Why Was Pepper Worth Crossing Oceans For? Routes Built on a Few Plants

The trade rested on a small number of plants with narrowly restricted origins, which is the fact that made the whole system possible. Black pepper came from the Malabar coast of southern India. Cinnamon and its relatives came from Sri Lanka and southeast Asia. Cloves and nutmeg grew only on a few small islands in eastern Indonesia, the nutmeg on a group of islands measuring a few dozen square kilometres in total. Ginger, cardamom and turmeric came from south and southeast Asia. Because the sources were confined and the demand was distant and enormous, anyone controlling either the growing or the route captured extraordinary value, and the price multiplied many times between the grower and the European consumer.

The routes combined sea and land and changed repeatedly over the centuries:

• •Monsoon sailing across the Indian Ocean, exploiting winds that reverse seasonally and permit a round trip within a year
• •Overland caravan routes through central Asia and Persia
• •The Red Sea and Egyptian route into the Mediterranean
• •The Persian Gulf route to Mesopotamia and onward
• •Coastal shipping through the straits of southeast Asia
• •The Atlantic route around Africa, opened by Portuguese voyages from 1498

Routes built for one purpose carry everything else, and the consequences ran far beyond the goods. Religions moved along these networks, with Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Hinduism all spreading substantially through trading communities rather than through conquest. Technologies moved, including papermaking, the compass, printing and a great many crops, with several staples reaching regions where they became fundamental to the diet. Writing systems, numerals and mathematical techniques travelled with merchants who needed them. Diseases moved with equal efficiency, and the plague pandemics of the sixth and fourteenth centuries followed trade routes closely, which is documented in the sequence of outbreaks along known corridors. Trading communities themselves settled along the routes, producing diaspora populations whose descendants remain in place today.

Several factors compounded and the explanation frequently given is the weakest of them. The claim that spices were needed to preserve meat or to disguise spoilage does not survive examination, since anyone who could afford pepper could afford fresh meat and salt was the actual preservative. The real reasons are distance, risk and intermediation, since goods passed through many hands with each taking a margin, voyages took years and lost ships regularly, and the sources were deliberately obscured by traders who profited from nobody knowing where the plants grew. Demand was driven by cooking, by medicine, since spices featured heavily in medical theory, and by status, since serving them displayed wealth in a directly legible way.

The European search for a direct sea route had consequences far beyond the spice market. The Portuguese voyage around Africa reaching India in 1498 bypassed the intermediaries and collapsed the margins that Venetian and Egyptian merchants had taken, redirecting wealth and shifting the commercial centre of Europe westward. The attempt to reach the same sources by sailing west produced the European arrival in the Americas, which was a navigational error with consequences nobody intended. Control of production was then pursued by force, with the Dutch East India Company seizing the nutmeg islands, destroying trees elsewhere to maintain monopoly and conducting a massacre on one island in 1621. The monopoly ended when the plants were successfully transplanted elsewhere in the eighteenth century, and prices collapsed.

A few plants with narrowly restricted origins, including nutmeg growing on islands totalling a few dozen square kilometres, supported networks spanning continents. Prices reflected distance, risk and many intermediaries rather than any need to preserve or disguise meat. The search for a direct route produced the European arrival in the Americas and then violent monopoly over the sources.