I'm still mentally into the old-timey combination shipping news/stock market report:
Dutch East India Company (VOC)
$64.98 (+$13.84) (+27.1%) Shares in the spice purveyor soared on word that the three sturdy galleons dispatched two years afore had been sighted off the coast of Cape Verde, returning from their dangerous voyage to the exotic Orient with their casks brimful of redolent cinnamon, cardamom, and mysteriously intoxicating curried powder.Okay, that's actually America's Finest News Source.
note: link to The Onion rotted, apparently un-Googleable as well. I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray.
From Experience Magazine:
Single-source spices come with tasting notes and the exact location of their farm. They’re part of a new way to do business in the international spice trade.
When Ethan Frisch gets a misspelled Instagram message from an overseas account, he always responds. It’s usually not a scam, but a business opportunity.
“Hi,” began one recent conversation. “are u form newYork?”
“Yes I am,” replied Frisch, 32, from his home office in Jackson Heights, Queens. After a full screen shot worth of pleasantries, the messenger got to the point. His family grows turmeric in India and would like to export to Frisch’s spice company, Burlap & Barrel.
And little wonder. In just three years, Burlap & Barrel has built a network of 150 spice farmers around the globe. Each of the company’s 30 spices are labeled with tasting notes and the exact location of the farm where the spice was grown. Blue Turmeric, from Nghe An, Vietnam, tastes of baked apple, toasted almond and smoke. New Harvest Turmeric, from Karnataka, India, evokes ginger, jasmine flower, and honey.
Burlap & Barrel is one of several companies that have pioneered the sale of single-source, ethically-sourced spices — a new way of doing business in one of the world’s oldest and most storied industries. By leveraging technology such as smartphones to flatten its supply chain, the company pays its farmer suppliers five to ten times the going rate. Its customers include famous restaurant kitchens like Manhattan’s Eleven Madison Park, powerhouse companies such as Brooklyn Brewery, and cooks in their home kitchens. Whether it’s for the taste or the social-justice impact, these customers are willing to pay double or even five times the price of common supermarket brands. Burlap & Barrel’s turmeric is $5.25 an ounce, roughly twice the price of grocery-store turmeric; its black peppercorns will set you back $3.99 an ounce, about five times a typical grocery-shelf price.
The international spice trade dates back to biblical times. Spices, along with silk and silver, drove the beginning of global trade, explains Eric Tagliacozzo, history professor at Cornell University. “Spice tied very remote areas of the world, such as the so-called Spice Islands of Eastern Indonesia, to the rest of the world,” he says.I bet those fat Dutch burghers didn't care about the Banda Islanders.
At its start, the spice trade transformed world history. The world’s major powers converged on areas that grew spice, where they struggled, often violently, over harvests, trade routes, and taxing authority. The people who lived in spice-growing areas experienced exploitation and even genocide. For instance, in 1621, the Dutch East India Trading Company enforced its virtual monopoly on the Indonesian spice trade by killing or deporting almost the entire native population of the Banda Islands and seizing their nutmeg.
Though the spice trade is less violent today, in other ways, it hasn’t changed much over the centuries. The vanilla in your spice cabinet probably grew in Madagascar, the black pepper in Vietnam, the nutmeg in Indonesia, the ginger in China. The world’s favorite spices tend to grow best in places far away from most of their consumers. Black pepper and cardamom are tropical, while cumin prefers the sub-tropics and mustard the temperate zones....MUCH MORE
And I guess we didn't either. There's only one reference on the blog, and that's in a post on the wealth extracted from the silver mines at Potosi Bolivia:
...Pious or otherwise, wealthy women clicked Potosí’s cobbled streets in silver-heeled platform shoes, their gold earrings, chokers and bracelets studded with Indian diamonds and Burmese rubies. Colombian emeralds and Caribbean pearls were almost too common. Peninsular Spanish ‘foodies’ could savour imported almonds, capers, olives, arborio rice, saffron, and sweet and dry Castilian wines. Black pepper arrived from Sumatra and southwest India, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, cloves from Maluku and nutmeg from the Banda Islands. Jamaica provided allspice. Overloaded galleons spent months transporting these luxuries across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Plodding mule and llama trains carried them up to the lofty Imperial Villa....We will rectify the oversight, more on Banda forthcoming.
The V.O.C. and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange got a few posts:
The World's First Stock Exchange (and first bear raid, first dividend, first equity derivatives...)
‘This little game could bring in more money than contracting charter parties for ships bound for England’, wrote Rodrigo Dias Henriques to Manuel Levy Duarte on 1 November 1691.1 Dias Henriques was referring to the ‘game’ of trading shares of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC, founded 1602) and its derivatives* on the Amsterdam securities market.Behavioral Finance at The World's First Stock Exchange
"Mokyr: 'How Europe became so rich":
Because Dutch is the language of love?
No?
Then I give up. How did Europe become so rich?
