How Spices Shaped the Modern World

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

In the 16th century, spices drove the world economy, creating riches on an unprecedented scale. Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find the elusive source of cloves and nutmeg, and when Portugal reached the spice islands of the Moluccas, it set in motion a fierce competition for control.

In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Roger Crowley, whose new book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World chronicles the adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters—and remade the world economy for centuries to follow.

This episode was edited by xx and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	rarer than art and as valuable as precious metals.
0:08.0	The economy of the early modern world was shaped by the pursuit of its single most important commodity, spice.
0:16.0	Transported to Europe through a network of complex trade routes,
0:20.0	the exact source for many spices remained unknown.
0:24.0	But all this changed in 1511 with the Portuguese discovery of the Malachas, the so-called
0:30.0	Spice Islands. The next six decades brought intense change from the linking of trade routes
0:36.4	across oceans to the increasing manufacture of merchant ships and armaments and the origins
0:42.2	of the first truly global economy all in the hope of
0:46.2	controlling the world's most valuable asset. Joining me today to talk about the
0:51.7	European Battle for Spice and its enduring effects on the world
0:55.6	is the New York Times best-selling author Roger Crowley.
0:59.3	His latest work of compelling narrative history is Spice, the 16th you to not just the tutors.
1:19.0	Thank you very much, Miss Anna.
1:20.0	It's a great pleasure to be here.
1:22.0	This is an exciting topic. Can you take us at the very beginning back to the early 16th century and give us some basics? Where in the world were the Spice Islands? What were they? What was grown there and why they were important?
1:36.0	The Spice Islands are in the Malay archipelago, which is a kind of 4,000 mile arc.
1:42.0	It's about a quarter of the world's diameter.
1:45.5	A little group of islands which are now effectively
1:48.4	in the Philippines.
1:49.8	And the critical issue here is that they sit on the fault line between two species systems.
1:57.0	One is that of Asia, the other is that of Oceania, Australasia.
2:01.0	And on this fault line, it's like a laboratory of evolution it was here
	...

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