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 traded what, when, and why.
Overview¶
For most of recorded history the spices Europeans prized most grew in a small number of places in tropical Asia: black pepper and cardamom on the Malabar coast of south-west India, cinnamon in Sri Lanka, cloves on a handful of volcanic islands in the northern Moluccas, and nutmeg and mace on the tiny Banda Islands alone. Getting them to Rome, Cairo, Venice or London meant passing through many hands, each taking a margin. Scarcity at the end of a long chain, not rarity at the source, is what made spices expensive in Europe.
The trade is best understood not as a single "spice route" but as overlapping networks. Most of it, for most of its history, was run by Asian and African merchants for Asian markets; Europe was a wealthy but peripheral customer until the 16th century.
The routes¶
Pick a route to follow it across the map, or hover over a place to see what came from there.
Pick a route to follow it, or hover over a place to see what came from there.
Routes and places as a list
Routes
- Incense road and Roman monsoon route (c. 1000 BC – AD 300). Camel caravans carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia north to Petra and Gaza. From the 1st century BC Greek and Roman ships used the monsoon winds to sail from the Red Sea port of Berenike straight across to the pepper coast of India and back within a year. More
- Maritime routes of the Indian Ocean (7th – 15th centuries). Malay, Javanese and Chinese ships brought cloves and nutmeg west to Malacca; Gujarati, Persian and Arab merchants carried them on with Indian pepper and Sri Lankan cinnamon, up the Red Sea to Cairo and Alexandria, or up the Gulf to Baghdad. Venetian galleys bought at the Mediterranean end. More
- Overland Silk Roads (2nd century BC – 15th century). Caravan routes linked China with Persia and the eastern Mediterranean through Central Asia. They carried silk above all, but spices moved along them too, passed from market to market rather than carried end to end. More
- Portuguese Cape route (from 1498). Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut in 1498, cutting out the Venetian and Mamluk middlemen. Portugal went on to seize Goa (1510) and Malacca (1511) and reached the Moluccas, running the trade from fortified posts and selling passes to Asian shipping. More
- Dutch VOC route (from 1602). VOC ships sailed from Amsterdam to the Cape, then ran east on the strong westerly winds of the Roaring Forties before turning north to Java, the route Hendrik Brouwer pioneered in 1611. From Batavia the company enforced its nutmeg and clove monopoly, conquering Banda in 1621. More
Places
- Moluccas (Ternate and Tidore) — Cloves. For centuries the only place cloves grew.
- Banda Islands — Nutmeg and mace. A few tiny islands that were the world's only source of nutmeg.
- Malabar coast — Black pepper, cardamom, ginger. The pepper coast of south-west India.
- Sri Lanka — Cinnamon. Home of true cinnamon.
- Southern China — Cassia, ginger. Cassia and ginger from the south of China.
- Dhofar and Hadhramaut — Frankincense and myrrh. The incense lands of southern Arabia.
- Malacca. The great entrepôt on the strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea; taken by Portugal in 1511.
- Calicut. Pepper port where Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498.
- Goa. Seized by Portugal in 1510; capital of its Asian empire.
- Aden. Gateway to the Red Sea.
- Hormuz. Commanding the mouth of the Persian Gulf; taken by Portugal in 1515.
- Baghdad. Where the Gulf route met the caravan roads.
- Alexandria. Where Venetian merchants bought spices from the Mamluks.
- Venice. Europe's spice market before 1500.
- Petra. Nabataean city on the incense road.
- Berenike. Roman Red Sea port for the monsoon voyage to India.
- Samarkand. Oasis city at the heart of the Silk Roads.
- Chang'an (Xi'an). Eastern end of the Silk Roads.
- Lisbon. Home port of the Portuguese Cape route.
- Amsterdam. Headquarters of the VOC.
- Cape of Good Hope. Rounded by Dias in 1488; a VOC supply station from 1652.
- Batavia (Jakarta). The VOC's Asian headquarters from 1619.
Timeline¶
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 1213 BC | Peppercorns placed in the nostrils of the mummy of Ramesses II in Egypt |
| 1st century BC–AD | Greek and Roman ships use the monsoon winds to sail directly between Egypt and India |
| 1st century AD | The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchants' guide, describes pepper ports in India |
| AD 408 | Alaric's Visigoths demand, among other things, 3,000 pounds of pepper to lift a siege of Rome |
| 7th–15th centuries | Arab, Persian, Gujarati and Malay merchants dominate the Indian Ocean trade; Venice and Genoa buy at Alexandria and Beirut |
| 1488 | Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope |
| 1492 | Columbus sails west looking for Asia and meets the chilli instead |
| 1498 | Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut (Kozhikode) |
| 1511 | The Portuguese take Malacca |
| 1600 | The English East India Company is chartered |
| 1602 | The Dutch East India Company (VOC) is founded |
| 1621 | The VOC conquers the Banda Islands, killing or enslaving most of the population |
| 1667 | Treaty of Breda: the Dutch keep Run in the Bandas, the English keep New Amsterdam (Manhattan) |
| 1770 | Pierre Poivre's agents establish smuggled clove and nutmeg plants on Mauritius, breaking the Dutch monopoly |
| 1799 | The VOC is dissolved |
Antiquity¶
Spices moved long distances very early. Pepper from India reached Egypt by the 13th century BC, and cinnamon and cassia feature in Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek texts as costly aromatics for incense, perfume and embalming as much as for food. The Roman appetite, especially for pepper, was large enough that Pliny the Elder grumbled in the 1st century AD about the drain of Roman coin to India and Arabia. Roman gold and silver coins are still found in hoards in southern India. See ancient spice routes and spices in the ancient world.
The medieval trade¶
After the collapse of the western Roman Empire the trade never stopped; it was reorganised. Muslim merchants connected the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean via the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and cities such as Aden, Cairo and Alexandria grew rich on it. Chinese junks and Malay and Javanese shippers carried cloves and nutmeg westward from the Moluccas to entrepôts such as Malacca. Venetian merchants bought at the Levantine end, and from the 14th century Venice ran regular state-organised galley convoys to Alexandria and Beirut.
In Europe, spices were a luxury of the wealthy and a marker of status, used lavishly in elite cookery and in medicine. See medieval spice cookery.
⚠️ A persistent myth
It is often said that medieval people used spices to disguise rotten meat. Historians of food reject this. Spices were far more expensive than meat, so anyone who could afford them could afford fresh food; meat was usually eaten fresh, salted or smoked; and medieval recipes add spices to fish, vegetables, sweets and wine as much as to meat. The appeal was taste, prestige and contemporary medical theory, not concealment.
The European scramble¶
The Portuguese wanted to cut out the Venetian and Mamluk middlemen by reaching the sources by sea. Vasco da Gama's arrival at Calicut in 1498 opened a direct route round Africa, and within two decades Portugal had seized Goa (1510), Malacca (1511) and Hormuz (1515) and reached the Moluccas. Its system relied on fortified trading posts and forcing Asian ships to buy passes, but it never controlled the whole trade. See the Portuguese sea route.
In the 17th century the Dutch, organised as the VOC, pursued monopoly far more ruthlessly. They conquered the Banda Islands in 1621, destroyed clove trees outside areas they controlled, and took Sri Lankan cinnamon and much of the Malabar pepper trade from the Portuguese. The English East India Company, squeezed out of the Spice Islands, turned increasingly to Indian textiles and later to territorial rule in India. See the Spice Islands and the Dutch East India Company.
The human cost¶
The European phase of the spice trade was built on coercion. The Portuguese used naval violence against Asian shipping; the VOC's conquest of Banda killed or displaced most of its inhabitants and replaced them with enslaved labour on nutmeg plantations. In the 19th century the clove plantations of Zanzibar and Pemba, under the Omani sultanate, depended on enslaved East Africans. Pepper and ginger in the Caribbean and vanilla on Réunion were likewise grown within slave or indentured labour systems. The romance of the spice trade is real, but so is this.
Why it ended¶
Monopolies depend on scarcity, and scarcity did not last. The French transplanted cloves and nutmeg to Mauritius in 1770 and from there to the Seychelles, Réunion and Zanzibar; the British, occupying the Moluccas during the Napoleonic Wars, spread nutmeg to Penang, Sri Lanka and later Grenada. At the same time European taste shifted in the 17th and 18th centuries away from heavily spiced food towards butter, herbs and sugar. Spices became cheap commodities, and the great trade became ordinary commerce. Today the largest producers include India, Vietnam, Indonesia and China; see biggest spice producers.
Legacy¶
The spice trade left place names, words (see etymology of spice names), cuisines and diasporas across the world. It also carried plants the other way: the chilli, carried out of the Americas after 1492, became one of the most widely used spices on earth within about two centuries. See the Columbian exchange and how chillies spread around the world.