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📜 History

Pepper as currency, the Spice Islands and how chillies conquered the world.

14 pages in this section

Ancient spice routes
Monsoon winds, camel caravans and the ports between India and Rome
Before 1500 spices reached the Mediterranean by incense caravans across Arabia and by monsoon sailing across the Arabian Sea. How those routes worked, who ran them and wh…
Etymology of spice names
Where the words for pepper, ginger, cinnamon and chilli came from
Spice names travelled with the spices, through Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Nahuatl and French. Where the common names come from, and which popular derivation…
Herbals and herbalists
From Dioscorides to Culpeper: the books that described the plants
Herbals were books describing plants and their uses, mostly medical. From Dioscorides's first-century De materia medica to Gerard and Culpeper, they shaped how Europe nam…
How chillies spread around the world
From Mexican gardens to Goan kitchens, Hungarian paprika and Korean kimchi
Chillies were domesticated in the Americas thousands of years ago, then spread across Africa, Asia and Europe within about a century of 1492. How that happened, with the …
Medieval spice cookery
Ginger, galingale, grains of paradise and the taste of the rich
Wealthy medieval Europeans cooked with remarkable quantities of spice: ginger, cinnamon, saffron, grains of paradise and pepper. What they used, how they used it and why,…
Pepper in history
The king of spices, from Ramesses II to peppercorn rents
Black pepper from India's Malabar coast was the most traded spice in history. Its story runs from Egyptian mummies and Roman warehouses to Portuguese fleets, Salem mercha…
Physic and monastery gardens
Infirmary beds, university gardens and the roots of the modern herb garden
Monastic infirmary gardens and, later, university and apothecaries' physic gardens grew medicinal and culinary herbs for study and use. They are the ancestors of botanic …
Spices in Britain
Roman pepper pots, medieval ginger, Christmas spice and the curry house
Britain's relationship with spices runs from Roman pepper pots and medieval banquets through the East India Company and Victorian curry powder to the curry house and toda…
Spices in the ancient world
Embalming, incense, medicine and the Roman pepper habit
How Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks and Romans used spices and herbs, from embalming and incense to medicine and cookery, and what the surviving texts …
The Columbian exchange
Chillies, allspice and vanilla east; cumin, coriander and sugar west
After 1492 plants, animals, people and diseases crossed between the Americas and the rest of the world. For spices it meant chillies, allspice and vanilla for the Old Wor…
The Dutch East India Company
The VOC: shareholders, monopolies and colonial violence, 1602–1799
The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), founded in 1602, dominated the Asian spice trade for most of the 17th century through armed monopoly, conquest and slavery, a…
The Portuguese sea route to India
Round the Cape to Calicut, and the violent century that followed
Vasco da Gama's voyage round Africa to Calicut in 1498 opened a direct sea route from Europe to the pepper coast of India and launched a Portuguese maritime empire built …
The Spice Islands
Cloves, nutmeg and the small islands the world fought over
The Moluccas of eastern Indonesia were once the only source of cloves, nutmeg and mace. Their history includes wealthy sultanates, European rivalry, the 1621 Banda massac…
The spice trade
Four thousand years of pepper, cloves and the people who paid for them
The long-distance trade in pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg shaped empires, fortunes and colonial violence from antiquity to the 19th century. An overview of who trade…