Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World

Five microscopic volcanic islands – Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian and Bacan – were the only places on the planet where clove trees grew. Four hundred miles south another handful of islands – the Bandas – were the unique source of nutmeg.

The lure of spices reaches far into antiquity: 4,000-year-old clove buds have been excavated from cities on the banks of the Euphrates, sculpted reliefs of spice fleets recorded in the Valley of the Kings.

They have been instrumental in the development of long-distance trade routes by land and sea, the growth of cities and the spread of religions by the merchants who carried them. Lightweight and durable, they were the first truly global commodity; the mark-up as they passed through many hands has been so astonishing – as much as 1,000 per cent by the time they reached Europe – that they could be worth more than their weight in gold; at times they have been a currency in their own right.

Columbus had set out westward for the ‘Indies’ – China, Japan and the Spice Islands – to track the riches of the Orient back to their source and cut out the Islamic middlemen.

The Moluccas were destined to become the epicentre of a sixteenth-century great game that literally shaped the world – first a vicious struggle between Portugal and Spain that had ricocheting consequences, later a global contest.

The years 1511–71 saw Europe, hungry, competitive and aggressive, shift decisively from the margins to the centre and briefly transform Spain into a world power.

In 1511 three Portuguese ships set sail from Malacca to track cloves and nutmeg back to their source. They were poised to reap enormous rewards.

These accounts collected by factors and merchants were effectively commercial handbooks, providing a continuous stream of feedback to Portugal’s national project on all aspects of geography, ecology, trade, power structures and anthropology.

Silver ran through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries like wildfire, an element beyond human control. With overproduction its value fell – by two thirds in a century. Rampant inflation damaged economies. Spain, which produced too little and depended on silver mines too much, faded as a world power. The Ming dynasty, whose taxes were levied in a fixed quantity of silver, was overthrown.

was the lure of spices that had set the process in motion. They were the first worldwide trading commodity and an ideal one. Dried spices were a lightweight, high-value, reasonably imperishable product with which to stuff a ship’s hold on long voyages. The profits were huge. In 1515, the return on a cargo docked at Lisbon was 700 per cent.

The VOC, the Dutch East India company, which replaced them in the following century, looked to get a total monopoly of the spice market through the systematic application of violence. The VOC operated as a state within a state, the forerunner of autonomous multinationals, with enormous power and resources.

The VOC massacred the Bandanese, uprooted nutmeg plantations on rival islands, punished the indigenous population mercilessly for side trades. With an almost complete monopoly of the spice market, it made huge profits. The Dutch Golden Age, its buildings, its canals, its Rembrandts, its science and its Protestant enlightenment, was paid for, in part, by the suffering of the people of the Malay Archipelago.

Tempura – the technique of cooking battered and fried food – a classic Japanese dish, was introduced via the Portuguese technique for frying vegetables, a more benign gift than the tanegashima. The word is most likely a corruption of the Latin ‘tempora’ – the ‘times’ for fasting from meat eating during Lent, evidence of missionary influences in the country. All these tastes and foodstuffs were speeded on their way by ships.

Some of the new staple crops were introduced into China and would dramatically alter the country’s nutrition. Sweet potatoes, maize and peanuts were instrumental. China’s population doubled in the eighteenth century: from 150 million to 300 million. The introduction of faster-maturing rice seeds permitted more crops a year, supplemented by the other new imports from the Americas that supported diet in the intervening periods between rice harvests.

The inventiveness of Chinese craftsmen, their ability to copy and adapt for markets, was already legendary.

The differential in the relative value of gold and silver across the world, and an awareness of this, afforded novel opportunities for arbitrage, prefiguring the money markets of today. Silver was twice as valuable to the Chinese as it was in Europe. A quantity of gold bought in Europe, converted there into silver and carried to China, could be changed back for double the original amount of gold.

it also marked Potosí. The Spanish silver dollar – the pieces of eight of Treasure Island – became the most portable form of silver, a world currency. Its descendant would be the US dollar.

A Chinese official during the Ming era calculated that transport on inland waterways was 30 to 40 per cent cheaper than by land. By sea the advantage was 70 to 80 per cent. Ships were many times more rapid and economical than camels plodding the ancient silk roads. The sixteenth century saw an acceleration of connectivity. By 1600, all the continents could trade with each other, linked by a maritime chain encircling the world and the emergence of silver as a global currency driven by China. Its nodal points: Lisbon, Goa, Malacca, Macau, Canton, Nagasaki, Manila, Acapulco, Mexico City, Vera Cruz, Seville. The discovery of a reliable return route across the Pacific had been the final buckle in this maritime belt. It had taken the restless Europeans just eighty years to weave the oceans together. From Columbus via Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Urdaneta and the Portuguese voyages to China and Japan they had traversed the navigable seas of the planet.

Although Europeans, with their competent sailing ships and gunpowder, were the carriers of silver and the purchasers of Chinese produce, the economic engine of trading networks, which spread in all directions, was China. Then as now, the Middle Kingdom produced and Europe consumed. Like a collision of atoms, the ricocheting consequences spread across the world.

The Philippines themselves had few exploitable resources – a little cinnamon, a little gold, wax and hardwood – but Manila stood at the centre of a network of trade routes and production centres. Legazpi understood almost immediately why occupying this bay was so important. The settlement’s function, its only function, was to be an entrepôt, a turntable of commodities from China and Japan, from Portuguese Macau, from the Moluccas, Java and Sumatra, from Malacca, Siam and Cambodia.

The webbed map of trade expanded and expanded with silver oiling the wheels. It rippled all the way back to Europe. It was the twin elements of the economy of China that dominated the process: the desire for silver and vast manufacturing capacity.

The volumes of goods carried back and forth were enormous. It is estimated that three-quarters of a million kilograms of silver – some 800 tons – crossed the Pacific to Manila in the first half of the seventeenth century; the real amount was probably double that, allowing for high levels of smuggling. Travelling the other way was, above all, silk. Galleons at the time of the Concepción shipwreck would transport something between 30 and 50 tons a time – the demand for luxurious fabrics was voracious.

One single commodity linked these unconnected events across time and space: the use of silver to trade, exchange and wage wars. And it was the luck and curse of the Spanish empire that it happened to be in possession of the world’s largest source of this precious metal.

One book was enough to dismantle the Portuguese empire in the Moluccas and the Bandas.

The Iberian pioneers were Renaissance accumulators of data, constructing virtuous circles of knowledge and capability – powerful feedback loops.

With information came secrecy. The contents of the Casas were classified state documents, closely guarded by royal officials.

Following on from the Merchant Adventurers, in 1600 another joint-stock company was formed: the East India Company, destined to be a powerful player in global trade and empire, and ambitious for the spice trade. In the short run, however, China and the Spice Islands were as far away as ever.

Silver was king in China, and there wasn’t enough of it. It would provide the Europeans with an extraordinary opportunity, and the luck would be Spain’s.

Like the Portuguese, the Spanish worked tirelessly to suppress commercial and cartographic knowledge, but it proved impossible to seal the leaks. Both Spanish and Portuguese ventures were pan-European in nature,

In 1548 Giacomo Gastaldi produced the first ‘pocket book’ atlas. You could hold the world in your hand; you could spin it round on a globe; you could circumnavigate it with your finger. In the process the furthest reaches of the world were coming into view:

The information revolution that began in the first half of the sixteenth century saw the printing of some 10 million books. The second half witnessed a dizzying acceleration. Over the whole century, book production totalled 150–200 million volumes, dwarfing the whole of human history’s previous written output. This ever-expanding world of new knowledge opened up by the Portuguese and the Spanish rapidly increased European understanding of the world and the possibilities for discovery and conquest. The Portuguese had rightly feared espionage and the power of print. In the end their spice monopoly would be destroyed by a spy who wrote a book. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a Dutch secretary to the bishop of Goa in the 1580s, stole their trade secrets. He surreptitiously copied charts, maps and navigational information that provided a blueprint for voyaging to the East and trading there.

Knowledge was valuable: experienced navigators could switch allegiance.

Yet the economy along the coast of southern China relied on overseas trade, and that trade was located in luxury items. Spices were in great demand at the imperial court, as well as such items as ivory and aromatic wood, in exchange for silk, porcelain and musk.

Overall, China lacked for nothing by way of essentials: it was completely self-sufficient. A Dominican missionary, Gaspar da Cruz, remarked that China’s overseas trade ‘is so little in comparison of the great traffic of the country, that it almost remained as nothing and unperceived’.

So enthusiastically did the Japanese embrace the gunpowder advantage that, by the seventeenth century, they were possibly producing more guns than the whole of Europe.

Macau was a city run by and for merchants, something of an oriental Venice – one that existed only to trade.

Trade centres were printing centres: Venice, Lisbon, Seville. Antwerp, Lyons, London. First-hand accounts of new worlds were at a premium and, sensing opportunity, printers obliged, publishing in vernacular languages.