587. S is for Spices

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

 

Spices. The very word heightens the senses in a heady synesthesia of fragrance, aroma, richness of hue, deep well-being—even luxury. Ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon. saffron, black pepper, star anise—just looking at them promotes well-being and makes you want to close your eyes, breathe deep, and let yourself be wafted away.

We endow even those spices in everyday use with near-magical powers, cherishing the home remedies passed down through the generations, tell and retell stories of miracle cures. We believe in them deeply. We covet them; we want more.

How spicy do you like your food, Madam?

Hold up! Not so fast with all the romance and exoticism. Those innocent-looking spices stacked neatly in your kitchen rack have driven global commerce, traveled global trade routes for millennia, made merchants and middlemen rich beyond the dreams of avarice, been the stuff of deeply unequal trade deals that have shifted the global balance of power, motivated slaughter and even genocide.

The spice trade traveled the silk road for centuries, with money changing hands several times along the way, but when Christians lost control of the overland routes across Asia, European powers engaged in a race to seek out sea routes to gain monopoly control over the wildly lucrative trade. The Portuguese got there first (as children we had to memorize 1498, the date when Vasco de Gama reached Calicut, India round the Cape of Good Hope), then the Dutch, French, and British. A convenient religiously sanctioned doctrine of moral superiority gave them permission to eliminate any “savages” who stood in the way of profit.

In The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), Amitav Ghosh discusses Francis Bacon’s 1623 treatise, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War, in which Bacon explained “why it was lawful, in his view, for Christian Europeans to end the existence of certain groups” (Ghosh 26). Bacon’s argument, that in the case of countries that “have utterly degenerated from the laws of nature” it was justified in both the eyes of the law and of God for other nations to “unit[e] together as a body with the object of punishing, even exterminating such savage peoples” (qtd. in Ghosh 26). Ghosh describes the Bandan massacre of 1619 in Maluku (the Moluccas or “Spice Islands”), when Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the governor of the Dutch East Indies, conducted such a massacre to “punish” the people for failing to give them complete control of the nutmeg trade.

And the fortunes these European trading companies made! Peppercorns, at one time, were worth their weight in gold. When the Roman Empire conquered Egypt in 30 BC, they gained access to the Malabar Coast of India. “To give you an idea of how precious black pepper was considered—3,000 pounds of black pepper was demanded along with gold, silver and silken tunics, as a ransom to free Rome besieged by the Huns” (Iyer). Cinnamon, Cloves, and Nutmeg were similarly prized. In 1667 the Dutch traded New Amsterdam (now Manhattan) to the British in exchange for the tiny island of Run, or Pulau Run, one of the smallest of the Banda Islands, part of the Moluccas, Indonesia, because of the tremendous value of the nutmeg that was found nowhere else. Before the 17th century, the Moluccas were also the only place in the world where clove trees grew.

Rival trading company agents from other European countries got up to all sorts of mischief to break the Portuguese, then the Dutch monopolies, and eventually they succeeded, grabbing shares of the outrageous profits. They gained access to the Moluccas and made off with seedlings that they planted in their own colonial holdings. 

    clove harvest day, East Manggarai, Indonesia

 In 2022, the United States imported:
—$887M in pepper, becoming the largest importer of pepper in the world. The U.S. imports pepper primarily from: Vietnam ($309M), India ($146M), China ($89.5M), Mexico ($84.9M), and Spain ($77M).
—$190M in cinnamon, becoming the largest importer of cinnamon in the world. It imports cinnamon primarily from: Indonesia ($83.5M), Vietnam ($52M), Sri Lanka ($41.1M), India ($4.29M), and Canada ($2.47M).
—$22.8M in nutmeg, becoming the 3rd largest importer of nutmeg in the world. It imports nutmeg primarily from: Indonesia ($11.1M), Vietnam ($6.05M), India ($2.43M), Canada ($2.14M), and Sri Lanka ($265k).
—$20.3M in cloves, becoming the 6th largest importer of cloves in the world. It imports mainly from Indonesia ($5.19M), Madagascar ($3.63M), India ($3.36M), Sri Lanka ($2.56M), and Canada ($795k).

Carl Lewis concludes an interesting piece on cloves as follows:
Because spices occupy a small space in the supermarket and in our kitchen cabinets, we often overlook their importance in shaping the modern world. It is hard to comprehend the centuries of exploration, conquest, slavery and war that brought these products to our shelves, and it is impossible to estimate the number of lives and fortunes that were risked and lost along the way. . . They stand as one of the best examples of a local crop that skyrocketed onto the world stage and forever transformed the global economy.

The colonial monopolies on spices have been broken up and now I can now afford to buy them when at one time only the fabulously wealthy could have done so. It is true that the spice trade made a once-rare plant from a remote island a global commodity. But at what cost?

The spices I use regularly in my cooking are readily available to me half a world away from where they were grown. But the violent histories that made them so accessible to me persists today in the tremendous inequities of power and wealth that underlie the global economy. As I close my eyes and take a deep breath, those histories rush in along with the heady scents.

 

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