The Spice Trade

For hundreds and indeed thousands of years, intrepid sailors and merchants have braved the seemingly endless seas to find the mysterious islands where spices could be found. Mace, nutmeg and cloves may be familiar items to us now, but for the Romans and for the Europeans of the Dark Ages and Mediaeval era, they were almost magical particles from unbelievably remote locations. Fragrant, exclusive, fiery and with perhaps monstrous sexual benefits, spices were the preserve of the rich, sophisticated and complex - or the vulgar rich, in any case.

Spices come from places such as the Moluccas Islands (also known as Maluku), which are a chain of islands which are little more than submerged mountains poking out of the sea at the far end of Indonesia. The Moluccans have from the beginning of recorded history welcomed junks and boats from China and Southeast Asia ready to collect their spices and to pay for them with all the other refinements of society that the islanders were unable to produce for themselves.

From there, the spices were transported across land and sea via a dense network of traders that connected the east with the west. That this trade was dominated in part by Muslim people was a source of constant frustration to the Christian crowns of Europe and one of the more important inspirations for the voyages of discovery mounted by the Spanish and the Portuguese from the fifteenth century onwards. Indeed, Christopher Columbus was mostly intent on finding new sources for spice when he set off to discover the passage to the Indies. When he found that his discoveries in the New World had no new spices (apart from the ubiquitous chilli pepper which, unfortunately for him, proved too easy to grow) he considered his missions to be little more than failures.

Eventually, Portuguese explorers did find their way to the east and began to try to establish trade with the local people - how disappointed they were to find not the simple natives they were accustomed to duping in Africa and the Americas but sophisticated Arab and Indian merchants demanding gold and silver and looking down their noses at the newcomers. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that this would lead to the violence that did then flare.

The Dutch VOC (East Indies Company) supplanted the Portuguese in the east and went about enthusiastically extracting resources from Southeast Asians through the use of force. There are many reports of Dutch outposts in Java (which they knew as Batavia) full of nervous soldiers afraid to venture out for fear of their lives.

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