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Spice Trade

a subject of political and cultural, as well as economic, interest.

In commercial terms, pepper has always been the most important of the spices, followed usually by cloves and nutmeg; but there are many others. Since their general characteristics are that they take up relatively little space, but are of considerable value, they have often been used as objects of barter against bulkier, less exciting but more necessary, goods such as rice and cloth.

In the early days of the trade, there was considerable mystery, fostered by those involved in the trade, about where some spices came from (usually S. or SE Asia). Their high value and this atmosphere of mystery combined to give these natural products something of the allure of precious metals. They were indeed sometimes used as currency.

Pepper from India was being traded in the Middle East before 2000 bc. It travelled along ways that were dictated by geography and have remained in use ever since, although shifts of power from time to time close some routes and developments in technology make others more attractive. Overland, the route went up the valley of the Indus, through the passes of the Hindu Kush, to join the great east–west Silk Roads. By sea, pepper was shipped from ports on the west coast of India to either the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. Indian and Arab merchants handled most of the trade as far as the Mediterranean; redistribution to markets further north and west was controlled by the Phoenicians until Alexander the Great destroyed Tyre and set up his new entrepôt at the mouth of the Nile. The Greeks in turn gave way to the Romans, whose seapower allowed them to send ships directly to India. This round trip took two years, until Hippalus, a Greek seaman, rumbled the Arabs' ‘secret’ of the seasonally alternating monsoon winds, thereby cutting the return journey to only twelve months and precipitating an increase in Roman pepper consumption.

For the European importing countries, spices were very expensive, this because they came from afar, and changed hands so many times in the course of long and dangerous journeys. At their destination they could cost the western consumer at least 10 times and often 40 times as much as they had cost at source. But those Romans and Europeans of the later medieval period who could afford them willingly paid the high prices for various reasons. One was the obvious one; they liked their food spiced. Besides, spices were a good way to show off wealth and power. And they were thought to have valuable medicinal properties. (It used to be said that spices were needed to disguise the off flavour of spoiled meat; but this was a piece of culinary mythology.)

China, like the Mediterranean world, traded for centuries with S. and E. Asia, but without the long chain of middlemen. The key spices here were cloves and nutmeg, produced only on a few small islands in what is now the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku (the Moluccas). Cloves were being exported to China in the 3rd century bc, two centuries before they reached Alexandria. As Asian commercial empires developed, trade increased and Indian merchants, too, set up permanent bases in or near the spice islands, so that a network of trade routes brought these new communities and their products into the larger world. At the same time as the seaways were flourishing, the Silk Roads across C. Asia were regulated and policed by the Han emperors, so that Rome and China were in continuous, if indirect, contact. Trade prospects must have looked good in, say, ad 350.

But the Chinese, to secure their own borders, had displaced Mongol and C. Asian pastoral tribes. The quest by these tribes for new territory (besides being responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century) severed overland trade routes and reduced the spice trade to a fraction of what it had once been.

However, the invaders were horsemen, not sailors, and the seaborne links of the network survived. Spices, now including the first nutmegs seen in the West, found their way back into Europe along with other oriental goods as Christendom grew slowly out of the ruins of Rome and economic life re-formed with Constantinople as its centre. Then came the sudden expansion of Islam and the consequent disruption of all trade relations with the Orient.

In the long term, Islam was to bring lasting benefits to the West, including the supply of a wider range of goods and materials than Europe had ever been able to obtain before. From about 1100 onwards overseas trade revived strongly in Europe, where the resources of capital, know-how, and trade goods were at last sufficient to give the merchants of the N. Italian cities a chance to do business with Islamic states on something like equal terms. Their profits, partly from spices, sufficed to make Venice, Genoa, Florence, and other city-states almost as rich and powerful as the caliphate of Egypt. ‘Arabic’ (actually Indian) numerals made proper management of goods and money possible, and were the basis of N. Italian banking and double-entry bookkeeping. These techniques, whether native to Italy or learned from Arab models, all assisted the growth of modern capitalism.

Muslims, who had at first been unwilling to do business with Christians, were happy to trade with Hindu India. Hindus had been very active in trade with the Far East. Although they were now becoming increasingly reluctant to travel, because they risked pollution or loss of caste if they mingled with strangers, Indian Buddhists and Jains travelled freely throughout the Far East to engage in trade by barter. So spices could flow from the Far East to the Arab world through India.

Eventually, as the Hindu presence in the Far East diminished, the Arabs were encouraged to extend their own voyages to Sumatra, Java, and the more distant spice islands, especially after they realized that Indian ‘nutmegs’ were inferior to those of Ambon and Banda.

This was, however, only one aspect of the long process by which Arab influence in Indonesia gradually replaced Buddhist and Hindu in all areas of life. There was no political conquest, but religion followed trade, local rulers were converted to Islam, and their subjects, of course, followed them. Because the change was slow and on the whole peaceful, it struck deep roots. Commercial continuity was largely unbroken, with inland villages of Java producing big rice surpluses for the sultans and merchants of the north coast, who then shipped it to Maluku, where rice and textiles were bartered for nutmegs, mace, and cloves. These spices then started their long journey, either north to China or west to India and eventually, perhaps, to Constantinople, or the Hansa ports, or England.

In Europe, the great days of the Italian cities were now ending and the future lay with nation states. As early as 1418 Prince Henry the Navigator set up a school of navigation and started sending Portuguese expeditions questing down the west coast of Africa. In the middle of the 15th century, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and in the course of the century pepper prices in Venice went up by a factor of 30. It was abundantly clear that maritime European powers now had good reason to look for a direct sea passage to the Indies. By the late 15th century, they also had the technology and the resources to do so with some hope of success. Following the voyage by Vasco da Gama in 1497–9, round the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut and safely back to Lisbon, the Portuguese set about their entry into the spice trade with a buccaneering zest from which other nations quickly learned. In only thirteen years after da Gama's voyage, Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Europe, had not only annexed Brazil but also captured the three principal stations on the route to the East: Ormuz, controlling the Persian Gulf; Goa; and Malacca, the hub of SE Asian trade in spices and many other goods. A few years later, a Portuguese feitoria (factory) in Ceylon established a monopoly in cinnamon that it held for more than a century.

In fact, however, this small nation had overreached itself; its rather primitive administrative systems could not develop fast enough to replace aristocrats with meritocrats, and it never managed to get firm control of the Red Sea route, or of the clove and nutmeg producers of Maluku. Crown agents and private adventurers got rich but sent as little as they could back home to the royal treasury, so the country as a whole profited little. And Portuguese successes naturally inspired strong reactions from trade rivals, notably the Muslims of Indonesia, who attacked European settlements frequently. In N. Sumatra, the Achenese drove the Portuguese out and kept control of pepper production until the second half of the 19th century.

It was the Dutch and the English who, towards the end of the 16th century, emerged as the principal competitors of the Portuguese. (The struggle might have involved the Spaniards too, but the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 more or less ruled them out.) The British founded their East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch counterpart of this was set up only two years later.

The Dutch took the lead in the 17th century. By 1621 they had driven the Portuguese from Indonesia, created new monopolies in nutmeg and cloves, and set up a factory and port at what is now Jakarta. Dutch forces occupied Ceylon in 1636 and captured Malacca in 1641. By the 1680s the Dutch had established themselves unshakeably in Makassar, where their impressive Fort Rotterdam still stands. By 1700 they were fixing clove and nutmeg prices in almost every market place of the world.

The 18th century, however, brought serious problems for the Dutch. One was that they had to counter over-production of cloves and cinnamon. On a notorious occasion in 1760 they had to burn excess bales of spices in the streets of Amsterdam. A much more serious problem was the erosion of their stranglehold on production. As Rosengarten (1969) records:

Between 1770 and 1772 Pierre Poivre, the French administrator of the island of Mauritius [and perhaps a relation of the Peter Piper who picked a peck of pickled pepper], managed to smuggle clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon plants out of the Dutch-controlled Spice Islands. New spice plantings were established in Réunion, the Seychelles, and other French colonies. The blockage of Dutch East Indian ports by British ships in 1780 barred the export of spices to Holland.

In 1799 the Dutch East India Company, suffering from losses by piracy and the takeover by England of the Dutch ports on the Malabar Coast and many Dutch stations in the E. Indies, went bankrupt. This, perhaps, marked the end of what has been seen in retrospect, despite the ruthless and sometimes bloody struggles which took place, as the ‘romantic’ era of the spice trade.

Spices are now being traded in larger quantities than ever. The biggest importer is the USA, followed by Germany, Japan, and France. The greatest entrepôt is Singapore. The big exporters are India, Indonesia, Brazil, the Malagasy Republic, and Malaysia.

Much has changed, although much remains the same. The Banda Islands still export nutmeg and mace, but the mansions of former Dutch planters lie open to the rain or are converted into homestays for tourists, while the fine stone quay where the world's merchant ships once jostled for space lies tranquil and decayed.

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