I bet those fat Dutch burghers didn't care about the Banda Islanders.
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:...
Here's a different angle of attack on the subject from Res Obscura, February 8:
The (history of) spice must flow
To me, one of the most intriguing objects housed in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a container for something that
few people have ever heard of: the lapis de Goa, or “Goa stone.”
Goa
stones were a compound of gold, crushed gemstones, herbs, bezoars, and
other exotic substances popular in the 1690-1750 period. Like the bezoars
they imitated, they were thought to offer a powerful protection against
poisoning. Tiny flakes would be shaved off and consumed (I picture them
being dropped in wine glasses) by wealthy consumers in India and
Europe. As you can no doubt tell from the incredibly lavish decoration
of this particular Goa stone container, they were extremely valuable.
*****
Last week, in “Why drug history?”,
I argued for the usefulness of drugs and spices for helping us to
better understand important aspects of human history. But aside from
mentioning Paul Freedman’s great book Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, I didn’t dig much into the spice trade per se.
This is partly because I tend to subsume spices intothe
category of drugs. I agree with Freedman’s approach of seeing spices,
herbs, medicinal animal products, and even gems as all occupying the
same amorphous category in the medieval and early modern periods. They
were all medicinal simples, the raw materials out of which drugs were made....
*****
....The
progression from “simple” (medicinal raw material) to “drug” is evident
from the layout of early modern pharmacy manuals, like this one from
1764.
As Freedman explains, spices were a category of simples that moved fluidly between the culinary and medical realms:
All
of these substances—plants, animal products, gems— were ‘simples’ and
could be combined to form various compounds. Pharmacists had to know how
to grind up mixtures of simples according to medical instructions or
their own ingenuity. Pounding and grinding together these aromatic
products was a tedious task and became a symbol of the art and labor of
the medical or culinary expert in spices, the cook and the pharmacist.
The mortar, an emblem of sophisticated cooking in the Middle Ages
because of its use in grinding spices, has remained the preeminent
symbol of pharmacists, just as the word ‘recipe’ in most languages means
both instructions for cooks and prescriptions for druggists, a reminder
of the conceptual similarity of the two professions.
It’s
not hard to see the blurring between the culinary and the medical if
you read premodern writings about drugs. In my first book The Age of Intoxication, for instance, I cite the case of Bahadur,
a sultan of 16th century Gujarat who (according to the Portuguese
physician Garcia de Orta) ate a kind of sweet, spiced candy composed of
sugar, nutmeg, mace, camphor, opium, and cannabis which supposedly
allowed him “to go to Portugal or Brazil or Turkey or Arabia or Persia”
via hallucinatory, drug-induced dreams.
As a kid, I remember our history class featuring a module on
the spice trade in which we learned about its importance to the Silk
Road, along with lots of fun trivia about things like the Biblical
significance of frankincense and myrrh and the fact that nutmeg
originally only grew on one small island chain.
But it wasn’t until I became a professional historian that I realized
just how foundational the hunger for spices has been in human history.
The trade routes of the Indian Ocean world, for instance, are among the
most long-lasting and significant long-distance trade links in human
history.
And if you dig into their origins roughly three to four thousand years ago, you find… cinnamon....
