History of Spice Trade
From time immemorial man has enhanced his food with seasonings. Earliest findings of this practice are found in European fossil records from Neolithic graves and caves where people lived. Even in the late Stone Age, people were using the seasoning power of various herbs and seeds e.g. caraway and chervil. Signs of evidence of the use of various plants or plant parts as food seasoning were found in debris in caves used as dwellings for thousands of years in Eastern Asia, especially in China.Knowledge of early peoples’ customs, ways of life and food preparation methods grew in the wake of exhaustive archaeological excavations of early civilisations in Asia Minor which were carried out. A great number of exotic spices, or evidence of their use, was found. It was discovered, too, that some of the spices could only have reached the site where they were found, through trade.
Early Arabian traders and merchants ensured the import of Indian spices to Egypt. During the era of the great Pharaohs there were also merchants who specialised themselves in the spice trade. The trade routes at that time led over caravan routes, some of which are still in use today, or over the seas along the coasts.
For hundreds of years Arabs, and their enterprising Phoenician partners, dominated the spice trade. This is how cloves and nutmeg found their way to Ancient Rome and Athens. They were so valuable that only the most affluent and aristocratic families were able to afford the luxury of these exotic spices.
With the expansion of the Roman Empire to the North over the Alps came the lore of exquisite, noble spices from foreign lands afar to central Europe. It was only, however, with the rise of the city states of Venice and Genoa that spices from the Far East became known in northern Europe, and the most valuable trading commodities of the time. The most famous trading centres for spices and other goods from the Far East at that time were Constantinople and Alexandria.
The great demand for spices and other goods from the Orient lured Christopher Columbus, a native of Genoa, to venture westwards across the Atlantic Ocean in search of India. He failed to find the legendary Spice Islands but discovered America instead. The only aromatic plants he found in the Western World, were capsicums, pimento and vanilla, which were to attain special significance later on.
In 1498, the spice trade experienced the beginning of the period of most significant prosperity in conjunction with the discovery of the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope to India by the Portuguese, Vasco da Gama. The exceedingly high profit margins in the spice trade led to the – admittedly not the first – monopoly by Portuguese traders, with the result that the major exotic spice growing areas were soon in the hands of the
Portuguese. For almost one hundred years, Lisbon controlled the spice trading market and acquired a previously unheard of, and unchallenged, economic wealth.
Later, the Dutch began to challenge the leading position of the Portuguese in the spice trade and in bloody conflicts eventually managed to gain control over the growing areas of spice. The Dutch ruled over the cultivation, harvesting and trading of spices with a rod of iron. With time, however, the strictly controlled monopoly collapsed when the French managed to steal seeds and saplings of nutmeg and cloves and successfully grew them on their territories in the Indian Ocean.
Subsequently, the upcoming colonial power, England, ousted the Dutch out of East Asia, and for a long time, too, enjoyed the economic advantages gained from the ever increasing need for spices. London is today still one of the leading trading centres for Asian and American spices.
As the numbers and size of areas under cultivation increased world-wide, and as opportunities opened up through the further development of global transport and communication, with time, the demand everywhere for spices was satisfied. This eventually led to the collapse of earlier spice monopolies.
