How Europe became hooked on Asian spices

 When Vasco da Gama landed on Kappad beach, in what is  now the Indian state of Kerala, in 1498, his Portuguese  mariners proclaimed they were in search of Christians and spices.  Religion was part of the Portuguese justification for their  determination to find a direct sea route to India. The commercial  imperative was black pepper. 

As this book demonstrates, the European quest for spices was one  of the main impulses behind mercantilism, the seaborne  commerce which brought great wealth to Europe’s maritime  powers. It provided the initial push to establish trading posts in  the spice-producing regions of South and South-East Asia. These  often developed into colonial outposts and then metamorphosed  into the rapacious imperialism which proved so difficult for  emerging nations to shake off. 

The merchant powers made huge amounts of money from the  spice trade and in so doing left a lasting mark on the world. This  commerce was a catalyst in the development of new forms of shipping, navigation, map-making, banking and futures trading.  The producing countries benefited far less from this exchange. In  the wake of the spice trade came wars, subjugation, the coerced  trade in opium and that most awful of stains on our shared  history, slavery. 

The Indian Ocean depicted by Dutch cartographer Jan Jansson in 1652. 

This reviewer recently visited Pulicat to the North of Chennai  where an imposing seventeenth-century cemetery is the most  tangible evidence of what was once the nerve centre of the Dutch  commercial presence on India’s Coromandel coast. From there  over several decades, Dutch traders arranged, through local  compradors, for an estimated 40,000 enslaved Indians to be  shipped to work on spice plantations in what is now Indonesia.  Slavery is often associated with the feared ‘middle passage’ across  the Atlantic which took millions of captive Africans to toil in  plantations in the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil. In  fact, it was a global evil. 

The spice trade required spice ports, and the focus of this elegant  book is the development of these ports and the role of explorers,  pirates, botanists, soldiers, and sultans in enabling the trade.  Europe’s maritime powers were late to the party. Chinese and  Arabian traders had, centuries earlier, recognised the value of  spices, used for everything from flavouring food to serving as an  aphrodisiac. The great prize was commercial access to the handful of equatorial islands with volcanic soil in the Moluccas  (among the easternmost parts of Indonesia) which produced  nutmeg, mace and cloves. The other most sought-after spices –  pepper, cinnamon and ginger – were grown in the spice gardens  of southern India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Sumatra. 

Nicholas Nugent has researched the history of the spice ports  intensively and has travelled across continents in doing so. The  seed of the idea for this book took root many years ago when he  visited Indonesia’s Banda Islands, the original home of nutmeg.  He tells the story well, as you would expect of a former BBC editor  and correspondent (and now the editor of Democracy Asia). 

Nugent has chapters on twelve spice ports. Five of these are about  European (and allied) commercial centres which gained wealth  from importing spices: Venice; Lisbon; Amsterdam; London; and  the North American city which was initially known as New  Amsterdam and then rechristened as New York. Two chapters  concern ports which facilitated the trade: the Egyptian city of  Alexandria, which was established by Alexander the Great as part  of his search for a land route to India and which remains a  gateway to the East; and Cape Town, which a Swedish botanist  and traveller described in 1772 as ‘an inn for travellers to and from  the East Indies, who, after several months’ sail, may get  refreshments of all kinds, and are then about half way to their  destination, whether homeward or outward bound’. A view of Goa in India looking south across the Mandovi River, by German cartographer Joseph Friederich Leopold in 1700.

On the export side, Nugent writes about five ports in four Asian  nations: Goa, which throughout the sixteenth-century was the  principal Portuguese commercial centre in South Asia; Bombay  (now Mumbai) which offered a better harbour being able to  ‘afford at all Seasons, Reception and Security for whole Fleets’ according to a description dating from 1724; Malacca, the city  which can lay claim to being the birthplace of the Malay nation  and which the Portuguese and Dutch fought over in ‘the spice  wars’; Batavia (now Jakarta) which offered the best access to the  clove and nutmeg islands; and Singapore, developed by the  British as a harbour free of Dutch control but within reach of the  Moluccas’ spice islands. 

An onshore view of the town of Batavia, now known as Jakarta, in 1748 by English  engraver Emanuel Bowen. Jakarta was recently declared the most populous city in  the world with 42 million inhabitants. 

Ports which initially traded spices sometimes went on to become  still more prosperous from other commodities. Bombay became  India’s commercial capital because it was so important to the  supply of cotton, tea and opium. For Singapore, the global  demand for rubber transformed its fortunes. But the  contemporary map of Asia remains shaped by the spice trade and  the imperial rivalries which stemmed from it. Nugent argues that  a treaty agreed between the British and the Dutch more than  two-hundred years ago laid the foundations of the modern  nations of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Spices Europeans fought over and traded: the nutmeg plant with its hard seed at the centre and its outer covering or mace, a distinct spice, depicted in 1800. 

The text of this book is compelling; the production standards are  exceptional. The Spice Ports includes scores of maps, prints,  manuscripts and paintings, with high-quality colour  reproduction. Remarkably, as many as a hundred of the maps and  illustrations included are from the author’s own collection,  outnumbering those sourced from the British Library, the  publishers of the volume. Like the best spices, this book is  piquant and enticing and deserves a place on the shelves of the  discerning.