Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me Katie Prescott.

In this programme, I'm exploring the history and impact of the spice trade in Zanzibar, East Africa.

I'll be hearing why these tropical spice islands are so important to this valuable global industry and how spices unite food,

culture and tradition across the world.

Spice roots were so long. There were lots of people involved, lots of middlemen, and everybody

took their cut. So it meant that spices actually were incredibly expensive.

And the rotten side, the human cost.

Slavery which propped up spice plantations here for centuries.

Business Daily with me, Katie Prescott,

here on the BBC's World Service.

So these old carved doors had chains around the edge to represent.

Yeah, they were, they used to mark those stuff.

To mark, the person who lived here,

he was doing those days.

Yeah.

Like many people at this time of year, I've come down to my local pub for a glass of bold wine,

that classic warm winter drink that smells just quite as good as it tastes.

And as well as the obvious red wine ingredient, it's a mix of cinnamon and cloves,

one end product of the very lucrative global trade in spices.

At the heart of this trade is Zanzibar, off the coast of mainland Tanzania in East Africa.

These islands are known as the spice islands.

After tourism, these luxury plants are the most important driver of their economy, as they have been for hundreds of years. Claves, nutmeg, turmeric, vanilla,

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