The History of the Spice Trade

John Keay

For at least 2000 years spices rivalled gold, ivory or silk as the prime commodity to be traded globally. Light in weight, largely imperishable and immensely valuable, consignments of dried peppercorns, clove buds, cinnamon bark and nutmeg (to name but a few of the better known spices) were readily bagged and stowed and could be transhipped, carried overland, broken up and warehoused at will before being released onto the market. In an age when oceanic travel consisted of short voyages in small ships interspersed with landward portages, spices were the ideal cargo.

But to consumers at the end of the supply chain in Europe, the question of where this produce actually originated remained shrouded in mystery. All that was known for sure was that the trade in spices spanned more of the earth’s surface than geography could yet account for. This added a mystique to their culinary, aromatic and medicinal properties, while provoking some wildly fanciful speculation. Cinnamon, for instance, was supposed by the fifth century BC historian Herodotus to be a kind of twig collected by Arabian vultures as nest-building material. The nests being on precipitous cliffs, the only way to obtain the twigs was to slaughter an ox, says Herodotus, ‘then cut the carcase into manageable joints and retire to a distance’. The birds swooped down and carried the meat up to their nests, which obligingly collapsed under the additional weight; ‘then the men come up and gather the cinnamon, and in this manner it reaches other countries.’ [1] Herodotus had obviously heard tell of birds’ nests being prized in Chinese cuisine, but he was wrong about everything else; vultures’ nests are not edible and cinnamon merely passed through Arabia; it originated in Sri Lanka. His informant had misled him. Substituting a spice’s remote place of transhipment for its even remoter place of origin was a good way of assuaging curiosity without giving much away.