rather than the more direct, but very
long, way across the Pacific.
When Magellan circled the earth, he had a mandate
from the Spanish crown to find spices or to negotiate for
them. On board his flagship was Antonio Pigafetta, who
imparted information about spices as the expedition moved
through the Spice Islands. He wrote that ‘the best cinnamon
that can be found’ on an island grew on a tall tree with leaves
similar to the laurel and branches ‘as thick as fingers’ whose
bark was collected twice a year. The nutmeg tree was like the
walnut and had a bright red cover of mace that surrounded
the nut. Since cloves were considered the most exotic and

A cinnamon tree, depicted in the th-century German manuscript Gart der

Gesundheit (Garden of Health). The cinnamon tree has been said to live over
 years.


valuable spice, Pigafetta spent a great deal of time describ-
ing them: their height and thickness (as ‘tall and as big
around as a man’), the shape of their leaves, the colour of
the bark and the cloves themselves. As mentioned earlier,
the cloves grew in very specific locations in the mountains
of the five islands where they are extant. Pigafetta wrote that
each day a cloud descended around the plants and, because
of the moisture and cooler temperatures, ‘the cloves became
perfect’. When Magellan’s leaderless ship returned to Spain,
it was laden with valuable cloves. Unfortunately, a second
vessel of this famous expedition never made it back because
it was so overloaded with spices.
The Spanish crown was not satisfied with obtaining
spices second hand. They set out to look for new spices in
the Philippines and their colonies in Latin America or to
consider transplanting spice plants in the lands they con-
trolled. Some variations of the premier spices were eventu-
ally found in the Philippines, where local varieties of cinna-
mon, pepper and nutmeg grew. Cinnamon was so plentiful
that it was used as a fuel. Wild pepper grew but was not cul-
tivated. However, despite some attempts at cultivation, there
was no significant development of spices such as nutmeg
and cloves. On the other side of the world, Columbus
thought he had found cinnamon (not true) and pepper (a
long pepper found around Panama and Colombia which,
because of its strong scent, was thought to be more healthy).
A variation of cinnamon was found near Quito, Ecuador,
and was brought to Europe, but it had neither taste nor
aroma so perhaps was not cinnamon at all but merely
wishful thinking on the part of the sailors.
Transplanting the spices was a significant undertaking
for the Spanish in their new American colonies, known as
‘New Spain’. The Spanish were not only interested in spices

Ternate, an island in eastern Indonesia, was the original source of cloves.
The island was controlled by Islamic sultans, who became extremely rich
selling cloves to buyers from both east and west.

as a food stimulus but also as a medicine. They had learned

much from the Arab/Muslim conquest of southern Spain
after . The Arabs had done a great deal of experimenta-
tion with plants and transplanting over the centuries, and this
quest for knowledge regarding the use of spices and other
plants in medicine took hold in the Spanish Empire. In the
s, New Spain was given the exclusive right (or asiento) to
plant the seeds of black pepper, cloves, cinnamon and ginger.
Of these only ginger was able to take root and prosper. Later,
in the seventeenth century, the planting of cloves was
attempted, but this endeavour was also unsuccessful. It was
difficult to duplicate the conditions of those five Spice
Islands where moisture and cooler temperatures filled the
air. Ginger (Zingiber officinale) was one success story, however,

not only in New Spain, but also in and around Seville and at
the gardens of the Alcazar, the royal palace of Spain. The
southern part of Spain, after the eighth century and before
the expulsion of the Moors in , was dominated by Arab
cooking. This of course continued. When chilli peppers
arrived from the Americas they were, over time, used in dif-
ferent ways. The peppers were eaten roasted over coals,
boiled in liquid, prepared with salt, oil and vinegar, or dried
and pounded into a soft powder. They were also used as a
substitute for black pepper.

Dutch Competition and Dominance

During the sixteenth century, Portugal’s grasp was far-reach-
ing on the world scene, extending from Lisbon to Brazil to
Japan, with the capital a major centre of Western Europe.
However, this control was about to be challenged by the
Dutch. While Portugal was ascending to European leader-
ship of the Eastern spice trade, the Dutch were dominating
the trade on the rivers of Europe and in the Baltic Sea. It
was clear that the Low Country denizens had a keen com-
mercial and seafaring sense, but what factors propelled them
to sail the oceans to the East?
In the mid-sixteenth century, the Netherlands, or Low
Countries, comprised a complex set of states and towns,
loosely federated in seventeen provinces dominated by the
Catholic king of Spain. There had been some armed resist-
ance against Spain in  by Calvinist Protestants, and by
 this conflict had been resolved with the Union of
Utrecht, in which the southern Netherlands remained loyal
to Spain and the seven northern provinces, centred on
Amsterdam, became the Dutch Union. By  a company

was formed to pursue world trade. In the  years that fol-
lowed, this small confederation rose to the apex of the
global trading world. Already seaborne in the Baltic and on
Europe’s rivers, the union would undergo a transformation
and expansion that would extend around the globe. The ini-
tial Dutch move into the oceans was not in the eastern but in
the western hemisphere, where it centred on Brazil. One
expedition to that South American nation in  brought to
Amsterdam a shipload of gold and ivory. The Netherlands
controlled almost two-thirds of the European–Brazilian trade
by , the same year the Dutch West India Company was
formed to regulate trade.
Dutch ventures into Asia began with Dutch citizens
who had sailed with the Portuguese to Asia. They had gained
valuable knowledge about the spice trade routes. By  the
Dutch launched ships to Indonesia. Two years later a few
returned with a modest cargo of pepper, which more than
covered the cost of the expedition. In  another fleet set
out, returning less than fifteen months later with a costly
cargo of spices. In the holds of the returning ships were
, pounds of pepper, , pounds of cloves and
lesser amounts of mace and nutmeg. One Dutchman
exclaimed: ‘So long as Holland has been Holland, such rich-
ly laden ships have never been seen.’ The total profit for the
voyage was  per cent.
Trade now intensified as fourteen fleets with  ships set
out for the East Indies in . However, there was a funda-
mental problem with these earlier voyages. Each of the fleets
and ships that left Holland was funded individually or by
political units of either North or South Holland. The Union
of Utrecht had not solidified the economic interests of
Holland. In the Spice Islands, individual Dutch ships in the
same port were vying for the same spices, a situation that was

far from ideal. When ships and fleets returned to the various
ports of Holland before , the profits, or the loss of
money for failed voyages, were not shared by all. Individual
companies were going into bankruptcy. After much strain,
dissent and argument among the many factions, the end of
 saw the birth of the United East India Company, or the
 (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), more com-
monly known as the Dutch East India Company.
The unified Dutch economic compass was now pointed
directly at Asia and, for the most part, success came the
nation’s way. The Dutch were very straightforward in their
trading, using silver coin – rather than Vasco da Gama trin-
kets – to purchase spices. In  the Portuguese lost the
Spice Islands to the Dutch, in  Malacca fell, in 
Colombo was in Dutch hands, in  Ceylon and the cinna-
mon trade was Dutch and in  Cochin went to the .
The dominant trade in spices had a new leader. One Dutch
ditty of the day went:

Wherever profit leads us,

To every sea and shore,
For love of gain,
The wide world’s harbours we explore.

Concurrent with their many successes, the Dutch experi-

enced hard lessons in cross-cultural learning. In the year
after the  was formed, the Dutch were in Ceylon seeking
a way into the cinnamon trade when they were approached
by the Singhalese Maharajah of Kandy, located east of
Colombo in the centre of the island nation. The maharajah
asked the East India traders to assist him in getting rid of the
Portuguese. The Singhalese leader was angry that the
Portuguese had taken over the productive coastal cinnamon

areas and sent him inland. Meanwhile, the Dutch sailors, after
a long time at sea eating salted beef, caught sight of some cows
on the hillsides and longed for freshly cooked beef. An over-
ture to buy the beasts was made to the Singhalese, who were
horrified, since their religion held that the cows harboured
the souls of their dead relatives. The Dutch leader did not
take this seriously and allowed a few of the animals to be
slaughtered, thinking that payment could be made after the
fact. Not surprisingly, the Singhalese reacted badly, and
relations between the two groups deteriorated. The Dutch
had made another cultural error with the Sultan of Achin,
at the northern tip of Sumatra, when they presented the
Muslim leader with a greeting written on parchment made
from pigskin. The convergence of cultures continued with
more negative results.
A son of the Netherlands, Jan Huygen van Linschoten,
sometimes referred to as the Dutch Marco Polo, illuminat-
ed the evolution and culture of the Dutch experience in
Asia. He described the sixteenth-century spice world in
writings called the Itinerario, or a journey or description of
his travels. Later he wrote about the nature of the Dutch
empire in editions also published in German and English in
the seventeenth century. This merchant and explorer start-
ed working for the Portuguese in the last quarter of the
s and was sent to Goa on the coast of west India. Here
he copied maps and other important information such as
trading stations and resupply points of Portuguese trade,
which were to prove extremely helpful to the Dutch. Lins-
choten also rendered detailed descriptions of spice trees and
spice-growing areas. One portrayal of residents of a clove-
growing area of the Moluccas includes mention of a drink
with ‘four drammes [of cloves] being drunke with Milk’, a
potable said to ‘procure lust’. When initially published

Senior Merchant of the Dutch East Indian Company and his Wife Before Batavia
(present day Jakarta) by Albert Cuyp, c. . Anyone caught stealing spices
in the Dutch spice empire faced the death penalty.

between  and , the Itinerario not only helped the
development of the Dutch spice empire but also aided the
English, who used the writings in their quest for spices.
In the next century the young Dutch minister François
Valentijn ventured out to the Spice Islands, eventually reach-
ing Ceylon. A keen observer of the world, Valentijn’s record
of the Dutch spice empire in Asia is one of the best written.
His description of Ceylon as being shaped like a large ham
precedes his vivid portrait of the cinnamon tree and the
process of developing the spice:

These trees sometimes grow very tall and sometimes

medium. Their leaves are comparable to a citron leaf or
to a laurel leaf in thickness and colour and the cinnamon
leaf has three veins. The young leaves on first coming out
are as red as scarlet and when broken in pieces smell
much more like cloves than cinnamon. The tree has white

 flowers which have a lovely and agreeable smell, from
which come a fruit which is as big as an olive . . . The tree
grows wild like other jungle trees and is not valued any
higher by the natives. This tree has a double bark, the out-
ermost, which is not like cinnamon and which one peels
with a knife, and the innermost which is the real cinna-
mon and is peeled with the curved edge of a knife first in
a circle and then lengthwise, and laid to dry in the sun
where they roll into each other, and are curled together as
we generally see them . . . There are three sorts of cinna-
mon here; first the fine, which is peeled from the young
and middle-aged trees; the second, the coarse which
comes from thicker and older trees; and the third, the
wood or wild cinnamon, which is also found in Malabar
and in other quarters. But the real cinnamon is found
nowhere else except on this island.

As the Dutch tightened their control on the Spice

Islands, their administration of the spice-growing process
was a harsh and demanding one. In order to control the
market in spices such as nutmeg and cloves, the Dutch only
allowed the growth of a certain number of plants. This cul-
tivation was strictly regulated, enabling the Dutch to control
European markets in spices for a long period of time.
However, the effect of this action on the native peoples
growing the spices was damning. One example of this is
found in the Banda Islands, the sole source of nutmeg and
mace. The Dutch began trading here with the Bandanese,
who initially were very agreeable to making a treaty with
them – but were later just as willing to break that bond when
the English and Portuguese appeared and wanted their share
of nutmeg. This aggravated the Dutch to such an extent that
they were forced to take strong measures. In  it was

Eugenia caryophyllata. The clove was native to Ternate, an island in the East
Indies.
declared in Holland that ‘the Bandanese should be overpow-
ered, the chiefs exterminated and chased away, and the land
repopulated with heathens [slaves].’
The Dutch asked for a monopoly, it was refused by the
Bandanese, a battle ensued and the Bandanese surrendered
to Dutch sovereignty. However, the terms of the treaty were
broken by the residents of Banda, and the Dutch proceeded
to slaughter the natives. Slaves were brought in to replace the
native population, and the Dutch tried to encourage their
homebound citizens to colonize the islands.
These incursions on the indigenous populations were
direct violations of cultural mores. One custom in the clove-
growing islands was that a clove tree was planted for every
baby born. If a clove tree was cut down, it might bring bad
fortune to a child. The Dutch policies eventually allowed
them to have major control of three of the premier spices
in the East Indies. Of the trading islands in this region, first,
cloves on Amboina, and then pepper on Ternate and Tidore
preceded nutmeg as spices under Dutch control. So
demanding were the colonists about the control of the spice
markets that it was said that if there were too many spices
entering the European market, ‘mountains’ of cinnamon
and nutmeg would be burned in Amsterdam in order to
maintain prices.
Like the Portuguese, whom they ran out of the Spice
Islands, the Dutch never had any control of the trade in
spices. The German historian and sociologist Andre Gunder
Frank wrote that the Chinese and other East Asians ruled the
seas. From the late seventeenth century onwards, European
penetration was actually reversed. Other historians point out
that the Portuguese and Dutch were able to make the inroads
that they did because of local and regional power vacuums
that they filled for short periods of time, playing one region

off another. The Dutch, even with their colonies and full
shares, got only a small part of the global trade in spices.
Finally, and of no little importance, the Dutch were instru-
mental in bringing Asia into the world economy as no other
people were. Asia and Europe were inextricably linked.

The English Evolve from Pirates to Players

The formation of the Dutch East India Company not only
united the Dutch and allowed them to dominate the seas of
Asia, but it also did great damage to the English by not per-
mitting them to get a full share of the spice trade. However,
there were some English successes along the way, including
control over some of the Spice Islands for limited periods
of time.
The first favourable outcomes occurred during Sir
Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. In November
 he arrived at Ternate in the East Indies. Here he made
a treaty with the Sultan Baabullah, buying a huge amount of
cloves. After striking a reef and being delayed, Drake was
able to continue west into the Indian Ocean. However, his
ship, the Golden Hind, was forced to dump much of its cargo
because it was overwhelmed with the weight of the spice.
With the remaining spices and other precious cargo, Drake
arrived back in England in late September . The profit for
the voyage was estimated at , per cent (£ for each £
invested). Because of Drake’s success, Queen Elizabeth  was
petitioned to sanction an expedition. In  James Lancaster
and George Raymond sailed from Plymouth, on England’s
south coast. Raymond’s ship was lost, and Lancaster pro-
ceeded on to the East Indies, plundering Portuguese ships
in the Straits of Malacca and establishing a British base on

the north-western tip of Java in Bantam (near present-day
Banten), the most important port in the spice trade from
the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century. Stimulated
by the founding of their own East India Company in ,
the English continued their quest for spices. Despite this and
other initiatives, the Dutch managed to keep the English at
bay through much of the next century and, not surprisingly,
some of these difficult situations increased the tension
between the two nations.
The British had not been able to make significant inroads
in the Spice Islands, and investors in the London-based East
India Company were ready to pull the English out. While that
was in progress, the Dutch and English were coexisting on
one of the last English settlements, the island of Ambon.
This small piece of volcanic land,  miles long by ten miles
wide, saw coexistence between these two European powers
as difficult at best. Both nations were operating under a treaty
wherein they were obliged to work with each other. However,
the British did not cooperate with the Dutch on either finan-
cial or military commitments made under a  treaty
between the two nations. The Dutch governor, Herman van
Speult, had dealt with a few insurrections and mutinies and
was understandably suspicious. However, by  it was gen-
eral knowledge that the English were about to pull out. But
van Speult, without warning and for reasons unknown,
arrested fourteen Englishmen and ten Japanese mercenaries,
accusing them of plotting to take over the main fort on the
island. The Japanese were executed and, shortly thereafter,
ten of the English as well, but not before being tortured in
the fort’s dungeons until they confessed. Finally, they were
convicted and beheaded. There was no evidence that the men
were plotting to seize the fort, which would have been a daunt-
ing, if not impossible, task. The Dutch recalled van Speult,

Harvesting cloves in the spice islands in the th century. The clove tree is
an evergreen with thin and smooth bark. It grows to a height of – metres
(– feet) with a straight trunk.

but he died before he could return home. The British were

outraged, and this heinous act convinced them that they need-
ed to give up the Spice Islands. The ‘Ambon Massacre’, as it
came to be called, remained a strong force in the animosity
the British felt toward the Dutch. Later, this negative feeling
played out when Oliver Cromwell went to war with the Dutch
in the s and Charles  did the same over a decade later.

 The spice trade and the competition that was ever pres-
ent in battles and wars between the competing nations took
its toll on lives and psyches. John Keay in The Spice Route
points out that the Reverend Samuel Purchas wrote that the
mayhem in the Moluccas could best be attributed ‘to the per-
nicious abandon induced by equatorial temperatures; decent
men, Dutch and English, shed their “solid virtues” with their
thick European clothes, became excited by the “fiery ferity”
of their own spices, and surrendered themselves to the
“heathenish qualities of their swarthy associates”.’
There was one shining success in the British experience
in the Moluccas, but it did not actually occur there. In ,
the year before this occurrence, the English captured two
richly laden Dutch ships and docked in Erith in Kent. The
writer Samuel Pepys, recently appointed the Surveyor-
Victualer to the Royal Navy, hearing of the cargo, went to
the ships and marvelled:

The greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in

the world. Pepper scattered through every chink, you trod
upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs I walked above the
knees; whole rooms full. And silk in bales, and boxes of
copper plate, one of which I saw opened . . . as noble a
sight as ever I saw in my life.

Pepys also concluded some business on the side, according

to the historian Simon Schama in his  book The
Embarrassment of Riches. The famed diarist was found in the
taverns of the port buying up spices from ‘dirty wretched
seamen’ in verminous taverns. Additionally, the gossip was
that men in high places had helped themselves to riches that
belonged in the royal treasury. These ‘riches’ acquired by
Pepys and others, dazzled by such affluence, were of minor

Painted map of Ambonia in the East Indies with a portrait of its first
Dutch Governor, Frederik Houtman. Ambonia was the scene of the 
massacre of Englishmen, Japanese and a Portuguese by the Dutch that
ended any hope of Anglo–Dutch co-operation in spice trading.

concern to the Dutch, who had been acquiring many more

spice-laden ships from the east. The majority of the spice
wealth was docked in Amsterdam.
The year  saw the occurrence of a significant real
estate exchange. A historical fact that many people are aware
of is that in  the Dutch bought the island of Manhattan
from the Canarsee Indians for a few trinkets. What is less
known about this two-part transaction, however, is the way
in which the English acquired it from the Dutch soon after-
wards. The fascinating story is centred on spices. Around
 the Dutch East India Company was able to secure a
source of nutmeg by occupying Pulo Run, a small volcanic
island in the Banda Islands, west of New Guinea. The nut-
meg crop here was small, but the British had one outpost
among the Dutch-controlled Spice Islands. In March 
two English ships pulled into Pulo Run, taking it over and
forcing the Dutch to leave. However, a short time after the
incident, the Dutch returned in greater numbers and ousted

the English, destroying the island’s entire nutmeg crop, with
the result that no one could profit from it. Meanwhile, the
British decided to retaliate, not in the East Indies, but in
New Amsterdam. When an English fleet came into the
Hudson River at Fort Amsterdam, they found a Dutch gar-
rison that had overestimated both the firepower of the
British fleet and the number of fighting men facing their set-
tlement. There were four ships in all, and only one of them
a man-of-war, the others being simple trading vessels. The
Dutch leader Peter Stuyvesant had been told there were 
men but, in reality, there was less than half that number
aboard the four ships. The Dutch gave in, and the English
took over, naming the area New York. Later, in the Treaty of
Breda, the Dutch retained the island of Run and the British
held on to New York. This exchange of a small nutmeg-
growing island for Manhattan turned out to be a major his-
torical event. It also represented a dramatic shift of global
power, as the British concentrated their Asian efforts on
India and moved their western focus to North America and
the Caribbean.

Cross-cultural Convergence
Unrelenting heat was an aspect of the tropics that made life
uncomfortable for spice seekers. Compounding this was a
lack of knowledge about the people native to these spice-
rich lands. Cross-cultural living of any kind was not an easy
task in the days of spice trading and the settlements that
grew up to support them. Giles Milton in Nathaniel’s Nutmeg
reports that ‘the annals of the East India Company are filled
with notices of plagues, sicknesses and deaths that occurred
in Bantam’. The journal of the seventeenth-century English

sinologist Edmund Scott depicts the horrors of life in this
disease-ridden port. Scott watched his two superiors die and
numerous sailors succumb to typhoid and cholera. Malaria
was rife in these tidal swamplands situated by the Sunda
Strait. To add to this misery were the confusion and misper-
ceptions caused by the cultural mixing of Chinese, Indians,
Christians and Muslims, all living yards apart. And on top of
this, the indigenous Javanese people despised them all, toler-
ating them only for the benefit of trade. Moreover, in times
of tension and armed conflict, the Javanese could not distin-
guish between the Dutch and English, a constant challenge
to native alliances formed with either of these powers.
Finally, as Milton reports, there were roving bands of head-
hunters who were constantly in need of ‘products’. Daily life
in the spice trade, and the ‘cultural encounters’ that ensued
were indeed daunting, unpredictable adventures. In his 
book, Pathfinders, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the global his-
torian, evocatively sums up the experience of Europeans in
the tropics: ‘They began with embraces, continued with
abuse, and ended in bloodshed.’

The Role of the Chinese

The question as to where the Chinese were in this long chap-
ter of the spice trade story can be said to have two short
responses: that they were already there or that they had come
and gone. In the centuries before the Europeans came to
Asia, the Chinese were engaged in trading networks that
brought them pepper, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. Trade
in Asia was so interactive that the Chinese did not have to
exert much effort to get the spices they wanted. However, in
the fifteenth century, they launched a global expedition that

may very well have been greater than any the world has ever
seen. Early in the s, before the Portuguese arrived in
Asia, the Chinese sent seven expeditions to the West under
the leadership of Admiral Zheng He. The first of these voy-
ages comprised sixty-two junks,  support vessels and over
, men. Zheng He’s junk was a technological marvel.
Some accounts have its length at more than  metres (
yards) and width at  metres ( yards). It had nine masts
running fore to aft. (The ship was as long as ½ American
football fields and bigger than a  by -yard football/
soccer pitch.) In comparison, a Portuguese caravel that sailed
to India was under  feet long. Zheng He may have led the
greatest sea armada in history. Another question is: if the
Chinese already had access to spices, what was the purpose
of these voyages? It is generally agreed that these were flag-
waving expeditions meant to demonstrate the power and
might of the Ming Dynasty. Moreover, the Chinese were also
interested in documenting all the ports visited and products
encountered by the voyages, and maps and sailing records
were known to have been returned to China. The seven expe-
ditions visited about  countries all over the Indian Ocean,
west to Africa and east to the Spice Islands. Zheng He even
presented a giraffe from Africa to the emperor, a singular and
exciting event in the Chinese court. During his septet of trips
abroad, the admiral also brought back lions, camels, ostriches,
zebras, rhinoceroses and other African wildlife.
All this seafaring by the Chinese could have meant domi-
nation over the Indian Ocean traffic in spices and other
goods. However, history played a hand in the form of court
intrigue: Zheng’s successes created problems for the imperial
court, whose power was shifting to a more Confucian philo-
sophical system that honoured values such as taking care of
the home front and dealing with outsiders and barbarians only

as the need arose. This sea change of thinking halted future
ocean-bound movement for China (and, sadly, even resulted
in the records of Zheng He being destroyed). Consider what
the consequences for Portugal and other European nations
would have been if China had continued its seafaring empire
into the sixteenth century. Despite curtailing its ocean-going
ways, from the end of these voyages forward, the Chinese and
their spice-trading empire of coastal shipping and commerce
continued as the dominant force in Asian economics. This
period of history in the East did not see any expansion of
empires. South Asia had trading networks and fleets but was
not assertive toward others. In Japan the warlords were divid-
ing up the country, the empires of Java were in the past, and
the Thai and Burmese efforts at imperialism were yet to
come. Trade flourished, and the Europeans, despite local
conflicts, took their share of spices without interference.

The French and Danes Play a Part

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France
and Denmark played small roles in the spice trade. Both
nations based their operations not on the Malabar coast of
India or in the Spice Islands but on the south-east coast of
India, the base for textiles and cloth that were desired all
over Asia and Africa. Here they joined the Dutch and the
English, who also realized the great value of the Indian
cloth that supplied many global markets and afforded access
to East Asian spices.
The French had attempted to enter the spice trade more
directly at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Initially, and
with the unofficial support of the king, freebooters started
pirating Portuguese ships that were carrying Asian spices to

A lady bringing spices to a lawyer in France in the time of Louis , no
doubt in payment of a fee.

the north of Europe from Lisbon to Antwerp. Additionally,

French vessels from various western ports intercepted
Portuguese ships returning from India off the west coast of
Africa or in other parts of the Atlantic. The French also estab-

lished royal ports for the importation of spices into France.
Over time they became carriers of the spices for Venetian or
Genoese traders, and eventually Marseilles became a major
centre for spices. The French made one venture into Asia
from the port of Dieppe after . Two ships set out for the
Moluccas, running a Portuguese blockade and making it to
Sumatra. Two of the leaders died of fever after failing to deal
with Sumatran leaders or trade for spices. One of the vessels
returned home in , convincing the French to leave the
spice trade to the Portuguese. However, French piracy of
Iberian vessels continued along the Atlantic coast.
The French had established a colony in  on the
southern Coromandel coast of India at Pondicherry (now
Puducherry). They later built a factory on the west coast
north of Calicut. It was in India that the French traded cloth
for spices and other products such as rice, timber, rope and
cowries (shells used as currency in the Indian Ocean world).
In the s, the East Indian monopoly on spices was bro-
ken when the French governor of Mauritius smuggled out
clove and nutmeg seedlings to the island he oversaw. From
here, the clove was taken to Zanzibar by the Arab trader,
Harameli bin Saleh, in . In time Zanzibar and Pemba,
on the East African coast, became two of the largest suppli-
ers of cloves to the world markets.
Changes in Gallic cuisine and the use of spices in French
cooking had a direct effect on the French world of spice
trading. Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, the French
employed various spices in food preparation. However, after
the publication of Le cuisinier françois in  by the chef
François La Varenne, the French shifted away from the use
of spices and instead concentrated on dishes where the
ingredients were cooked in their own juices or made with
butter and other home-made or home-grown products.

Thus, over time the French purchased and consumed fewer
spices in the preparation of authentically French cuisine.
One of the ironies of this transition away from spices was
the opulence of the court of Louis  where baskets of
spices were brought before the king prior to a royal feast.
However, this was the end of an era climaxing with the
French Revolution. Spices still play a minor role in tradition-
al French cooking – in dishes such as Béarnaise sauce which
uses white peppercorns, cayenne pepper and tarragon leaves
over Beef Tournedos. Often a little black pepper is added at
the end. The French also use nutmeg in preparing filet of
sole with spinach and Bechamel (or Mornay) sauce.
The Danes began their exploits into Asia in the seven-
teenth century, sending out ships to bring back pepper and
cloves. However, this trade was limited to only seven ships
returning to the homeland with spices between  and
. Decades later, Denmark established an East India com-
pany of its own, but Dutch dominance forced them west
from the Spice Islands to the east coast of India, where they
also developed a textile base for trade in Asia. It was not until
the eighteenth century that the Danes opened trade with
China and, as a result, other Asian ports. The Danish East
India Company did especially well during the time when
Holland and France were at war with England and spices
needed to be moved back to Europe by a neutral carrier.

Eastern Spices Move West

While Central and South America were to be the source of
one of the great world spices that emigrated to the East,
North America, during the period of English colonization in
the early seventeenth century, found spices in its settlers’ diet

as a result of global trade. One of these colonies, Maryland,
founded at St Mary’s in , is known to have used spices
in its diet. In Narratives of Early Maryland organizers recom-
mended spices as one of the staples that a colonist would
need to settle in for one year. Inventories of deceased mem-
bers of colonial Maryland families listed spices as part of
their estates. In the s, for example, a John Ward listed a
pound of pepper as well as ginger, nutmeg and mace among
those items inventoried. A decade later, in the much larger
estate of Robert Coles, pepper, saffron, nutmeg, cloves and
cinnamon were listed. The source of some of these spices
might have been Dutch ships that were trading at St Mary’s
frequently during the s, when the English were distract-
ed by their civil war.

Chilli Peppers Move Westwards to

Dominate the East
So far most of the emphasis of this world history of spices
has been on the Indian Ocean area and the Spice Islands.
The story now shifts to the western hemisphere, where the
capsicum vegetable enters the spice story. The tropical
plant known as the capsicum (from the Latin word capsa,
meaning ‘case’ or ‘box’) is native to the Americas and
belongs to the same family as the tomato and aubergine.
There are basically two main categories of capsicum –
sweet peppers and chilli (chili or chile) peppers – and from
these hundreds of variations are grown all over the world.
Amazingly, chilli peppers did not originally exist anywhere
in Europe or in Asia. Indeed today it is hard to imagine
China, Thailand, Korea and other Asian and African nations
without this ubiquitous spice. How it moved around the

Chillies laid out to dry in Ethiopia. The chilli has travelled more widely
than any other spice and been used in dishes from different cultures.

world through trade and cuisine is a complex and still ongo-

ing history.
The earliest known evidence of chilli peppers is found
at pre-Columbian sites in Peru. When the Spanish arrived
in Mexico in the early sixteenth century, Hernán Cortés
described the Aztecs growing and eating peppers. The con-
quistador and his men also had the fiery experience (and
honour) of being offered a chocolate drink laced with hot
peppers – although they were also presented with a less fiery
alternative sweetened with cane sugar.
The chilli was part of the native diet of Central and
South America, and there are hundreds of varieties of it.
This pepper is so old that it is difficult to trace the origin of
the plant to one or more sources. Evidence of its growth
goes back to  , while farming of it dates to roughly
 . The chilli was grown by the Toltecs, Mayas and
Aztecs in Central America and by the Incas to the south. The
latter three used them in their torture rituals, and they were

also used as a ‘poison’ for arrow tips. Fish were also deliber-
ately killed with chilli ‘poison’ that was dropped in the water.
Christopher Columbus brought the chilli pepper back to
Spain. However, the Italian explorer was only interested in
black pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg and less con-
cerned with native plants unless he thought they might be
related to these four premium spices. Nonetheless, the doc-
tor on his voyage, Alvarez Chanca, from Seville, identified
the spice and took it back to Spain, where it was used only
sparingly in foods and was found to have more applications
in medicine. In her  book, History of Food, Maguelonne
Toussaint-Samat writes that the chilli pepper was considered
a panacea for intestinal infections, parasites and diarrhoea . . .
and even a remedy for piles. Although the capsicum did not
play a strong role in Spanish cuisine, there is some evidence
of its use as food in Iberia. An annual festival in Galicia, in
north-western Spain on the Bay of Biscay, is held to cele-
brate a small green chilli pepper that is fried. The Basques
of northern Spain also used the peppers in their chorizo
sausages and in dishes with tomatoes and cod.
The early global migration of the chilli pepper could be
due to the Portuguese, who were establishing their colonies
in Asia just after the chilli arrived on the Iberian peninsula.
Brazil was also a site of peppers in the Americas for the
Portuguese. How much the Portuguese were influenced by
the pepper brought back by the Spanish is not known. What
is more likely is that the Portuguese found and promoted the
chilli of southern Brazil, taking it around the world to their
Asian bases, including the ports in Macao and Goa. From
there they came to influence Chinese and Indian food. One
sixteenth-century botanist referred to chilli pepper from
Goa on the west coast of India as ‘Pernambuco peppers’, a
direct reference to an area of Brazil. The chilli also found its

Capsicum annuum. Chilli has become a dominant world spice, moving from
west to east and around the world.
way into Africa, when the Portuguese conducted their noto-
rious slave trading on that continent. Slaves brought to Brazil
for the plantations continued these traditions, while the chilli
continued to evolve into new variations as it was replanted
in newly developed lands.
In Central America, the Aztec and evolving Mexican diets
were based on maize (corn), beans, tomatoes and capsicum
peppers. At the time of Columbus, the peppers were eaten in
soups and stews as well as with fish and meat. They were also
dried and made into a variety of pickles to take on journeys.
As the Spanish moved north and west throughout the
Americas, the chilli pepper moved into California with the
Jesuit priests, who established new missions at least  miles
north into the present-day state of California. Today, much of
the chilli powder in the United States comes from that state.
A legend that makes for good fiction tells how the chilli
pepper evolved into paprika, the national spice of Hungary.
In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire controlled
much of Eastern Europe, including Budapest. The story
goes that a Turkish pasha named Mehmet saw a beautiful
Hungarian water-girl and quickly put her in his harem.
Confined to the pasha’s gardens, she became familiar with all
types of plants. One of these was a vine that bore large red
fruit, which the Turks ground into a powder to spice up their
food. The water-girl had never tasted anything as good, so
secretly she gathered up some seeds. It happened that the
girl had been in love with a peasant boy before her abduc-
tion. While she was in the harem, she discovered a secret
passage that the pasha had dug as a means of escape in times
of trouble. Each night she went through the passage and
met her lover. On one occasion she gave him some of the
seeds, which he then planted. After a year, paprika plants
were growing all over Budapest and its countryside, and the

Hungarians embraced the new spice. Later, there was a revo-
lution in which the Turks were driven out of Hungary, but
paprika nonetheless grew to become the nation’s chief spice.
The paprika most Westerners enjoy today is very flavour-
ful but mild. However, in Hungary more than two dozen
variations of the spice have been developed, and they have
varying degrees of heat. The Hungarians more or less
adopted it as their national spice when it was made a central
ingredient in goulash, the spicy stew that is the country’s
best-known traditional dish. Mild paprika is made from the
seeds of the pepper, while hotter varieties come from the
whole spice pod, which is dried and then ground.
The real migration of the chilli pepper in Eastern Europe
was first into Greece, then into the northern Balkan coun-
tries, and then eastwards to Turkey. Eventually it migrated
into southern Italy. The pepper did not make inroads into the
north of Europe at this time, however, largely for botanical
and climatic reasons (Hungary was considered the northern
limit of chilli pepper growth). The name ‘paprika’ came from
the Greek term for black pepper, peperi. Other name changes
occurred as the spice moved through regional languages
such as Greek, in which it is called piperia. More than any-
thing else, the chilli pepper was born to travel. All that was
needed was the seed and the transplanting and, in many areas
of the world, such as India, where the climate was right, the
process was quite effortless.

Spices Migrate to the West

Once spices became more available to a larger portion of
the population in Europe, they assumed a larger role in both
medicine and in food preparation. In fact, it is generally

believed that at first spices were primarily used in medicine,
only later taking their rightful place in the kitchen. In his
Regimen corpus (), Aldobrandino of Siena wrote that cin-
namon was good for ‘fortifying the liver and the stomach’
and ‘cooking meat thoroughly . . . ’ while cloves ‘fortify the
stomach and body . . . eliminate flatulence and evil humours
. . . due to cold, and help to cook food thoroughly’.
According to Le Trésor de santé, written by a celebrated
French doctor and published in Lyon in , pepper
‘maintains health, fortifies the stomach . . . (and) eliminates
winds. It facilitates urination . . . cures chills from intermit-
tent fevers, and also heals snakebites and hastens the expul-
sion of stillborn infants from the womb. If drunk [it] is good
for coughs . . . Ground up with dried grapes, [it] purges the
brain of phlegm and stimulates the appetite.’ Cloves were
good ‘for the eyes, liver, heart and stomach’. Oil of clove was
‘excellent for treating toothaches. It is good for stomach flux-
ions due to cold and for cold maladies of the stomach.’
However, as this ditty from a fifteenth-century Commonplace
Book shows, spices such as pepper were becoming an integral
part of the European diet:

Snow is white and lieth in the dike,

And everyman lets it lie;
Pepper is black and has a good smack,
And every man doth it buy.

When all is said and done about the history of spices,

there has always been much – and deserved – ado about the
Age of Exploration and the roles played by the Portuguese,
Dutch, Spanish, English, Danish and French. Historically,
it was an exciting time, an age of converging cultures with all
of their challenges. These nations did take the initiative of

Pepper vines
growing in
Mexico during
the s.
Pepper spread
out from India
to other tropical
areas after the
th century.
Today Vietnam
is the world’s
largest producer.

connecting West and East, and they did change their

economies with the influx of spices and other Eastern
goods. A significant fact about the spice trade is that these
products became more reasonably priced after Vasco da
Gama returned. The main reason for this is that using a
direct sea route from Asia to Europe, as opposed to the
overland route across Arabia to the Mediterranean, eliminat-
ed many middlemen. Fewer hands in the spice pot meant
less expense at the end. But, during this age, and for at least
a century afterwards, Europeans gained only a small percent-
age of the total spice trade. The Middle Eastern and South
and East Asian economies flourished, as they did before

the Europeans came, consuming most of the world’s spices.
Trading networks, such as those across the Muslim world,
were conducted in an effortless way and ‘sealed with a hand-
shake and a glance at heaven’. It was, however, the first global
age and, as a result of this West–East convergence, the known
world expanded beyond belief and was never the same again.


 4
The Age of Industrialization

I speak severely to my boy,

I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

As the nineteenth century dawned, the spice trade found a

new competitor in the western hemisphere that explored
and exploited Sumatra and the Spice Islands. But these
traders from the newly founded United States of America
faced constant danger in north-west Sumatra from the
creese, a short wavy-bladed dagger of the native Malays.
France pulled off a coup in the spice world by stealing a
spice plant from the Moluccas and successfully transplanting
it on the other side of the Indian Ocean. This move led to
new growth sites of this spice and to an eventual domina-
tion in world sales. However, it also led to a slave system in
East Africa that took over a century to erase. The British
were to control the Dutch spice empire for a short time
during the Napoleonic Wars, but they gave that up, moving
on to dominate the South Asian subcontinent and, in the pro-
cess, changing the spice-consuming habits of their mother

Dutch spice trader in the East Indies. The Dutch continued to deal with
local villages in the Spice Islands well into the th century.

country. The Dutch regained their spice island world and

settled into an orderly and well-controlled system of spice
trading.

The British Expand Their Spice World

When Britain took over Holland’s colonies in the Indies,
the occupation was organized from Malacca by the governor-
general of India, Lord Minto, with the help of Thomas
Stamford Raffles, later the developer of Singapore. The
British introduced many reforms to improve the lives of the
people who cared for and produced the spices during the
Napoleonic Wars. Raffles’s newly instituted land-tax system
worked so well that the Dutch retained it when they took back
their possessions after the defeat of Napoleon in . It was
during this time of British possession that spice seedlings
were taken to India and Europe and transplanted successfully.

Edward Coles, an official of the British East India Company,
had successfully transplanted nutmeg and clove seedlings on
the south-western coast of Sumatra, and black pepper was
successfully grown in Penang, an island off the west coast of
the Malay Peninsula. Raffles eventually took over these plan-
tations for the East India Company, building a home there
which he called the ‘Abode of Peace’. His driveway was lined
with clove trees, which his second wife, Sophia, described
thus: ‘The spicy fragrance with which they perfume the air,
produce, in driving through a long line of them, a degree of
exquisite pleasure.’ Britain’s short control of the Dutch spice
areas had expanded their spice empire, and the British colony
of Singapore became a centre of the spice trade. As a result,
spices prospered during England’s domain, and the prices on
the world spice markets were kept at a reasonable level.
Over time Singapore became a human blending of the
overland Chinese (the majority), South Asian Indians and

Cutting and quilling cinnamon: cinnamon is cut after heavy rains when
the sap is active and the bark can be detached more easily. The best grade
is nearly as thin as paper.


Malays. Also influenced by nearby Indonesia and the spice
islands, this small nation at the southern tip of the Malay
Peninsula was a cross-cultural centre for South East Asia.
Their foods and spices reflected this cross-cultural blending.
One type of curry that has evolved in Singapore is a blend
used to cover seafood before cooking. It consists of corian-
der, cumin, red chillis from India, fennel, cassia, cardamom,
turmeric and tellicherry (Malabar coast of India) black pep-
per. Today Singapore offers a Spice Garden Tour followed
by cooking classes where you can learn to make spice paste.
In the s one of the great British scientists of the nine-
teenth century was spending years in the Malay Archipelago
studying the region’s flora and fauna. Alfred Russel Wallace,
the man who developed the theory of evolution before
Charles Darwin, was busy at work in the land of Eastern
spices. As Wallace travelled through the many islands of
present-day Indonesia and Malaysia, he outlined the transi-
tion of power in the world of nutmeg, mace and cloves. He
spoke of the native sultans, Muslim sovereigns who had
controlled the spice trade, then came to be dominated by the
Portuguese, and later found themselves under Dutch con-
trol. The Dutch imposed their will on the local leaders and
very strictly regulated the growth of cloves and nutmeg in
order to control the prices on world markets. For the sultans,
Wallace wrote, the Dutch system meant a regular supply of
income from spices, replacing an earlier spice world that
featured Portuguese domination and fluctuating prices for
both nutmeg and cloves. Additionally, under the Dutch, the
sultans had regained political control of their people, some-
thing that had been lost under the Portuguese.
In his classic book, The Malay Archipelago, Wallace offered
fine descriptions of the plant and animal life of these islands.
Here, he describes the nutmeg:

Leadenhall Street,
a th-century
watercolour by
Thomas Halton.
This was the
London street
where the
British East
India Company
was located.

Few cultivated plants are more beautiful than nutmeg-

trees. They are handsomely shaped and glossy-leaved,
growing to the height of twenty to thirty feet, and bearing
small yellowish flowers. The fruit is the size and color of a
peach, but rather oval. It is of a tough fleshy consistence,
but when ripe splits open, and shows the dark brown nut
within, covered with the crimson mace, and is then a most
beautiful object. Within the thin hard shell of the nut is
the seed, which is the nutmeg of commerce. The nuts are
eaten by the large pigeons of Banda, which digest the
mace but cast up the nut with its seed uninjured.


Loading Muntok pepper (early th century). Muntok is a seaport on the
western side of Bangka Island, located off the south-east coast of Sumatra.
It is noted for its white pepper, which is formed after the green berries are
picked and soaked and then left to dry in the sun.

The British centre for the spice trade was, appropriately,

on Mincing Lane in London. This thoroughfare, stretching
from Fenchurch Street south to Great Tower Street, was for
some years the world’s leading centre for spices as well as for
tea. In , after the British East India Company took over
all the trading ports of the Dutch East India Company,
Mincing Lane became a dominant centre for the global spice
trade. With the demise of the British East India Company in
, the lane was used as a centre for tea company offices.
As the England of the nineteenth century was gradually
influenced by Indian dishes, one domestic product under-
went a transformation in the upper classes. In London the
working classes were eating their eels, and later their chips,
in plain vinegar while the upper classes were developing
an appetite for tart, chilli-flavoured sauces. In  Eliza
Acton, in her Modern Cookery for Private Families, recommend-
ed the use of chilli vinegar as an addition to tomato sauce.
Moreover, her tomato ketchup recipe included three dozen

capsicum chilli peppers for every gallon or half peck of
tomatoes. The chilli pepper migrated east to India and was
now playing a culinary role in Great Britain.

The French Transplant Cloves

Nations that controlled islands where spices were grown
were extremely protective of their crops. The Dutch, above
all, were highly sensitive about protection. To stop their nut-
meg from being reseeded, they covered this export crop with
lime. The Dutch also set their clove groves on fire both to
control the market and to keep others from getting a new
crop from the plants. During the Age of Exploration and
into the nineteenth century, there were many attempts by
European nations to steal spice seeds or plants. In the last
quarter of the eighteenth century, a French adventurer,
Pierre Poivre (Peter Pepper) was successful. Poivre had spent
a great deal of time in Asia as a young man, doing various
types of work for the French. At different times he was a
prisoner of the Dutch, and he lost an arm when his ship was
taken by the British near the Straits of Malacca. He was espe-
cially interested in botany and decided to try to bring tropical
plants into French hands. On a few occasions he attempted
to transplant clove and nutmeg onto French soil, but the
seedlings always died. He eventually settled on Mauritius, in
the south-west Indian Ocean just east of Madagascar.
Working there as a French political official, he built a house
and started a garden of tropical plants on the island. He soon
returned to the Moluccas in search of spices and was lucky to
run across a disenchanted Dutchman who directed him to an
island where he could obtain a preponderance of nutmeg
and clove seedlings from natives who were secretly growing

Clove tree. Cloves originated on five small islands in the East Indies. The
clove tree grows better on small islands but away from the sea.

and hiding them from the Dutch. So the aptly named

Frenchman was able to bring a large quantity of seedlings
back to Mauritius to his garden. The die had been cast, and
Poivre’s determination and dual interest in botany and serv-
ing France had allowed for the beginning of a new clove
empire (a fellow countryman considered Poivre’s coup com-
parable to the stealing of the Golden Fleece by Jason). By the
last decade of the eighteenth century, the clove had been suc-
cessfully transplanted to Madagascar and then to Zanzibar
and Pemba, which today rank as the three largest clove
producers in the world. Cloves were also moved into the
Caribbean on St Kitts by the English, who had most likely
stolen them from the French West Indies. In , of the
, pounds of cloves sold in England, , came from
St Kitts. The nutmeg was transplanted to the Caribbean at
Martinique and on the island of Grenada, which later
became the world’s largest producer of nutmeg. It should be

noted that the Portuguese, who had earlier lost their spice
empire to the Dutch, attempted to grow cloves, nutmeg,
cinnamon and pepper in their vast colony of Brazil. The adap-
tation of spices was successful in many cases if the latitude
and botanical conditions allowed for it to happen.

Cloves and Slavery

Trade between Africa and the Arab world had existed for
centuries. There were trade connections between Africa,
India and Asia involving slaves, gold and ivory. The original
inhabitants of Zanzibar were Hadimu, Tumbatu and Pemba
peoples, who had been drawn out from interior Africa by the
fresh water and fertile soil of the large island off East Africa.
In the late tenth century, Persians came to the island, settled
there briefly, and then left to be replaced by Arabs from
Oman. Zanzibar became a focal point for commerce, since it
served as an entry point in East Africa for trade links with the
interior. Prior to Portuguese exploration of the East African
coast, many Indians from South Asia migrated to Zanzibar
where they served as shopkeepers, traders and skilled work-
ers. The Portuguese briefly ruled Zanzibar until , when
they were ousted by the Sultan of Oman. For a few centuries
Zanzibar was a corner of a global trade network where
Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Europeans, Indians and Persians
met. In the s a new sultan had moved the Oman capital
from Muscat to Zanzibar, setting up clove plantations on
Zanzibar and Pemba. This Muslim leader, Seyed Saia, forced
most of the Hadimu people to work on the plantations,
moving them to the eastern part of the island. Zanzibar then
became the world’s biggest producer of cloves as well as the
largest slave-trading centre on the East African coast. The

trade in cloves and slaves was mostly financed by the Indian
merchants working for Bombay (present-day Mumbai) firms.
The cloves were shipped to other parts of Africa, to India
and to Persia. The French clove plantations on Mauritius
thrived due to the shipment of slaves from the Great Slave
Market in Zanzibar. French slave traders were very influential
in the spread of the clove trade. The English explorer
Richard Burton attributed the development of clove oil, a
favourite of the Zanzibar peoples, to M. Sausse, a Creole
from the Mascarenes, a series of islands east of Madagascar,
where Mauritius and Reunion lie.
The British became involved with Zanzibar in the late
eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century.
The public in Great Britain increased its interest in Zanzibar
because the explorers Burton, David Livingstone and John
Speke launched their expeditions there. The British signed
treaties with the sultan to protect Zanzibar in exchange for

Spice box from a waterfront museum in St John’s, New Brunswick,

Canada.


Omani support against the French. Britain had outlawed
slavery in  and made many attempts to influence the
Sultan of Zanzibar to do the same. Agreements were signed
to eliminate slavery in the s, but progress was slow.
Zanzibar was an increasingly important trading centre, and
from the s onwards, American, German and British
trading ships had established Zanzibar as a major port.

The Impact of the United States

on the Spice Trade
Meanwhile, in the first decade of its existence as a nation,
the United States was starting to make an impact on the
global pepper trade. The country’s involvement began in a
small port north west of Boston, Massachusetts, called Salem.
Here an enterprising sea captain named Jonathan Carnes set
out on a voyage to the East Indies in , with no intent other
than to explore possible areas of trade. While in Sumatra,
Carnes learned of pepper. He was able to acquire a small
amount of the spice but did not visit the ports where larger
quantities were available. On his return home, his ship was
wrecked off the coast of Bermuda, but he eventually reached
Salem, all the while keeping his knowledge of the pepper ports
secret. He secured financial backing and built a large ship. In
 he set sail on the -ton Rajah, with four guns, a ten-man
crew and a secret destination. The cargo consisted of two
pipes (a pipe is equivalent to four barrels) of brandy,  cases
of gin and  tons of iron, along with tobacco, salmon and
other items. Eighteen months later, the ship returned with a
bulk of pepper that reaped a profit of  per cent.
Others in Salem were curious, but they were not able to
determine where Carnes had gone. A few set out for

Salem, Massachusetts’ city seal. Influenced by Salem’s dominant black
pepper trade in the early th century, the seal depicts an oriental person,
ship and the Latin motto ‘To the farthest port of the rich East.’

Bencoolen (Bengkulu, the present-day capital of Indonesia’s

Bengkulu province), and it was not until  and  that
the ship America, under the respective commands of Captain
John Crowninshield and Captain Jeremiah Briggs, brought to
Salem , pounds of pepper and the next year ,
pounds of the spice. The aggregate duty paid on these two
cargoes was $,.. Salem was to be the pepper port
of note, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the first half of
the nineteenth century. Except during the war of , when
ports were blockaded by the British, Salem supplied not only
the eastern United States but also much of Europe with

black pepper. It is an interesting point of history that at the
beginning of this trade the residents of the eastern United
States were not familiar with black pepper as part of their
diet. With this in mind, the Salem merchants and their sea-
men who flourished in the pepper trade were not so much
thinking of supplying the North American market but,
rather, delivering the pepper to Europe to exchange for other
products with a high value at home, such as French wine. For
over three-quarters of a century after the onset of this trade,
almost a thousand voyages were made between Salem and
Sumatra in the East Indies. When these early eastward-bound
expeditions set out from Salem to venture around the Cape
of Good Hope, the geography skills of the seafarers were
rough and untested. Early voyages in search of pepper could
have meant India or further east. Each Salem sea captain had
to learn his own way. As it turned out, the eventual destina-
tion and focus of the pepper trade centred on Sumatra.
The adventures of these ‘down East’ mariners in the East
Indies is the stuff of novels and movies. Narratives from
accounts such as Salem Vessels and Their Voyages and Pepper and
Pirates relate many tales of these New England sailors
encountering new cultures and navigating unknown waters
around the island of Sumatra. This large island was typical
of many of those making up the Indonesian Archipelago,
tropical in nature, many with active volcanoes, and all linked
to the seas.
The people of north and north-west Sumatra were the
Achnese, who historically had controlled the trade passing
through the Straits of Malacca to the east. They were
Muslim traders and warriors, and their capital was Banda
Aceh at the northern tip of the island nation. The Dutch
were to discover how difficult it would be to control the
Achnese as they established their spice empire in the East

Indies later in the nineteenth century. An affront to one
Achnese might be an insult to all. Different trading centres
were controlled by rajahs, each with its own history of trade
with Europeans and other Asian traders over the centuries.
However, one of the first adventures of Captain Carnes and
his Salem crew was not with the Achnese. In the Scents of
Eden, Charles Corn vividly describes an encounter:

One evening late, Carnes was pacing the small quarter-

deck, while the sounds of jungle on a moonlit night filled
the bay. He made his way forward, dimly making out the
anchor watch alert in the dense darkness before turning
aft, passing two seamen of the port watch who mur-
mured a greeting before Carnes returned to his solitary
promenade on the quarterdeck.
A half hour passed, then an hour. Carnes considered
turning in, but it was close and humid below, and a soft
breeze made it pleasant on deck. Suddenly a shout went
up from the bow watch. ‘Boat ahoy, who’s there?’ he
challenged in the darkness. Carnes, suspecting Malay
pirates, had just turned to sound the alarm below when
he was rocked by the heavy impact of another boat. Men
hurried up the latterway, seizing pikes as they emerged
from the hatch to repulse the attackers who were attem-
pting to board.
A figure rose over the rail, and the mate fired, hitting
his target, who fell backward, but another replaced the
first. The bow watch, with no weapon, tried to push the
intruder back, but a cutlass severed his left hand. Other
mates came to his aid, and the attackers pushed off.
In the darkness the attackers identified themselves as
French, having misidentified the American vessel for a
British one.

 Men of the Rajah stood to arms now under lantern
light as Frenchmen came aboard, uttering exclamations
of regret, while their lieutenant, who had led the attack,
lay dead in the longboat and the maimed sailor was car-
ried below.

Today the term ‘global/local’ is used to describe how

local life is influenced by global events. The last people
Carnes expected on his boat were French soldiers and sailors,
but the Napoleonic wars, fought mostly in Europe and
North Africa, reached these American traders near the Straits
of Malacca in the late s.
Two days before Thanksgiving in November , the
ship Putnam, from Salem, commanded by Captain John
Carlton, was captured by the Malays and several of the crew
were massacred. The captain had finished his trading, and
two British ships were anchored nearby. While Carlton was
gone, the crew of a Malay boat had been allowed to board
the Putnam and wander about the ship at will. When Captain
Carlton returned, he found an alarmed crew fearful of the
Malays. Carlton sent a small crew out from the ship to warn
the Malays not to return. Later that day a Malay boat
approached the Putnam, and the captain ordered the crew to
be on deck and ready for an attack. However, the visitors
were Chinese merchants who wanted to trade with the
officers and crew. The Malays remained in their boat.
On Thanksgiving Day, the captain had one more settle-
ment to make with the traders on shore, and as he left he
noted a Malay brig well off to his south. There was a strong
north wind, which Carlton felt would keep the Malays away.
However, during his absence on shore, the wind dropped,
and a Malay crew of sixteen men approached his ship, claim-
ing they had pepper they wanted to pass on board. Six

Malays were allowed to bring the pepper up, and they did
not appear to be armed with creeses. During the weighing
of the pepper, one of the crew members, Samuel Pearson,
noticed that two Malays at the ship’s rail were being handed
creeses from their boat. These curved or wavy Malayan dag-
gers with double-edged blades were something to be feared
because they were very effective for hand-to-hand fighting.
Pearson gave a cry of alarm and that seemed to be the signal
for the Malays to attack. Pearson was stabbed, and now other
Malays were climbing aboard the Putnam. Several crew mem-
bers were killed, while others fled over the bow or below.
One grabbed a handspike and dispatched two or three Malays
before he was stabbed in the back. The ship’s carpenter,
William Brown, the only crew member left, grabbed a stout
stick about four feet long and bolted a coffee grinder to its
end to flail away at the attackers. He was stabbed several
times but kept fighting. Finally, some other crew members
appeared on the scene and, working together, were able to
drive the Malays off the ship. On Thanksgiving night it
appeared that three members of the crew were dead, two
more soon died of their wounds, and two or three more
had been badly wounded. One of the British ships took the
crew east to Penang on the Malay Peninsula. Eventually, in
February , William Brown, the hero of the encounter,
arrived in Calcutta, where his account of the incident reached
Salem and was printed in the Salem Gazette of  July .

The Adulteration of Spices

By the nineteenth century the early medieval ideas of spices
flowing on rivers from the Garden of Eden had long since
faded. When pepper arrived in England in the fourteenth

Slaves harvesting cinnamon near Colombo, Sri Lanka (formally Ceylon).

century and was handled by the Guild of Pepperers, higher

standards were established for the importation of spices.
The guild forbade the soaking of cloves to increase their
weight and thus add to their value. They also cracked down
on dirt, filth and other waste added to spice containers. The
Guild even established the right to enter places of business
and seize inferior spices. Adulteration had evolved into
many forms such as the reusing of ginger, mixing the old,
discarded pieces with the new.
There were also some substances used in adulteration
that were harmful to health. In the s a Dr Arthur Hassall
compiled a list of thirty substances which he had discovered
in food and drinks, some of which used deadly poisons.
Cayenne pepper contained lead which could induce paralysis.
In the s A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary

Poisons exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistication . . . and Methods of
Detecting Them was written by Fredrick Accum. He described
the mixture of fake peppercorns with genuine pepper. The
fakes were made from the residue of linseed oil extraction
mixed with clay and a little cayenne pepper. You could detect
the fake by putting all the ingredients in water. The fake
would fall apart and the peppercorns would remain whole.
Ground pepper was often mixed with dust, dirt or pepper
dust to increase the weight.
Cinnamon presents an interesting cross-cultural case of
adulteration vis-à-vis the United States and Great Britain.
Beginning in the s in England, cinnamon adulteration
was claimed when cassia bark was mixed with cinnamon.
The British have historically preferred cinnamon to cassia,
considering the latter inferior. In the United States cassia is
sold as cinnamon, or perhaps, accepted as cinnamon as ‘inter-
changeable in commerce’. Harold McGee in On Food and
Cooking states that ‘most of the cinnamon sold in the United
States is actually cassia. The two are most easily distinguished
by colour: true cinnamon is tan while cassia is a darker red-
dish brown.’ This is even more confusing when you know
that there are three major types of cassia – Chinese, Saigon
and Batavia – all with differently coloured bark. One culture’s
adulterated cinnamon is another culture’s cinnamon.

Spices Spread Across the Globe

The nineteenth century witnessed the promulgation of spices
all over the world. The Dutch had established a strong con-
trol of some of the sovereign spices in the Moluccas, the
British had a firm grip on India and its pepper trading and
the French had a strong hand in the clove industry, while the

United States supplied South East Asian pepper east and
west. Chilli peppers continued to move to East, South East
and South Asia, steadily influencing the eating habits of
peoples in those regions. Of significant note in this century
were the improvements in transportation on both land
and sea. The development of steam-powered ships not only
made the movement of spices across the globe faster and
more efficient, but it also provided a vehicle for people of
financial means to travel abroad and experience new cultures
and cuisines. The establishment of novel businesses such as
Thomas Cook’s travel empire allowed both the rich, and the
less well off crew members who served them, to become
acquainted with new worlds across the globe. On the ground,
the development of steam power for trains saw the evolu-
tion of extensive railway systems that connected people
across land masses and allowed seaborne travellers to move
inland. Spices were no longer just an exotic food for the rich
– they had become an accessible product for all.


 5
The Twentieth Century
and Beyond

Pepper love: that’s how I think of it.

Abraham and Aurora fell in pepper love,
up there on the Malabar Gold.
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie

In the last century and a half, the spice trade has played a
minor role in the British economy. The Dutch, after initially
faltering at the end of their period of dominance, made some
humanistic reforms in the nineteenth century and, employ-
ing a host of progressive scientific agricultural methods,
remained at the forefront of the pepper trade until the
Second World War. In  Indonesia became independent,
and the Dutch had to deal with a new nation and new times,
which resulted in their exclusion from exploiting much of
their former colony’s natural bounty. Taking their place were
Chinese overland traders who worked the spice trade.
Also after the Second World War, a boom in spices came
about in the United States. American soldiers returning
home from the Pacific as well as Europe had experienced
new cultures and new tastes, and the spice market grew.
Spice consumption in the s and ’s increased at five
times the rate of the population growth. By  the United

Market spices on sale in Lanzhou, China.

States accounted for  per cent of the world’s consumption

of spices, with black pepper the primary spice of choice in
the country. Today, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and Singapore
dominate the global pepper trade.
In this the modern era, where and how spices are grown
and treated and how the weather affects them are important
issues surrounding their development, sale and distribution.
Changing patterns of use are also part of the spice story in
the twentieth century and beyond. If you were to ask a his-
torian knowledgeable about the sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century spice trade where most of the black pepper in the
world is grown today, he or she would most likely say west-
ern India, not Vietnam, which in fact leads the world in
pepper production in the new millennium. If you were to
ask how the nutmeg crops of Grenada in the Caribbean are
faring after the devastating Hurricane Ivan wiped out the
island’s world-dominant crop in , the response would
be that nutmeg comes from the Banda Islands in Indonesia,
not the Caribbean. Finally, if you were to state that Indonesia

is a major importer of cloves needed to support the Kretek
clove-cigarette smoking habits of its natives, the historian
would be astounded. After all, cloves have their roots in the
Spice Islands and for centuries could be found nowhere else.
As well, a historian of the early civilizations of the Americas
might be dumbfounded to discover that Mexico, the land of
the Aztecs, is now importing most of its chilli peppers.

The Rise of McCormick in the Spice Trade

What is today the largest spice company in the world,
McCormick, was founded in Baltimore, Maryland, in .
The last of the Salem clipper ships came back from Sumatra
before the Civil War in the United States. The New England
city faded as a port as New York and Boston came to dom-
inate global trade. From this point onwards, and for about a
hundred years afterwards, direct contact between the United
States and the sources of spices stopped. Amazingly, up
until the s, spices for the United States were almost
exclusively bought through merchants in New York City,
who acted as middlemen in procuring spices from mer-
chants, in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany,
where they were in direct contact with spice sources in Asia
and Africa. These Europeans arranged for the delivery of
spices through the merchants in New York and other global
cities historically involved in the spice trade. McCormick, an
evolving and growing spice company in the United States,
also obtained its products in this manner, even after nearly
three-quarters of a century of existence.
By the late s, McCormick began its ascent to the
top of the world spice markets by setting up a programme
called ‘global sourcing’. Hank Kaestner, the now-retired

Bee Brand spice
advertisement.
From the late
nineteenth until
the mid-twentieth
century McCormick
sold its spices under
the ‘Bee Brand’.

McCormick and
Company factory
on the Downtown
Baltimore Water-
front. From the
early to the late
th century scents
of spices filled the
air of Baltimore.
global spice buyer for McCormick, began his career at this
time, travelling across the world and identifying the best
spices at their source. Over the decades until his recent
retirement he made some  trips to the world’s spice-
growing areas. Kaestner recounted his feelings about retrac-
ing the steps of Vasco da Gama and other explorers of the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all of
whom were seeking spice sources, just as he was, centuries
later. Forts of past spice-seeking nations and monuments to
their adventurers of bygone times constantly reminded
Kaestner of the world’s spice-laden past.
In this new system, McCormick set out to identify the
best sources of spices from Africa to the East, setting up a
dozen or more global sourcing operations with local ship-
pers. These might take the form of joint ventures with local
spice traders on the Malabar coast of western India or a
legal relationship with a company already in operation. In
Indonesia, for example, these arrangements involved collab-
orations with overland Chinese trading companies that had
replaced the Dutch system or with Indonesian government
officials in the Suharto government during the s and
s. Cross-culturally, the overland Chinese, acting as mer-
chants in another culture, had to leave a small footprint in
conducting their trading. Since they were capitalist business-
men, they accrued a great deal of profit, and at times their
lofty financial status resulted in a deep resentment among
native Indonesians that could occasionally turn violent. In
an effort to offset this threat, in many cases the Chinese
changed their identities by assuming local Indonesian
names, thus attempting to blend into a local community.
Working with regional merchants, McCormick began
to dominate the retail spice market, providing products for
both homes and restaurants. During the last half-century, in

the United States and many other places across the globe,
large food-producing chains have emerged to feed growing
populations. Firms such as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried
Chicken, Wendy’s and Burger King, as well as massive food
companies such as Kraft, General Foods and Pillsbury, now
consume the great bulk of imported spices. Domestic use of
spices still continues, but the greatest volume is consumed in
the forms of the coatings for chicken, the mixes for ham-
burgers and the basic ingredients in the sauces and packaged
products that fill the aisles of modern supermarkets. To
confirm this, one needs only read the labels on cans, boxes
and frozen products to see the wide distribution of spices in
various products.
This evolution from home consumption to large-scale
production caused McCormick to concentrate more on scien-
tific approaches to spice development and marketing. There
now had to be concern for the overall quality and purity of
a spice that was put into products that were consumed by
millions, if not billions, of people every hour of every day.
As he moved through the sources of spices, Hank Kaestner
saw how cinnamon was stripped from the barks of trees and
cloves were sorted in the drying sun. He then had to deter-
mine what would have to be done to ensure the quality of
these raw spices before they emerged in the marketplace.
This might involve setting up small plants to assure cleanli-
ness in all aspects of production, from washing hands to
sorting out foreign matter found among the spices. Quality
control was a major concern. This ‘global sourcing’ also
involved finding local managers who could ensure quality
and also identify and maintain the best sources for the spices.
Competitively, this also meant an edge for McCormick in the
global marketplace. Here the company could ensure both
high quality and the best price by controlling the spice at its

 Bee Brand
vanilla adver-
tisement. After
their beginnings
in the s
McCormick
was shipping to
South America,
Europe, Africa
and the East
and West Indies
through their
New York
export office.

source. Many major food companies that purchase spices for

their product development buy them from McCormick, as
they have done for decades.
While McCormick dominated the market, many smaller
companies in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas
continued to prosper, providing spices for various food and
distribution markets in various regions of the world.

International Spice Trading Groups

In , the publication of a book rocked the households of
the United States. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle detailed the

unsanitary conditions of meat-packing plants producing
food for homes. The public outcry caused by the book led
to national legislation to protect food safety. About a year
later, a group of men met in New York City to form the
American Spice Trade Association (). The opening
statement of that meeting focused on connecting the spice
trade to pure food legislation and upholding the Pure Food
and Drug Act, recently passed by the  Congress. The
nation was in shock from The Jungle, and these spice traders
felt the waves of public outrage. So, for the  men attend-
ing that meeting, fear may have been a motivating factor: a
fear of losing their businesses because of unhealthy condi-
tions. However, in the early decades of its existence, the
organization, consisting exclusively of traders in the United
States, focused on the nitty-gritty world of contracts and
arbitration as well as establishing a liaison with the Federal
Government, which was enforcing pure food legislation.
The Great Depression of  affected spices, as it did
all markets, and  struggled through many types of reor-
ganization over the ensuing decades. During the s there
was more consciousness about the quality and purity of
spices coupled with concern about government regulation as
there had been seven decades earlier. Issues such as quality
control, packaging, nutrition and sanitation were of para-
mount importance. In the s the Chernobyl nuclear leaks
and the waves of radioactive material that drifted across
Europe instigated new fears of possible contamination of
plants and products. Now questions were asked about sources
of food and the conditions at the source. The s brought
new issues such as food safety and trans-fatty acid to the
forefront. As the twenty-first century began,  expanded
its membership globally, including all international members
who trade with the United States.

 While  is now an internationally inclusive organiza-
tion in relation to American spice trading, many other global
spice organizations exist that represent national, regional or
individual spice products. The Canadians have their associa-
tion; there are several in South Asia, Japan and Australia,
and European countries such as Denmark, Italy, Germany
and the United Kingdom have their own national groups.

Modern Issues in the Spice World

Looking at the website of one of the national spice associa-
tions can be an eye-opening experience as regards the myriad
issues faced by spice traders and companies that market
spices. Loaded terms such as ‘methyl bromide’, ‘spice adulter-
ation’, ‘workplace safety’, ‘ethylene oxide’ and ‘food additives’
conjure up a plethora of negative images that at one point
would never have crossed people’s minds when they reached
for a jar of spices in their supermarket.
The significance of the phrase ‘workplace safety’ is
obvious, but spice adulteration has been an issue for cen-
turies. The early European spice traders who moved in and
out of the spice ports of Asia were ever on the lookout for
suppliers who added other ingredients to the spice sack to
increase its weight. Hard lessons were learned and some-
times resolved on the next trip. In the modern era, adulter-
ation of spices takes a different tack. The essential questions
become: does the label on the spice jar, or on the product
that contains spices, state a spice as part of the product and,
if so, is that spice actually contained in the product? If a
hamburger mixture claims to have cloves and black pepper
as part of the package, are they actually present or are they
imitations of the real thing? Here, chemistry and science

Chillies hanging up to dry in China.

play a big role. Gone are the days when you emptied a sack
of cloves from a ship and all the spikes and crowns of the
cloves spilled out before you or you saw foreign elements
that were mixed in to adulterate the spice.
The pesticide methyl bromide is applied as a liquid that
vaporizes on crops. In the United Kingdom supermarkets
such as the Co-op and Marks & Spencer have called for it to
be phased out. Ethylene oxide is an industrial chemical used
for fumigating spices in an effort to kill microorganisms that
may harm the spice. When you consider that most spices are
scraped off trees, piled on the ground and pulled off low
bushes, there is reason for concern about small organisms
affecting the spice. There have been suggestions of cancer
risk as a result of ingesting such chemicals in food. In the
United States, the Food and Drug Administration ()
analyses all these chemicals and additives and those that
are not approved cannot be used. Since  irradiation is
increasingly used on spices, a process that kills contaminants

without altering either the appearance or the taste of the
spice. Human bodies take in hundreds of types of substances
daily, and most are digested without any harm. At times the
public becomes alarmed without knowing the facts about
additives or processes. At other times problems can be found,
and public relations nightmares can ensue. Nonetheless, one
spice dealer recently asked the following (rhetorical) question
about additives and spices: how much of an adverse effect can
the chemicals on a few grains of pepper or a few cloves have,
especially when compared to eating a steak or vegetables with
comparable additives that may be consumed in much greater
volume?

Organic Spices and Fair Trade

Various spice companies have moved to the development and
marketing of organic spices. McCormick has introduced a full
line of such spices for the marketplace. Big food chains in the
 that sell in bulk to consumers such as Wal-Mart, ’s, Sam’s
Club, Price Club and Costco are demanding more organic
products for their customers. (And some food stores, such as
Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, specialize in or have more
organic than non-organic products on offer). In the United
States such developments have been partially stimulated by
the National Organic Program of the United States Depart-
ment of Agriculture (), which began in . The 
sends out agents to check on companies that are claiming to
have developed organic goods. It is estimated that – per
cent of agricultural products now marketed are organic.
In recent decades fair trade has emerged as a concept in
the global marketplace. The basic idea applied to the spice
trade might go like this: let’s assume that $. is the cost

A spice market in Yemen at the base of the Arabian Peninsula.

of producing  pound of cloves. Cloves might sell at $– a

pound. If the market price goes to $, the seller gets that
amount, or a -cent profit. However, if the market price
drops to $ or lower, the seller always gets a minimum of
$., or the production cost.
Organic farming plays out in different ways. One spice
wholesaler, Vermont-based ForesTrade, started in Sumatra,
where the company founder, Thomas Fricke, was asked to
identify incentives that would discourage commercial devel-
opment of a local national park. Using cinnamon as a focus
crop, Fricke demonstrated how local farmers could develop
an organic spice without clearing large sections of land that
would endanger this national park. The key was to market
the cinnamon in Europe and North America to dealers who
could pay a good price and thus reward the Sumatran farm-
ers for their labour. This was not a simple process, since it
involved a number of factors including a network between
grower and wholesaler, which included community associa-
tions, individual entrepreneurs, businesses already in place

and, importantly, local non-governmental organizations
dedicated to protecting the environment. A complex net-
work of people and organizations had to work together for
a common goal. When it is successful, environmental sus-
tainability and profit can go hand in hand. ForesTrade now
collaborates with , indigenous producers in  com-
munities in Indonesia and Guatemala. It is also creating
alliances with others in Sri Lanka, India and Madagascar.
Another example of the evolution of fair trade practices
involves the Salagama, a Hindu caste of people on primarily
Buddhist Sri Lanka who traditionally peeled the cinnamon
from the tree. Over the centuries that the Portuguese, Dutch
and English sequentially controlled the cinnamon trade on
this island, the Salagama were devastated by the mandatory
payment of annual tributes, which grew sixfold when the
Portuguese were there. Later, under British control, the death
rates soared among these cinnamon workers. Frequently the
Salagama would register their children under the names of
another caste so that they could avoid the demanding labour
imposed by these European colonists. In recent years, the sit-
uation has changed for some of these cinnamon workers, who
now sell their products to a local fair trade association that can
often get  per cent above the market rate for the sweetly per-
fumed harvest. These fair trade programmes seem to work if
people are willing to pay just a little more for their spice prod-
ucts. Doing so improves the lives of those who labour to give
us these spices and also helps erase centuries of human abuse.

Spices and Health

Spices have always been viewed as a source of healthy habits.
But many of the old remedies to cure ills that originated in

Bhut Jolokia,
the hottest chilli
in the world,
discovered in
Northern India.
It has over 
million Scoville
heat units.

the ancient and medieval worlds have gone by the wayside in

the light of the scientific revolution and modern medicine.
Still, even in today’s world, there appear to be many positive
health benefits of spices.
Cinnamon has been touted as a product that can lower
cholesterol and regulate blood sugar, helping people with type
 diabetes. Studies on yeast-infection prevention and even the
reduction of the proliferation of leukaemia and lymphoma
cancer have involved cinnamon. In Denmark research on
arthritis prevention showed that cinnamon offered relief. The
spice may also inhibit bacterial growth and food spoilage as
well as fighting E. coli bacteria in unpasteurized juices. Studies

also show that, beside being a good source of calcium, iron,
fibre and manganese, cinnamon may also boost cognitive
function and memory.
The cayenne pepper of the Americas has been touted as
a nutritional and medicinal spice that has positive effects on
both the digestive and circulatory systems of the body. For
the digestive system, it helps the body create hydrochloric
acid, which is necessary for good digestion. It has even been
known to stop heart attacks. There have also been suggestions
that it can be beneficial for acne, coughs, colds, low blood
pressure and tumours. One doctor has even employed it to
cure a toothache, while another finds that it increases energy.
One factor that should be kept in mind about spices is
that many of them do lose their effectiveness after a period
of time. Spice merchants like Ian Hemphill of Herbie’s
Spices in Sydney, Australia, place a ‘best before’ date on their
spice packages. McCormick promotes ads that say, ‘If you
see Baltimore, , on the label, the spice is at least  years
old.’ They even have an informative page on their website
about the ageing of different spices.

Spices, Culture and History

In many areas of the world where the climate is hot, the
spices used are also hot. In southern India, Mexico and parts
of Africa, many dishes are served with spices that will burn
your tongue and bring sweat to your brow. The flavours of
the Arab world are blends of spices that will awaken your
appetite in the heat, but not deny you the moisture needed
in these arid and desert lands. I grew up with a diet of bland
German cooking. Some food preparations I liked, others I
dreaded eating. It never dawned on me why my mother’s

dishes were the way they were. My experiences at boarding
schools in upper elementary school, high school and college
were not much different. Spaghetti with red tomato sauce
may have been the height of my spicy experience during
these growing years. Only in adulthood did I begin to visit
cities and experience foods and spices of different global
cultures. I liked it. From that point forward I was hooked on
spices.
About a decade ago a study was published in the United
States that explained a lot about cultures and their use of
spices. The study showed that after analysing the cuisines of
 nations, based on , ‘traditional’ recipes from  cook-
books, it was found that the hotter and wetter a nation, the
spicier its food would be. The authors of the study, Jennifer
Billing and Paul Sherman, concluded that as the risk of food
spoilage grows, so does a dependence on spices which are a
natural antimicrobial source. So, more spices, less a chance
of having those small bugs upset your stomach and health.
The survey further showed that about  per cent of all
surveyed recipes used at least one spice. Each recipe from
Ethiopia, Kenya, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia,
Morocco, Nigeria and Thailand was spiced. When the food
of nations in northern Europe such as Finland and Norway
was studied, spices were found in no more than one recipe
in three. One powerful result of this study focused on the
spice-eating habits of the Japanese and Koreans who live in
fairly close proximity at similar latitudes. Koreans, were 
per cent more likely than the Japanese to use spices in their
food, with the result that the Japanese experienced more
food-poisoning incidents than Koreans. For the Koreans it
was three people in ,, for the Japanese, .


 Spices Go Global
It seems that spices have reached their ultimate level of matu-
rity, wherein their use is diversified across all the continents
and in many commercial fields far beyond food. British skin-
care and cosmetics emporium, Molton Brown, offers black
pepper eau de toilette, body wash and shower gel, which
mixes the spice with ginger, cumin and coriander for a result
that is ‘masculine, but not overpowering’. The first scent
developed by Jo Malone of London, an exclusive connoisseur
and retailer of fragrances, candles and related products, was
nutmeg and ginger, still one of her most popular creations.
Today, urban centres and small towns alike across the
globe offer a wide array of ethnic restaurants whose dishes
reflect the history of spices over the last millennium. No
longer are major cities such as New York, London, Amster-
dam and Singapore the primary venues for food from Burma,
Mexico, India, Tibet and Thailand. In a world where immi-
grants hail from far and wide, with more and more Asians
settling in the West, most likely more and more of their food-
stuffs will be available in shops and eateries.
Down through the centuries, the ultimate mixture of
spices has been found in curries, which are a mixture of meat,
fish, vegetables, or fruit with a spice mixture. The spice mix-
ture that comes to us from India is called masala, which is a
pre-prepared blending of various spices. A garam masala
may contain a mixture of black pepper, cinnamon and cloves.
Also of Indian origin is the type of dish known as vindaloo,
which has Portuguese roots as well, following those European
colonists’ times on the Malabar coast, where cooking with
meat or fish was done in wine vinegar and garlic. Indians
may prepare similar dishes using mustard oil, ghee (melted
butter) and/or lard to cook the meat, adding garlic and then

A German spice plant advertising card (c. ) showing cinnamon stalks
being gathered. Sticky cinnamon buns (Schnecken, ‘snails’) are a favourite
treat in Germany.

the major ingredient, chilli, which gives the vindaloo a spicy

heat. Curries and their various related dishes are ongoing
global and local variations of cross-cultural encounters.
Other spice blendings have taken place in various cul-
tures. The British have, over time, developed pickling
spice, a combination of allspice, cloves, mace, chillies, corian-
der, mustard seeds and ginger. A pudding spice called Mixed
Spice for use in biscuits, desserts and cakes has also evolved
in Britain; it contains cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg,
coriander and allspice. One famous American mixture is
cajun seasoning, which makes extensive use of cayenne and
black pepper.
Ian Hemphill, the Australian spice author and dealer
writes of many native plants that enrich the foods of his
continent. Among them is wattleseed which comes from
acacia trees bearing leguminous seed pods. One type of
acacia is the Mulga tree which grows in the outback to

heights of  metres. The Aborigines ate these seeds for
protein, but for use as a spice they should be roasted and
ground. When ground the spice resembles ground coffee
and has a light, coffee-like aroma and a slightly bitter, nutty,
coffee taste. This spice is used to flavour sweet dishes such
as ice cream, yogurt, cheesecakes and whipped cream. It is
also used in pancakes, goes well with breads and comple-
ments chicken, lamb and fish when used in small amounts.
Hemphill and his spice partner and wife Elizabeth, who run
a spice store in Sydney, employ native ingredients with trad-
itional spices. He outlines his efforts in one of his books,
Spice Notes. Cultural blendings affected the European pow-
ers in the geographic areas they encountered although, his-
torically, the Portuguese at home have made little use of the
spices they once desired so strongly. This is less true of the
Dutch, who have incorporated spices in a number of their
main dishes and desserts. The rijsttafel is a combination of
plates of meat dishes that are either in a stew or presented
on a skewer as satay and represent the cultural areas of
Sumatra, Bali and Java, all major venues of the Dutch spice
empire (and colonization). The abundance of Indonesian
restaurants in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities and towns
also reflects their history of spices. The British have adopt-
ed curries as a result of their experience in colonial India.
Some dishes, according to Lizzie Collingham in her history,
Curry, such as chicken tikka masala, have become a new
national dish for Great Britain. Some critics say, however,
that many of the ‘Indian’ dishes that are consumed outside
the subcontinent in Indian restaurants are very distant rela-
tives of the dishes the Indians themselves prepare and eat.
The same is often said of the fare offered in many Chinese
eateries throughout the West, especially the ubiquitous take-
away restaurants.

 So check your jars and boxes of spices and other foods
at home and at the supermarket, ask questions at restaurants
about spice ingredients, search the Internet for sources of
spices and for recipes using different types of these flavour-
ings, each with its own world history. Spices are with you and
around you and in you. Experiment with them, enjoy them,
and think of the journey they made over the miles and the
centuries to get to your table and your palate!


 Glossary

Sugar and spice and everything nice,

that’s what little girls are made of.
Nursery rhyme

There are many plants that can be classified as spices. This glossary
focuses on the spices that have a global reach. For further research
you might want to consider such spices as caraway, zedoary,
asafetida, juniper, galangal, nigella, poppy, cubeb, sumac, ajowan,
fenugreek, wasabi, pomegranate, mahlab, screwpine, curry leaf,
mango powder and kaffir lime.

Alleppey Pepper: A type of Malabar pepper from the state of

Kerala on the Malabar Coast of south-west India with a good
harbour on the Arabian Sea. Alleppey was historically the name
given to Malabar pepper grown in the southern part of the state
of Kerala.

Allspice: This spice, which is from the West Indies and Central
and South America, is a small bushy tree of the myrtle family.
Columbus brought it back to Europe thinking it was pepper. Its
Spanish name is pimienta or pepper. Like chilli pepper it is a unique
New World spice. Allspice is primarily used in the food industry in
pickles, sausages, ketchup and canning meat. It can be also used as
a spiced tea mix, in soups and curries and as a pickling spice.


Anise: This spice is related to caraway, cumin, dill and fennel. It
is a native of some islands of the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Middle East. During the Middle Ages it was cultivated all over
Europe. It has been historically used as a digestive, especially after
consuming a large meal. Anise is also good for freshening the
breath, with its liquorice-like taste, and is used in a number of alco-
holic drinks such as the French anisette, the Turkish raki, the South
American aguardiente, and Pernod. It is also used in the Middle East
and India in soups and stews.

Banda and Amboina: The two Spice Islands in the Moluccas

where nutmeg was principally grown during the competition
between the Dutch and Portuguese for control of the spice trade.

Black Pepper: This is prepared by drying the immature berry. It

had its origins on the Malabar Coast of south-western India.

Brazilian Black Pepper: This pepper is grown in the Belem area

in the state of Para. It has a lower oil content than Indian and
Indonesian pepper.

Brazilian White Pepper: This pepper is lighter in colour than

Muntok and some consider it to have a bland flavour.

Cardamom: This spice historically grew wild in the rainforest

areas of southern India and Sri Lanka. Today it is also grown in
East Africa, Central America and Vietnam. It is an ancient spice
highly valued in Indian culture and was used by the Romans and
Greeks for digestion, perfume and as a breath freshener. Ancient
Egyptians used it as a whitener for teeth. It has a smell like cam-
phor and lemon and is a main ingredient in garam masala. In Arab
cultures it is used in coffee and in Scandinavia found in spiced
breads and pastries.

Cassia: This is similar to cinnamon but different in quality. Cassia

bark is darker and thicker with a coarse, cork-like outer bark. It
is less expensive than cinnamon and is often sold as cinnamon.

When buying sticks of cinnamon and cassia note that cinnamon
rolls into a single quill while cassia is rolled from both sides toward
the centre. Cassia is native to Burma and is also grown through-
out South and South East Asia, the East and West Indies and
Central America.

Chilli Pepper: There are many varieties of chilli peppers. The

most common, Capsicum annuum, includes bell peppers, paprika
and jalapeños. Capsicum frutescens include cayenne and tabasco while
chinense identifies the hottest peppers such as habaneros and Scotch
Bonnets. Others such as pubescens cover South American rocoto
peppers and baccatum includes the South American aji pepper.

Cinnamon: This spice is indigenous to the island of Sri Lanka

(Ceylon). It comes from the bark of an evergreen tree of the laurel
family.

Clove: The clove is native to the North Moluccas, often called the
Spice Islands, which are part of present-day Indonesia. Today it is
cultivated in Brazil, the West Indies, Mauritius, Madagascar, India,
Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and Pemba.

Coriander: Originally from the Eastern Mediterranean and men-

tioned in ancient Egypt and the Bible, it is now cultivated world-
wide in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, Iran, the United
States and Central America. The green leaves of the plant are herbs
and the white or pink flowers develop into the spice seed which is
ground up for use in curries, meats, pickling spice and for baking.
In France it is used in vegetable dishes such as à la grecque. The oil
derived from the seed is used to flavour chocolate and other drinks.

Cumin: Cumin, a plant similar in size to coriander, originated in

the Nile valley and quickly spread to other areas of North Africa
and on to Asia Minor and then east to Iran, India, Indonesia and
China. In its northern migration from Africa it was grown in Spain
and then taken to the Americas. It is mostly grown in warm lati-
tudes but can also be grown as far north as Norway. Like coriander,

cumin is essential to Indian cooking and, like cardamom, it is used
in garam masala. In Germany and France cumin is used in cakes
and breads and the Dutch and Swiss use it in cheese. It can be used
in perfumes and the liqueur, kummel, uses it as a flavouring.

Ginger: One of the oldest spices known, ginger was cultivated in

tropical Asia. Confucius mentions it in his writings in the fifth
century . It was well known in ancient Egypt, Greece and
Rome. It is rich in vitamin  and was used by Chinese sailors to
ward off scurvy. By the end of the first century  it was widely
used in Europe. During the Age of Exploration it was taken to
West Africa by the Portuguese, to East Africa by the Arabs and to
the New World by the Spanish. The ginger root, or rhizome, trav-
els well and today it is grown in most tropical regions. For fresh
ginger, the rhizome root is scraped or ground after washing and
drying. For preserved ginger the rhizome is soaked in brine and put
in a syrup. Dried ginger is boiled and peeled before drying. In
Asian dishes ginger is often mixed with garlic. It is used in curry
powder and in cakes, puddings and cookies and in Asian vegetable
dishes. Ginger beer and wine are popular in some cultures. To
‘ginger up’ in English means to liven up your life.
Over  years ago W. M. Gibbs, a spice-loving author, penned
these lines to express his fondness for ginger:

Ginger black or ginger white

Will furnish warmth in coldest night
Without ginger how many would miss
A ginger cookie for little Sis.

Green Pepper: This is from the immature black pepper plant: the
peppercorns are harvested before they mature and are either
allowed to dry or bottled in vinegar, brine or water. They offer a
fresher flavour and are less pungent than either white or black
pepper.

Guinea Pepper: Another name for ‘grains of paradise’, used

because of its origin in West Africa. It has been also called

‘malagueta pepper’. It is very pungent and has a biting taste. Before
the Portuguese came to India and Malabar pepper became more
easily available in Europe, the West African coast was known as the
‘pepper coast’.

Herbs: These are plants that do not have a woody stem and die at
the end of each growing season.

Lampong Black Pepper: From the south-eastern section of the

island of Sumatra which serves as a principal centre for pepper
production in Indonesia. It is also known as acheen or Sumatra
pepper.

Lemon Grass: Found throughout South and South East Asia, it

was used in ancient South Asian Ayurvedic medicine and has long
been a staple spice in South East Asian cooking, especially in
Malay, Indonesian and Thai dishes. Emitting a fresh lemon taste, it
is used in soups and stews. It goes well with fish and poultry and
is also found in soaps, detergents, perfumes and toiletries for its
lemon aroma.

Long Black Pepper: From Southern India on the Deccan plain

north-east of the Malabar Coast. In ancient Rome it was the most
favoured pepper compared with the Malabar.

Mace: The lacy red covering over the brown nutmeg which is
called aril. When it is pulled off the nut and broken into parts the
mace is called ‘blades’. For every  pounds of nutmeg produced
only a single pound of mace will be gathered. Mace is therefore
more valuable. Its flavour is sweeter and much stronger than that
of the nutmeg. Mace dries lighter in colour and as such is used in
dishes where the dark pieces of the nutmeg are not desired.

Malabar Black Pepper: Pepper from the Malabar area of south-

west India in the state of Kerala. A general term used for both
alleppey and tellicherry pepper.


Muntok Black Pepper: Named after a seaport on the south-east
side of Sumatra.

Muntok White Pepper: This is produced on the island of Bangka

in Indonesia and is exported from Muntok. It has a mild flavour.

Nutmeg: This spice is native to the Banda Islands of Indonesia

and grows as an evergreen tree which can be as high as  metres
( feet). It is also grown in the Caribbean, especially on the island
of Grenada.

Penang Black Pepper: From an island ½ miles off the west

coast of the Malay Peninsula formally known as Prince of Wales
Island, which is part of the Malaysian state of Penang. It was the
first British settlement in Malaya. Penang is used in many Malay
dishes such as Black Pepper Chicken. Pepper mixes usually contain
Malabar for weight, Penang for strength and Sumatra for colour.

Pink Peppercorns: They are not true peppercorns but come

from the dried fruit of the baies or poivre rose. They have a sweet
pepper flavour and are used a great deal in French cooking.

Piper Retrofractum: Similar to long pepper from southern India

but grown in South East Asia and mostly cultivated in Indonesia
and Thailand. Often this black pepper is not distinguished from its
Indian relative.

Saffron: Without question this is the most expensive spice in the

world. Out of , to , handpicked plants,  pound of
saffron is yielded. First found in the Near East in Asia Minor it was
used by the Persians as both a flavouring and dye. The blue-violet
and lily shaped flowers of the plant appear in autumn. At the cen-
tre of these flowers are three blood-red stigmas, which are the
saffron threads that form the spice. It is better to buy the stigma
rather than powdered saffron because the powder may be already
mixed with other ingredients. Saffron is a strong feature in French
bouillabaisse, Italian risotto and Spanish paella and features its

aroma, bitter flavour and colour. Very little should be used, not
only because of the expense, but because too much will emit a
medicinal taste. In Indian cooking it is used in pilafs and biryani
dishes. Saffron can also be found on the foreheads of Indian
women denoting their caste.

Sarawak Pepper: This pepper has a unique taste, favoured by

many chefs around the world. Some describe it as a ‘toasty’ flavour
with winey, pungent tones. The white pepper has a uniform colour
and a bolder taste than its black counterpart. These peppers are
grown on the north-west side of the island of Borneo and consti-
tute over  per cent of Malaysian pepper, which is mostly shipped
to British Commonwealth countries.

Spice: The aromatic part of a tropical plant, be it root, bark,

flower or seed. Most spices are of Asian origin with chilli pepper,
vanilla and allspice being exceptions.

Spice Islands: Also called the Moluccas, they are a group of

islands in East Indonesia between the island of Celebes and New
Guinea. They are composed of three large islands, several smaller
island groups and even smaller islands, among them Ambon,
Ternate and Tidore, which were major sites of the spice wars.

Sri Lankan Black Pepper: This is a grey-black pepper and is

much bolder than Lampong black pepper.

Tamarind: This tree is native to tropical Africa and grows wild

throughout the Sudan. It was introduced to India so long ago that
many think it is native to that area of South Asia. It was popular
with the Arabs in the Middle Ages and the Crusaders probably
introduced it into Europe because it was a good thirst quencher.
The fruit is in the form of curved pods that turn brown when
ripe. It is used as a souring agent, as lemon or lime might be, in
India and South East Asia, and in many cultures it is used as a
mild laxative. Tamarind is commonly mixed with sugar and water
in the American tropics as a cooling drink. Its pulp is used to

flavour preserves and chutney, to make meat sauces and to pickle
fish. Sweets can also be made from the pulp by mixing it with dry
sugar and forming the mixture into different shapes. A slab of
tamarind can be employed as a brass and copper polish by adding
some salt and then wetting the mixture to shine the metals.
During the British occupation of India, the British soldiers would
put a fresh tamarind in their ear when entering native areas to
protect themselves. People in south-west India believed that
the fresh pods were inhabited by demons and thus avoided the
soldiers who were wearing them.

Tellicherry Black Pepper: A black pepper grown in north-west

Kerala on the south-western Malabar coast of India, as opposed to
alleppey, from the southern part of Malabar. The British East India
Company established a factory here in . Tellicherry berries are
very large and regular in size and usually commands a higher price
than other Malabar pepper. Italian sausage makers prefer it for
making salami since the pepper is strongly flavoured and has a
distinctive appearance.

Turmeric: Part of the ginger family. It grows in warm wet climates

and was once a highly valued alternative to saffron as a colouring.
Today its musky flavour is primarily used in curry powders and its
golden colour to dye the robes of Buddhist monks. Historically
it has also had a mystical side in some Pacific islands where it was
worn as a protective charm to keep away evil spirits. In India
turmeric is used with fish, eggs, poultry and meat, as well as in
curries. The western world uses its musky and bitter flavour in pre-
serves and some mustards, relishes and salad dressings.

Vanilla: Vanilla is native to Central America, southern Mexico and

the West Indies. The Spanish conquistadores Cortés and Diaz first
noted its use among the Aztecs. Cortés took both vanilla and
cocoa back to Spain. Soon Europeans began using vanilla in their
chocolate beverages. Some Europeans attempted to grow vanilla in
greenhouses but such attempts failed. In the nineteenth century
it was discovered that vanilla beans, growing on their climbing

tropical vines, were pollinated by bees and other insects native to
Mexico. Charles Morren, a Belgian, discovered how to artificially
fertilize vanilla in . From that point the French started raising
vanilla on their islands of Madagascar and Reunion off the East
African coast. An American invented vanilla extract which was uti-
lized in baking, custards and puddings as well as in ice cream. Most
of the vanilla sold today is in the form of extract or is synthetic.
However, vanilla beans, those long wrinkly, dark brown strips, are
quite versatile and can be rinsed and reused countless times, even
after soaking in milk or a sauce. Vanilla beans can be kept in a jar
of sugar; this will flavour the sugar as well as keeping the bean
available for future use.

White Pepper: White pepper is prepared by removing the meso-

carp that is the middle or fleshy layer of the fruit wall. It is mostly
used in sauces, mayonnaise and cream soups where a dark colour
is not desired.


 Select Bibliography

Books About Spices

American Spice Trade Association, A Glossary of Spices (New York,
)
Claiborne, Craig, Cooking with Herbs and Spices (New York, )
Daisley, Gilda, The Illustrated Book of Herbs (London, )
Day, Avanelle and Lillie Stuckey, The Spice Book (New York, )
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, The Mistress of Spices (New York,
)
Doole, Louise Evans, Herb Magic and Garden Craft (New York,
)
Gibbs, W. M., Spices and How to Know Them (Buffalo, , )
Greenberg, Sheldon and Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, The Spice of
Life (New York, )
Grieve, Mrs M., A Modern Herbal, vol. , (New York, )
Hemphill, Ian, Spice Notes (Sydney, )
Hemphill, Ian and Kate, The Spice and Herb Bible (Toronto, )
Hemphill, Rosemary, The Penguin Book of Herbs and Spices
(London, )
Humphrey, Sylvia Windle, A Matter of Taste: The Definitive Seasoning
Cookbook (New York, )
James, Wendy and Clare Pumfrey, Cooking with Herbs and Spices
(London, )
Lang, Jenifer Harvey, ed., Larousse Gastronomique (New York, )
McCormick & Company, Spices of the World Cookbook (New York,
)

McGee, Harold, On Food and Cooking (Boston, , )
Miloradovich, Milo, The Art of Cooking with Herbs and Spices
(Garden City, , )
Norman, Jill, Spices, Roots and Fruits (London, )
—, Spices, Seeds and Barks (London, )
—, Herbs and Spices (New York, )
—, The Complete Book of Spices (New York, )
Ripperger, Helmut, Spice Cookery (New York, )
Root, Waverley, ed., Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and
Dictionary of the Foods of the World (New York, )
—, Herbs and Spices: A Guide to Culinary Seasoning (New York,
)
Rosengarten, Frederic Jr, The Book of Spices (Wynnewood, ,
)
Schuler, Stanley, ed., Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Herbs and Spices
(New York, )
Stobart, Tom, Herbs, Spices and Flavorings (Woodstock, , )
Swahn, J. O., The Lore of Spices (New York, )
Thomas, Gertrude Z., Richer than Spices: How a Royal Bride’s
Dowry Introduced Cane, Lacquer, Cottons, Tea, and Porcelain to
England, and So Revolutionized Taste, Manners, Craftsmanship,
and History in Both England and America (New York, )
Tidbury, G. E., The Clove Tree (London, )
Woodward, Marcus, Gerard’s Herball (London, )

Spices in World History

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
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Articles
Billing, J. and P. W. Sherman, ‘Antimicrobial Functions of Spices:
Why Some Like it Hot’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 
(March )
Clarence-Smith, William Gervase, ‘Editorial – Islamic History
as Global History’, Journal of Global History, /part  (July
), p. ff.

De Vos, Paula, ‘The Science of Spices: Empiricism and
Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire’, Journal of
World History, / (December )
McCants, Anne E. C., ‘Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption,
and the Standard of Living: Thinking About Globalizatin
in the Early Modern World’, Journal of World History, ⁄
(December )
Seabrook, John, ‘Soldiers and Spice’, Letters From Indonesia,
The New Yorker ( August ), p. ff.
Smith, Stefan Halikowski, ‘Perceptions of Nature in Early
Modern Portuguese India’, Itinerario,  (), pp. ff
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘The Birth-pangs of Portuguese Asia:
Revisiting the Fateful “Long Decade”, ‒’, Journal of
Global History, / (November ), pp. ff

Interview With the Author

Hank Kaesner, retired global trader for McCormick & Company,
 May 

Widening Your Spice World

In writing Spices: A Global History, I have collected information from
a wide array of printed sources, from ancient accounts to contem-
porary histories, which are acknowledged in the bibliography.
Though I explored the Internet and was able to select and verify
some fascinating facts gleaned from it, I would warn readers to take
care not to get so tangled up in the World Wide Web as to overlook
conventional printed matter, cinema and other audio and visual arts,
such as the folk music of the Culture Music Club album Spices of
Zanzibar or the films Mirch Masala (), which centers on pepper
factory workers in India; A Touch of Spice (), about a young
Greek boy whose grandfather has a spice shop in Istanbul; and the
 adaptation of the novel The Mistress of Spices.
Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh tells a story of spice
families on the Malabar Coast of India over  years ago. Frank
Herbert’s Dune explores the role of spices in a science-fiction

world. Poetry is another avenue of exploration: John Dryden’s
‘Amboyna’, ‘Astraea Redux’ and the multi-versed ‘Annus Mirabilis’
call to trade and spices. In the Romantic period you can read
‘Little Derwent’s Breakfast’ by Emily Trevenen. In recent years,
there is the poetry of Michael Ondaatje, including the sensual
poem ‘The Cinnamon Peeler.’ Timothy Morton devotes a whole
book to The Poetics of Spice. Lastly, there is travel, through which
one can directly experience spices in a variety of contexts, some-
times even their original ones, as well as re-create the voyages taken
by the early spice traders.


 Spice Companies

The Americas
McCormick and Company
Sparks, Maryland
mccormick.com

McCormick in Canada is called Club House and in the ,

Schwartz. It is McCormick Foods in Australia, and Ducros in
France, which is the largest spice company in Europe. It is also
in Central America as McCormick de Centro America and in
India as  McCormick. It is also in Mexico, Venezuela,
Shanghai, Japan and Finland.

Penzey’s Spices
Brookfield, Wisconsin
penzeys.com

Watkins Spices
Winona, Minnesota and Winnipeg, Canada
watkinsonline.com

The Great American Spice Company

Ft. Wayne, Indiana
americanSpice.com


 American Spice Company
americanspice.us
Miami, Florida

Fuchs North America (formerly Baltimore Spice)

Owings Mills, Maryland
fuchsnorthamerica.com

The Great Spice Company (organic)

San Marcos, California
greatspice.com

Pacific Natural Spices

Commerce, California
pacspice.com

The Spice Hunter

San Luis Obispo, California
spicehunter.com

The Spice House

(Hermann Laue Spice Co. Inc.)
Ontario, Canada
thespicehouse.com

Spice Barn
Lewis Center, Ohio
spicebarn.com

Spice Islands
spiceislands.com


 South Asia
Go to indiamart.com for a more detailed listing of South Asian
spice companies. Selected companies are listed below.

Surendraray and Company

Mumbai, India
kamdarspices.com

Hindustan Global
Navi Mumbai, India
indiamart.com/hindustanglobal

National Masala Mills

New Delhi, India
kanwalspices.com

Spice Trade
Noida, India
spice-trade.com/products

About South Asian Spices

Peacock Spice Company

Royal Oak, Michigan
peacockspices.com

East Asia
Go to made-in-china.com for a detailed listing of
spice companies.

S&B Foods
Tokyo, Japan
sbfoods.co.jp/eng/


 Indonesia
 Ruby Privatindo
Jakarta, Indonesia
Rubyndo.com

Q-Spicing
Jawa Barat, Indonesia
q-spicing.com

Singapore
Wee Kiat Development Pte
Singapore
spicescommodities.com

Vietnam
Vietnam Agro-Products Company
Ho Chi Min City and Hanoi, Vietnam
www.alibaba.com

uk and Europe
Alakh Indian Spices
Leicester, 
pureindianspice.co.uk

Bart Spices
Bristol, 
bartspices.com

Ducros
France
ducros.fr


 Shropshire Spices
Shropshire, 
shropshire-spice.co.uk

European Spice Services

Temse, Belgium
spices.be

Africa
Cape Herb and Spice Company
Capetown, South Africa
capeherb.com

About African Spices:

Mozambique Spice Company

Laguna Beach, California
mozambiquespicecompany.com

African Hut
Laguna Niguel, California
africanhut.com

My Spicer.com
Denver, co
myspicer.com

Monterey Bay Spice Company

(African Bird Pepper)
www.herbco.com


 Australia and New Zealand
Gregg’s
Auckland, New Zealand
greggs.co.nz

Herbie’s Spices
Sydney, Australia
herbies.com.au

Spice Organizations
The American Spice Traders Association
astaspice.org

Indian Spice Board

indianspices.com

International Pepper Community

ipcnet.org

European Spice Association

esa-spices.org

The Seasoning and Spice Association

seasoningandspice.org.uk

Canadian Spice Association

canadianspiceassociation.com

The Spice Council of Sri Lanka

srilankaspices.org

Spices Board of India

indianspices.com


 Acknowledgements

Looking back over the decades, I want to thank my buddy Andy

for all the times we sought out bookstores in cities and towns
before and after our international education meetings and had
those great discussions about history and food and how to
research, write, and teach about food history and the roles that
spices played. Many thanks also to Patricia Bayer for her helpful
editorial comments and to Nancy Selden for fine work on devel-
oping the maps. Finally, to my wife, Betty, for her patience during
the time it took to put all of this together in a coherent form.


 Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below
sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.
Locations of some artworks are also given below.

Photo Alinari/Rex Features: p. ; photo © Xavi Arnau/

iStock International, Inc.: p. ; photo by the author: p. ;
Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome: p. ; Bibliotheca Estense Univer-
sitaria, Modena: p. ; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris:
p. ; Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Bruxelles/Koninklijke
Bibliotheek van België, Brussel: p. ; Bridgeman Art Archive:
pp. , ; The Bridgeman Art Library: pp.  (© British Library,
London/© British Library Board; all rights reserved),  (©
Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo); courtesy of the Chile Pepper
Institute at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, : p. ;
courtesy of the City of Salem, Massachusetts: p. ; Library of
Congress, Washington, : p. ; photos courtesy of McCormick &
Company: pp. , ; photo Françoise de Mulder/Roger
Viollet/Rex Features: p. ; Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga,
Lisbon: pp. -, ; Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid: p. ; Rijks-
museum, Amsterdam: p. ; photos Roger-Viollet/Rex Features:
pp. , , , , ; Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh: pp. ,
, , ; maps by Nancy Selden: pp. , , ; Wellcome
Images: pp. , ; The Wellcome Trust: pp. , , .


 Index

italic numbers refer to illustrations

Accum, Fredrick ‒ Cabral, Pedro Alvares –, 

Acton, Eliza  Camões, Luís de –
Aelius Gallus – cardamom , , , 
allspice ,  Carlton, John –
Albuquerque, Afondo de , Carnes, Jonathan , –
 Carroll, Lewis 
‘Ambon Massacre’ –,  cassia , , , , , ,
American Spice Trade –
Association (ASTA) – adulteration 
anise ,  and cinnamon , 
Apicius  cultivation 
Augustus  harvesting 
myths 
Bee Brand see McCormick origin , 
Blanche of Norway and tree 
Sweden – use in cooking , 
Book of One Thousand and One use in perfume 
Nights, The  in rites , 
Bosland, Paul  Chanca, Alvarez 
Boxer, C. R.  Charles II, King of England,
Braudel, Fernand – Scotland and Ireland 
Briggs, Jeremiah  Chaucer, Geoffrey 
Brown, William  chilli pepper , , –, ,
Burton, Richard  –, , , –,
, 


cultivation  in Spain , , 
harvesting – in USA –, 
heat see Scoville Heat Index vines –
medicinal and nutritional cinnamon –, , , –,
properties , ,  , , , , , , , ,
migration , –, , , , , , , , ,
 
myths – adulteration 
origin , ,  and cassia , , 
trade ,  cultivation , , –
types etymology 
aji  fair trade 
bhut jolokia ,  harvesting , , , ,
cayenne ,  , , 
chipotle  medicinal and nutritional
habaneros  properties , , –
jalapeño ,  myths , , –, 
New Mexico green  organic farming –
paprika –,  origin , , , , 
‘Pernambuco peppers’ trade , , –, , ,
 , , , 
rocoto  ‘Clove Route’ 
Scotch bonnet ,  tree , , , , , , ,
tabasco ,  –
use as poison  use in cooking , , 
use in cooking in Central America 
in Brazil  in India , 
in Britain – in Italy 
in the Caribbean  in Poland 
in Central America , in Portugal 
 in Morocco 
in China  in Great Britain , 
in Hungary  in  
in India , ,  in Spain 
in Korea  in Rome 
in Mexico ,  use in alcoholic drinks ,
in Portugal ,  

 use in rites , ,  in Switzerland –
use as poison – use as breath freshener 
storage ,  use in cigarettes , 
value , ,  use in perfume 
clove , –, , –, , and slavery –
–, , –, , , , storage 
, , , , , , value 
–,  Coles, Edward –
cultivation , , , , Collingham, Lizzie 
, –,  Columbus, Christopher , ,
etymology  , 
harvesting –, ,  coriander , 
fair trade – Corn, Charles –
medicinal and nutritional Cortés, Hernán , –
properties , , , , cosmetics see perfume
 Cromwell, Oliver –
myths –, –,  Crowninshield, John 
origin , , , –, , Crusades, the , , –, 
 cumin , –
soaking  curry –, 
trade , , , , , , chicken tikka masala 
, , , , , , Singapore 
,  vindaloo –
tree , , , , , –, Cuyp, Albert 
, , 
use in cooking ,  Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee 
in Africa  Drake, Sir Francis 
in Asia  Dryden, John 
in Britain 
in China  eugenol , 
in France 
in Germany  fair trade –
in India ,  fenugreek 
in the Middle East  Fernández-Armesto, Felipe 
in the Moluccas frankincense , 
in Poland  Freedman, Paul 
in Portugal  Fricke, Thomas 

Gama, Vasco da –,  Murray-Kynynmound) 
Gibbs, W. M. ,  Moore, Thomas 
ginger , , , , , –, Muhammad , 
,  myrrh , 
globalization  myth , , –, , –, ,
, –, –, , –,
Hassall, Arthur  –
Henry VI, Holy Roman
Emperor  Nero 
herbs ,  Norman, Jill 
Herodotus ,  nutmeg and mace , –,
Hemphill, Ian  , –, , , , , ,
Hildegard of Bingen ,  , , , , , , ,

Ibn Battuta , –, – in beer 
Ibn Khurradadhbih  cultivation , , , ,
, , –, , 
Kaestner, Hank , ,  hallucinogenic properties 
Kamel, Jiři Josef  harvesting 
Keay, John ,  and Hurricane Ivan , 
Kitah el-Talih  medicinal and nutritional
properties , 
Lach, Donald F. – myths –
Lancaster, James – origin , , , 
La Varenne, François  trade , , , , , ,
lemon grass  , , , 
Levinus Lennius  tree , , , , , 
Linschoten, Jan Huygen van use in cooking –
– in the Arab world 
Livingstone, David  in Britain 
in France 
McCormick –, , , in Italy , 
 in the Netherlands 
McGee, Harold  in Malaysia –
Magellan, Ferdinand , – in the Middle East 
Milton, Giles – in Poland 
Minto, Lord (Gilbert Elliot- use in perfumes 

 value ,  Muntok , , 
Penang black 
organic farming – Piper retrofractum 
Orta, Garcia de  Sarawak 
Sri Lankan black 
Pearson, Samuel  Tellicherry black 
pepper , , , –, , , white , , 
–, , , , , , , use in cooking 
, , , , , , , in the Arab world 
,  in China 
adulteration  in France 
cultivation , , , , in Rome , 
, , , ,  in India 
Guild of Pepperers ,  in Portugal
harvesting ,  in India , 
medicinal and nutritional in USA 
properties , ,  use in perfume and cos-
myths  metics 
origin , –, , , value 
, , , , ,  vine , , , , 
tax on – Pepys, Samuel 
trade in , , , , perfume , , , , 
–, , , , , , , Pigafetta, Antonio –
, , , , , , Pius V, Pope 
–, ‒, – Plancius, Peter 
types Pliny the Elder , 
Allepey  Poivre, Pierre –
black , ,  Polo, Marco , , –, ,
Brazilian black  
Brazilian white  Purchas, Samuel 
green 
Guinea – Raffles, Thomas Stamford 
Lampong (also Ramayana 
Sumatran) ,  Raymond, George 
long black  Richard I, King of England 
Malabar black –, Rushdie, Salman 


saffron , , , – pickling spice 
Sausse, M.  ‘Scappi’s Spice Mix’ 
Scappi, Bartolomeo  see also curry
Schama, Simon – spice routes and networks
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang  –, , , , , , ,
Scott, Edmund  –, –, , , , ,
Scoville Heat Index  –, –, 
Sinclair, Upton – Carreira da India 
slavery , , –,  ‘Clove Route’ 
Speke, John  ‘Manila galleon’ –
Speult, Herman von ,  Silk Road 
spices spice trade –, , , –,
in alcoholic drinks ,  , , –, –, 
adulteration and contami- Achnese –
nation , , –, – African , 
and celebrations , ,  Arabian , , , , ,
in cosmetics see perfume , , , , , , 
in dyes  American , –,
and the food industry , , –
,  Bandanese –
and herbs ,  Calicut –
medicinal and nutritional Chinese , , , –,
properties , , , , , , , 
, , , , , –, , Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) 
, –, –,  Danish , , , 
and paradise , ,  Dutch , , –,
as preservatives  –, , , , ,
in rites , ,  , 
sourcing and manufacture Dutch East India
of – Company , , , 
value , , , , , , Egyptian 
, , , ,  English and British , ,
spice blends , –, , –, 
baharat  British East India
cajun seasoning  Company , –, ,
garam masala ,  , 
Mixed Spice  Mincing Lane 

 French , , –, , , William , King of Scotland
 
Genoese –, , , , 
Indian , ,  Zheng He –
Indonesian ,  Ziyad, Tariq ibn- 
Persian , , , 
Javanese 
Jewish 
Phoenician , 
Portugese , , , ,
, –, , , 
Roman 
Singaporean –, 
Spanish , , , –
Venetian –, , , ,

Vietnamese 
and Islam , , 
spice wars , , , –
Strabo –
Stuyvesant, Peter 
Sylvester I, Pope 

tamarind –
Theophrastus –
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne

turmeric , 

vanilla , , –

Valentijn, François –
Varthema, Ludovico –

Wallace, Alfred Russel –

wars see spice wars
Wasif-Shah, Ibrahim ibn –
wattleseed –
