Reading Passage 1: The Long Road of Spices
Today a jar of black pepper costs little more than a cup of coffee, and few cooks give a second thought to the cinnamon or cloves on their kitchen shelves. For much of recorded history, however, these same seasonings were among the most valuable goods that could be carried from one part of the world to another. Merchants risked storms, pirates and disease to transport them, and entire port cities grew rich on the profits. Understanding why such ordinary-seeming products once commanded such high prices tells us a great deal about geography, about trade and about human taste.
The first part of the explanation lies in where spices grew. Most of the prized varieties came from a relatively small number of tropical regions around the Indian Ocean and the islands to its east. Pepper vines needed heat, heavy rainfall and shade, while cloves and nutmeg were, for centuries, produced on only a handful of small islands. Because these plants could not easily be grown elsewhere, the people who controlled the places where they flourished, and the routes leading away from them, held an enormous advantage. Buyers in distant markets had no alternative source.
The second factor was the sea itself. Much of the trade depended on the monsoon, the seasonal wind that blows from the south-west for part of the year and from the north-east for the rest. Ship captains who understood its rhythm could cross open water in weeks rather than months, but they then had to wait in a foreign harbour for the wind to change before sailing home, which meant that a single round trip often took a full year. Ports along the coasts grew into busy meeting places where cargoes were unloaded, stored, taxed and reloaded onto other vessels heading further west. Each of these ports charged fees, and each group of merchants expected a reward for the months its capital was tied up at sea, so that the price of a spice could multiply several times between the harbour where it was first loaded and the city where it was finally sold.
It is often claimed that wealthy households in cold climates bought spices mainly to hide the taste of meat that had begun to go bad. Most historians now reject this idea. Anyone who could afford large quantities of imported spices could also afford fresh meat, and in any case salting, smoking and drying were far cheaper ways of preserving food. A more convincing explanation is that spices were valued as symbols of status. Serving heavily spiced dishes at a feast showed guests that the host had money to spend on luxuries from the far side of the world. Spices were also used in medicine, since many physicians believed that warming seasonings such as ginger could correct imbalances in the body, as well as in perfumes and religious ceremonies.
Because spices were light, did not spoil quickly and were valuable in small quantities, they were ideal goods for long-distance trade. In some markets, peppercorns were even accepted in place of coins to pay rent or settle debts. The wealth that spices generated helped to fund harbours, warehouses and banking arrangements, and the desire to obtain them more cheaply by cutting out the middlemen became one of the main motives behind the long sea voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Competition for control of the supply was often violent, and local growers rarely received a fair share of the profits.
Ironically, the very success of the trade eventually undermined it. As shipping improved and more routes opened, the quantity of spices reaching distant markets rose sharply. Seedlings were smuggled out of the original growing regions and planted in other tropical territories, ending the near-monopolies that had kept prices high. By the eighteenth century, pepper had become an everyday item rather than a mark of wealth, and fashionable cooks in many prosperous countries had begun to turn away from heavily spiced food towards simpler dishes that emphasised the natural flavour of the ingredients. New luxury goods such as sugar, tea and coffee took the place that spices had once occupied.
The story of spices, then, is not simply one of exotic flavours. It shows how rarity, distance and fashion can combine to give an ordinary plant product extraordinary value, and how quickly that value can vanish once supply is no longer restricted. Economists who study modern luxury goods, from rare foods to designer clothing, often point to the spice trade as an early and particularly clear example of these forces at work.
