Some was simply a gift from the gods of climate and botany. Some of that control was enforced through political power or contrived through mercantile guile. As such it was at the heart of the spice trade, a network of sea routes and entrepôts in the making for millennia: the world economy’s oldest, deepest, most aromatic roots.įor thousands of years before Da Gama and hundreds of years afterwards, the secret of the spice trade was simple: great demand and highly controlled supply.
Then, as now, Calicut was a gateway to the world’s greatest pepper-growing region-indeed this was why the Syrians had moved there in the first place. But as far as spice went, Da Gama and his crew were right on the money. And what did the men shout as they came ashore? “For Christ and spices!” The proselytising part turned out to be disappointingly unnecessary: there were already plenty of Christians living on the Malabar coast, following the arrival of a Syrian contingent many centuries earlier. To support this expansion, its merchant classes would invent new forms of commercial credit and the first great corporations, vital parts of capitalism’s operating system, and spread their trading networks across the seven seas. With ships, weaponry and a willingness to use them both, the countries of Europe were about to colonise the rest of the world. Europe’s ignorance of, and isolation from, the cosmopolitan intellectual and commercial life of Asia were ended forever. If history’s modern age has a beginning, this is it. Soon after dawn on May 21st 1498, Vasco da Gama and his crew arrived at Calicut after the first direct sea voyage from Europe to Asia. KERALA, INDIA, AND THE MOLUCCA ISLANDS, INDONESIA The history of spices is the history of trade
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