From JSTOR Daily, September 20:
Cloves: The Spice that Enriched Empires
Behind one humble spice lies a complex history of empires and profit, commodities and globalization.
For most of human history, the humble clove, one of the most common spices in our kitchen cabinets, was one of the rarest in the world. Plucked from the tropical evergreen trees of the Myrtaceae family, these tiny, sundried buds from the clove plant Syzygium aromaticum were not only prized for their sweet and spicy flavors but also for their value in medicine and food preservation. Historically, they were high in global demand but limited in production and trade, making them some of the most expensive spices in the world. Even with price fluctuation, they were costly by today’s standards. In fifteenth-century Britain, for instance, it would have cost five days’ hard-earned wages for a skilled artisan to purchase a pound of the exotic spice. Today, the price of cloves in the United States can vary, from $20 to $40 per pound. They are readily available for purchase in neighborhood supermarkets and on the internet.
Cloves weren’t always associated with the winter season—as warm spices laced in holiday drinks or seasoning added to sumptuous meals—as they are today. For most of the plant’s history, they grew nowhere near places that had the four seasons familiar to us in North America. Rather, they grew in the dry and wet monsoon climes of Southeast Asia. In fact, they originated from a remote chain of mountainous islands along the western rim of the Pacific Ocean in present-day Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago. Their geographical spread used to be limited to a small number of Maluku islands, especially Ternate, Tidore, Bacan, Moti, and Makian, where Islamic sultanates and indigenous kingdoms controlled their local production and trade. While Indigenous laborers planted, cultivated, and harvested the plant, it was the Arab and Chinese merchants who engaged in their long-distance trade. They introduced the sweet-smelling spice to premodern European and Mediterranean markets, along the Silk Road and across the Indian Ocean.
Merchants and states went in search of profit. So began the early modern spice race in the fifteenth century. European states and corporations—including the English, Spanish, Portuguese, and the Dutch—competed in the trade of valuable spices. In the early sixteenth century, those working under the Portuguese imperial administration of Estado da Índia were the first to overtake parts of this spice-producing region of eastern Indonesia, expanding their commercial operations by adapting to existing inter-Asian connections across the Indian Ocean. By the seventeenth century, however, it was the Dutch merchants, working under the United Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or the VOC), who dominated the commerce in profitable cloves. In their determination to control the spice trade and to run the operations of an overseas corporation that stretched across the Indian Ocean—from the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa to the human-made island of Deshima in Japan—the VOC created its first post of Governor General in Ambon in 1610. While Ambon was counted as one of the smaller spice islands in Maluku, it was, for a brief moment, the very heart of VOC operations in the East Indies. The European trade in spices went hand in hand with the growth of early modern empires.
Clove trees grew abundantly in the Maluku Islands. The VOC’s attempt to monopolize the global spice trade was not only about economic competition with other European powers but also about controlling the geographic dispersal of clove trees. Hence the Company’s extirpation policies, which involved sending soldiers and laborers to different islands or contractually obligating local sultanates, to uproot and burn spice trees. This strategy was an attempt to exterminate as many clove trees that existed outside of Company control as possible. But the seeds continued to spread. Colonial administrators claimed that the people on Ambon would continue to filch unripe cloves, either to transplant them elsewhere or to sell to local merchants. But another source of their worry, one which has gained less attention in this history, was the birds....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
Logistics: Spice Trade Restocking (VOC)
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.
Oops, wrong century.
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.
And from "Why the spice trade is even more important for world history than you might have thought":
I mentioned, in November 2019's "How Technology is Changing the Spice Trade":
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:...
