The Spice That Traded Manhattan: The History of the Silk Road and Spices - Episode 9

Aleksandra Ganeva: Hello. There, can I ask you to do something for me? Open your kitchen cupboard. Not literally, just in your head. You know what's in there: salt, pepper, cinnamon, maybe, cumin, turmeric, some paprika that's been in there longer than you'd like to admit. A small jar of something you bought for one specific recipe and have not touched since. Just sitting there completely ordinary. Now, here's the thing I want you to hold on to for the next 20 minutes. Those little jars, those cheap, unremarkable, slightly dusty containers of dried things, once drove the greatest voyages of exploration. In human history. They reorganized the map of the world. They built and destroyed entire economies. They got people killed, a lot of people, in wars and sieges, and colonial violence across three centuries. The black pepper sitting next to your hob right now was once so valuable it was used to pay rent, to settle legal debts, to bribe officials. The word for a wealthy merchant in medieval English was sometimes just peppercorn, because pepper was the thing wealthy merchants had. Today it costs. Almost nothing. You grind it without thinking. Now, if you've watched a red Dune, you already know this story. Not the specific history, but the shape of it. Because Frank Herbert, when he built his fictional universe around a single precious substance found only one desert island, found only on one desert planet, a substance that extended life, enabled travel, and drove empires to violence, he wasn't just making things up. He was reaching back into actual history and finding the template that was already there. In Dune, the spice smell. Like cinnamon. It can only be found in one place. Whoever controls it controls everything. And the people who live where it goes are caught between powers far larger than themselves. Sound familiar? Today we're going to find out just how familiar. I'm Alexandra, welcome to the Hidden Life of Things, everyday history for anyone who's ever looked at something ordinary and wondered, how did this actually get here? Before we go anywhere, I need to clear something up. Because there is a story about spices that basically everyone has heard and that historians have largely shown to be wrong. And I'd rather start with the truth. You've probably heard that medieval Europeans use spices to mask the taste of rotting meat, that because they had no refrigeration, food went bad quickly, and spices were a way of making rancid meat edible. It gets repeated constantly. It sounds plausible. It's almost certainly not true. Here's the most straightforward. Reason why. The people who could afford exotic imported spices in medieval Europe were wealthy. And wealthy people could afford fresh meat. If you were rich enough to season your food with pepper and cinnamon that had travelled thousands of miles from South Asia or Southeast Asia, you were not struggling to preserve your dinner. So what were spices actually for? The first and most important answer is medicine. Now let me explain this properly because the word medicine means something different here than it does now. The dominant medical system across Europe and the Islamic world for over a thousand years was called humoral medicine. The idea that the human body was governed by four fluids called humours blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Health was about keeping those in balance. Disease was imbalance. and the way you treated imbalance was partly through diet, including spices. Pepper was considered warming and stimulating. Good for a sluggish, cold, phlegmatic constitution. Cinnamon was good for digestion and for warming the body. Cloves were used for toothache and as a general warming tonic. Ginger settled the stomach. When a medieval physician prescribed cinnamon, they were doing something they understood as genuinely therapeutic. A wealthy household spice chest was in a very real sense a ⁓ a medicine cabinet. The second reason is status. To serve heavily spiced food at a banquet was to show everyone in the room that you had access to the most expensive imported goods on earth. Think of it like serving the most expensive wine at a dinner party, except the wine had travelled by camel and horse across three continents before it reached your table. A feast without exotic spice was a poor feast. Everyone in the room knew it. And the third reason, which somehow always gets forgotten, is that spices are genuinely delicious. Medieval European recipes, when food historians actually reconstruct them, are interesting and good to eat. Layered, complex, flavorful, people like the taste, that's allowed. The antimicrobial properties are real. Cloves contain eugenol, which does inhib which does inhibit certain bacteria. Cinnamon does affect bacterial growth, but these were side effects, not the primary purpose. Nobody in 14th century France was reaching for nutmeg because they'd A paper on food safety. What made spices valuable was something much more interesting. They were beautiful, medically significant, socially prestigious, deeply delicious, and extraordinarily difficult to get a hold of. I want to pause here on cinnamon specifically because I think most people have been eating the wrong one their whole lives and don't even know it. When most of us buy cinnamon, the stuff in the jar at the supermarket, the stuff we put in porridge or apple crumble or Christmas baking, we're almost certainly buying something called cassia. Cassia is Cinnamomum cassia, a plant native to southern China and widely grown across and widely grown across Southeast Asia. It tastes like cinnamon, it smells like cinnamon. It is labeled cinnamon, but it's not what medieval merchants were paying fortunes for. Real cinnamon, what food historians and spice specialists call true cinnamon or Ceylon cinnamon is cinnamonum verum. Verum means true in Latin. It comes from Sri Lanka, which was then called Ceylon. And if you've never tasted it, it is different, softer, lighter, more floral, almost sweet, with a subtle complexity that cassia, which is harder, more intense, and slightly harsher, doesn't quite have. Ceylon cinnamon is also lower in coumarin, a naturally occurring compound that in large quantities can cause liver problems. Cassia has significantly more of it. The reason most of us have been eating cassia our whole lives is price and availability. Cassia is cheaper and easier to produce in large quantities, so it became the dominant cinnamon of mass market spice production. The labelling laws in most countries allow it to simply be cold cinnamon, which doesn't help. If you want to try the one that medieval merchants literally Went to war over. It's sold as Ceylon cinnamon or true cinnamon, and you can find it in most good delis or online. It costs more. However, the difference is worth knowing about. The reason I mention this is that it illustrates something important about the spice story generally. The objects in our cupboards are the survivors of long, complicated commercial histories. The cinnamon you have is not the same cinnamon. The cinnamon you have is not the same cinnamon that changed the world. It's the cheaper colourland that got there in the Mm-hmm. The geography of spice is the geography of medieval global trade. And it's worth understanding properly because everything that happens next depends on it. Black pepper, the most traded spice in the world for most of recorded history, came from the Malabar coast. That's the southwestern coast of what is now the Indian state of Kerala. Black pepper still grows there today. Ceylon cinnamon came from Sri Lanka. Clothes came from the Malacco Islands in what is now eastern Indonesia, about as far from Europe as you can get without leaving the planet. And nutmeg and maize, which are actually two different parts of the same tree's fruit, came from an even more specific place, the Banda Islands, a tiny cluster of volcanic islands in that same Indonesian chain. The Banda Islands were for a very long time the only place on Earth where nutmeg trees grew wild. Nowhere else, just tens more islands, the largest of which you could walk across in an afternoon. Now think about what that means. One of the most coveted substances in the medieval world grow on a handful of small islands at the very far end of the known world. It could not be cultivated anywhere else. To get it, you had to travel there, or more realistically, buy it from someone who had bought it from someone who had. If this is making you think of Arrakis, the desert planet in Dune, the only place in the known universe where the spice melange exists, you're absolutely on the right track. When Frank Herbert published Dune in 1965, he was drawing directly on the structure of the historical spice trade. One precious substance, one location. Whoever controls that location controls everything. The people who live there are simultaneously the most important people in the world and the most vulnerable. And the most vulnerable. And the great powers will do almost anything to maintain their monopoly. Herbert described the spice as smelling of cinnamon. He was not being subtle. Between the Banda Islands and Venice, the European hub of the spice trade, there were thousands of miles of ocean, mountain, and desert, and a chain of traders who each took their cut. Arab merchants controlled much of the Indian Ocean trade, Persian merchants handled routes through Central Asia and Middle East, Egyptian and Levantine ports were the entry points to Europe. By the time a sack of pepper arrived in Venice, it had passed through dozens of hands. The price at the end bore almost no relationship to the price of the source. Venice understood this better than anyone. The city's extraordinary wealth, the palaces, the art, the Basilica di San Marco with its Byzantine gold mosaics, is in large part spice money solidified. If you've ever walked across the Piazza San Marco and felt slightly overwhelmed by the extravagance of it, you're looking at what happens when one city controls the most profitable tok point in global trade for 300 years. And then things shifted. In 1453, Constantinople, the great trading city of the crossroads, The great trading city at the crossroads of Europe and Asia fell to Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II. The Ottoman Empire now controlled the key overland routes between Asia and Europe. Trade didn't stop. The Ottomans were sophisticated traders themselves, but the terms got harder for European merchants. The margins got tighter, and the incentive to find an alternative route became suddenly overwhelming. Portugal found the answer first. The Portuguese had been working at this for decades, methodically funding expeditions down the west coast of Africa year by year, generation by generation, slowly pushing further south. It was expensive, dangerous, long-term investment with no guaranteed return. The Portuguese crown was essentially making a series of very large bets on geography. In 1498, a Portuguese explorer named Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean. And arrived at Calicut on the Malabar coast of India. He was the first European to reach Asia by sea. The cargo he brought back was worth roughly sixty times the cost of the voyage. Sixty times? I want you to sit with that for a second. That is not a good return on investment. That is a number that changes what is possible. It is the kind of number that makes every subsequent expedition feel not just justified, but obvious. This was not a voyage of discovery in the romantic sense. It was a business decision. Pepper was the business case, the profit margin was the justification. And the consequences were enormous and mixed. I'm not going to paper over this because I think it's important to say clearly. The Portuguese establishment of sea routes to India and Southeast Asia did eventually break the Venetian monopoly and bring price and bring spice prices down in Europe. That's real and significant. but it also launched a period of European maritime expansion that was frequently brutal. The Portuguese and then the Dutch and then the British used violence. coercion and monopoly power to controlled trade routes. The communities at the producing end of these supply chains paid an enormous price for European appetites. Let me tell you about the Banda Islands, because this is where this five story gets a little bit dark, but I think it deserves to be told in full. The Banda Islands are a tiny cluster of volcanic islands in what is now eastern Indonesia. Ten islands. The largest, Banda Nera, is about five kilometers across. And for several centuries, these ten small islands were collectively the only place on earth where nutmeg trees grew wild. Not the most important source, the only source. If you wanted nutmeg and medieval and early modern Europe very much wanted nutmeg. It came from here and nowhere else. The Bandanese people have been trading Nutmeg with Arab, Javanese, and Malay merchants for centuries before any European ship ever appeared on the horizon. They had their own political structures, their own trading relationships, their own economy. Nutmeg was their livelihood and they managed it accordingly. And then the Dutch arrived. I want to be careful here because I'm not interested in national villainizing. This is a story about an institution and a system, not about Dutch people as a people. The Dutch Republic in the 17th century was also producing Rembrandt, building some of the most sophisticated legal and financial systems in the world, and pioneering ideas about religious tolerance. Complexity is the honest position. But the institution that arrived in the Bander Islands, the VOC, operated with the specific and documented brutality that the historical record requires us to. Mm-hmm. The VLC, the Dutch East India Company, was unlike anything that had existed before. Let me explain what it actually was because I think Most people don't quite grasp the scale of it. It wasn't a company in the modern sense, a corporation that makes products and sells them. The VLC, when it was granted its charter by the Dutch government, was given powers that governments normally reserve for themselves. It could negotiate treaties with foreign powers, it could declare war, it could build forts and garrisons, it could establish Colonies and governed them. It had its own standing army and its own navy, at its speak, a larger fleet than most European nations. Some historians call it the world's first multinational corporation. I'd say it was closer to the world's first corporate government. And this organization, this extraordinary, unprecedented commercial military entity, decided in the early 17th century that it wanted absolute total control over the nutmeg trade. Not a share of it, not a favorable position in it, all of it. The Bandanese had a system they called Hongi. Trading relationships, fixed prices, agreements with multiple buyers. The VOC found this arrangement unacceptable. They wanted monopoly, exclusive access. The only buyer, the only seller. When the Bandanese refused to accept these terms, when they continued trading with English merchants and others, the VOC's response was systematic and catastrophic. Between roughly 1609 and 1621, the Banda Islands were subjected to a campaign of violence that historians today describe as a massacre, and in some scholarly literature as genocide. Villages were burned, people were killed by VOC soldiers, those who survived faced forced labor or fled to other islands. Thousands died from direct violence, from famine caused by the destruction of food supplies, and from disease in a population already decimated. Before the VOC's arrival, the Panda Islands had a population estimated at around 15,000 people. Within roughly a decade of the campaign, contemporary Dutch accounts suggest the population had been reduced to a few hundred. The numbers are disputed and the exact figures are uncertain, but the scale of what happened is not. The VOC then parceled out the nutmeg gardens to Dutch colonists called Purkaneers who ran them using enslaved and forced labor. The people who had grown nutmeg for centuries were replaced by a colonial plantation system. The nutmeg was worth that much to the people running the VOC. And this is the important distinction. These were not rogue actors operating outside their institution. The VOC shareholders received their dividends. The system worked by its own logic, and that is perhaps the most disturbing thing about it. When you eat nutmeg in a bechamel sauce, grated over rice pudding, in a Christmas drink, the reason it is an ordinary ingredient in your kitchen and not an unimaginable luxury is a direct consequence of what happened on those islands. I don't say this to make eating nutmeg a moral crisis. I say it because I think it's worth knowing. And then there is the island of Run. And this is where the story takes the turn that I cannot get over. Run is the smallest of the Banda Islands, barely three kilometers long, a kilometer wide. Tiny, remote, volcanic island at the edge of the known world. And in the early 17th century, it was in British possession, one of the few toeholds Britain had managed to establish in the Nutmeg trade despite the VOC's efforts to exclude all competition. The VOC naturally wanted Run, it was the peace they didn't have. And for decades there were skirmishes, negotiations, seizures, and counterclaims over this tiny island and its Nutmeg trees. In 1667, the whole situation was finally resolved. Britain and the Dutch Republic sat down and signed the Treaty of Breda, a diplomatic agreement to settle various outstanding colonial disputes between the two powers. Britain gave up the island of Run. In exchange, the Dutch handed over a territory they controlled on the other side of the world, a settlement on a large island off the northeastern coast of North America. the Dutch had called it New Amsterdam. Now, you may know a song. There is a they might be giant song called Istanbul Not Constantinople, a wonderfully catchy thing about places that have changed their names. Istanbul used to be Constantinople, New York used to be New Amsterdam. The song notes correctly that New Amsterdam was renamed New York when the English took control. And that is the exact moment we're talking about. The Treaty of Breda is part of the reason New York is called New York. Here's the full picture. The Dutch had established New Amsterdam in the sixteen twenties. A trading settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. It was genuinely valuable, a deep natural harbour, a river a river running north into the continent, an established trading post. The English had seized it in 1664, renamed it New York after the Duke of York, and the Treaty of Breda in 1667 formalized the arrangement. The Dutch got legal recognition of their nutmeg monopoly on the island of Ron. The English got legal recognition of Manhattan. Britain swapped Manhattan for a nutmeg island. I want to make sure this lands properly. Manhattan today is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on earth. Trillions of dollars of property, the financial capital of the world, the skyline, the energy, all of that was in 1667 considered the less valuable side of a trade. The Dutch negotiators who agreed to give up New Amsterdam in exchange for Run were not considered to have made a bad deal at the time. Run was worth it. Nutmeg was worth it. The tiny volcanic island with the nutmeg trees was, by the calculation of the most sophisticated commercial. mines of the 17th century worth more than Manhattan. And here is the final twist, the detail that I think makes the story complete. Within a few decades of the Treaty of Breda, the Dutch nutmeg monopoly began to collapse anyway. People smuggled seedlings out, other sources were established, nutmeg became available across the tropical world. The price fell, the island of Ron, the island Britain gave away Manhattan to get, became ordinary. The Dutch got the better end of the trade at the time. History, though, had other ideas. I want to zoom out here because the spice trade didn't happen in isolation. It was part of a much bigger, older, more complex network, a web of routes connecting China to Central Asia, to India, to Persia, to the Middle East, to Africa, to Europe, that had been operating for well over a thousand years before Vasco da Gama ever set sail. We call it the Silk Road. And the first thing to know about the Silk Road is that it wasn't really a road and it wasn't actually about Sil. It was a name invented by a German geographer called Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877. He needed a shorthand for ancient trade routes he was writing about academically, and he coined the term Zaidenstrasse, Silk Road. It caught on. The problem is it gives you an image of a single golden thread stretching from China to Rome, which is completely wrong. The Silk Road was actually hundreds of overlapping, shifting, competing routes overland and maritime across some of the most extreme terrain on earth. The Gobi Desert, the Taklamakan, whose name roughly translates as You go in and you don't come out, which is the kind of place name that makes you want to immediately respect the people who cross it regularly. The Pamir Mountains, sometimes called the roof of the world, mountain passes above 4,000 meters that were closed by snow for half the year. The Hindu Kush, the Indian Ocean, where monsoon patterns dictated when you could sail and where and where? And here is the bit the romantic image always gets wrong. Very few people travel the full. Length of any of these routes. You don't get a single merchant walking from Chang'an in China all the way to Rome. What you actually get is a chain. A merchant in China sells goods to a Sogdian trader who takes them to Samarkand, where they're sold to a Persian merchant, who takes them to a Gulf port, where they're loaded onto an Arab boat bound for the Red Sea, where they're carried overland to Alexandria, where a Venetian merchant buys them and ships them home. Dozens of transactions, multiple languages, many currencies, months or years. years of movement. By the time those goods reached their destination, they'd passed through more economies and cultures than most modern supply chains. This is again exactly what Herbert put Dune, the layers of intermediaries, the markups at each step, the fact that people consuming the spice at the end of the chain had almost no idea what the conditions were like at the source. The distance between production and consumption, physical and psychological, is one of his central themes. And it wasn't just goods that traveled, Buddhism left India and spread east along these routes into China, Korea, and Japan. Islam spread west and east simultaneously, carried by Arab traders who were also missing. Paper, invented in China, traveled west along these routes, arrived in Samarakand in the 8th century, and eventually reached Europe where it made the printing press possible. The decimal number system that you use every day, the one with the zero in it, which sounds basic, but it's actually a mathematical but it's actually mathematically revolutionary, was developed in India, transmitted through the Islamic world via these routes, and arrived in Europe as what we now call Arabic numerals. Mathematicians traveled this road. Disease traveled it too. The Black Death, the plague that killed between a third and a half of Europe's population in the 14th century, almost certainly spread westward from Central Asia along these same trade. The network that carried silk and pepper and revolutionary ideas also carried plague. Every network is neutral, it carries whatever is moving. Here is someone I want to introduce to you properly because they appear in almost no popular accounts of this period and they absolutely should. The Sogdians. Sogdia was a civilization based in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, centered on the great cities of Samarakand and Bukhara. And for roughly 500 years, from around the 3rd to the 8th century CE, the Sogdians were the dominant merchants of the Silk Road, not the Chinese, not the Romans, not the Arabs, the Sogdians. They were extraordinary traders. They established merchant colonies across an enormous area, from the Byzantine Empire in the west to Tang dynasty in China in the east. And we know this not just from historical accounts, but from their own words. There are Sogdian merchant letters that survived, discovered at a watchtower in northwestern China, dating from around 313 CE. Private business letters in Sogdian script, which was an ancestor of modern Arabic and Persian scripts, among others. These letters discuss trade in silk, musk, and pepper. They mention market prices, family news, the difficulty of certain routes. One letter describes a famine and political case. In China, that is disrupting trade, another, and I love this one, complains extensively about a business partner who has taken the goods and hasn't paid up and doesn't seem to be responding to messages. It's 1,700 years old and reads almost exactly like an email from a difficult supplier yesterday. The Songdians eventually lost their dominant position when the Islamic conquests of the 7th and 8th century transformed the political landscape of Central Asia. Arab merchants operating within the new Islamic trade networks took over much of the trade they had controlled. But the Sogtians' roots, their knowledge of the roads, their established relationships across the network, all of that became the foundation for what came next. When we talk about the Silk Road as a functioning system, we're talking substantially about infrastructure that the Sogtians built and maintained for five centuries. They're almost completely absent from popular history. If you want a reason to feel slightly annoyed at how history gets told, the Sogdians are a good place to start. The story of how spices went from priceless to cheap is at its heart a story about monopoly and the things people will do to break one. As long as someone controlled the routes to spices or the only place where spices grew, prices stayed high. The moment that control broke, the moment multiple sources and routes existed, prices collapsed. The Portuguese sea route around Africa broke the overland monopolies. Then the Dutch and British competed with the Portuguese. Then the Dutch tried to control the source itself, and this is where it gets interesting. The VOC's approach to maintaining their nutmeg and clove monopolies was through violence and deliberate cruelty. The VOC sent expeditions to destroy nutmeg and clove trees on islands they didn't control. They tried to limit cultivation to specific places they could monitor and tax. They used violence to enforce compliance. For a while it worked, and then a French botanist named Pierre Poivre decided he was going to break it. Poivre is the French word for pepper. His name literally was pepper, and Pierre Poivre spent years, the seventeen sixties and into the seventeen seventies, trying to smuggle nutmeg and clove seedlings out of Dutch-controlled Malacou Islands. This was dangerous work, the Dutch took their monopoly seriously. Getting caught carrying seedlings out of those islands was not a situation you wanted to be in. Poivre eventually succeeded. He got seedlings to Mauritius and the island de Réunion, both French-controlled islands in the Indian Ocean. The plants took, they grew. From there they spread further to other tropical regions, to the Caribbean, to East Africa, to parts of South Asia outside of Dutch control. The Dutch monopoly, maintained through decades of violence and ecological control, was broken by a man whose name meant pepper, who had who hid seedlings in his coat. History has a wonderful sense of humour sometimes. Once spices could be grown across the tropical world, the price began its long fall, slowly at first, then faster, then all the way to the point where a jar of pepper is something you buy without thinking and put it at the back of a shelf. Today Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Brazil, Madagascar, and dozens of other countries produce the spices that once required armed fleets to obtain. The global spice trade is worth billions of dollars in total, but the price per jar is almost nothing. The value of the spice was never really about the substance itself, it was about scarcity, about control, about the gap between the people who had access and the people who didn't. That's the real history of spices, not the taste, but the gap. So next time you reach for the Pepper automatically, without thinking, the way you do every time, just take one second. It was the reason ships sailed into unknown oceans, the reason maps got redrawn, the reason a Dutch company committed atrocities on tiny Indonesian islands most people have never heard of. The reason the Dutch gave away Manhattan. The reason the man named Pepper stole seedlings in his coat. And somewhere in a very famous science fiction novel, there is a desert planet where a substance that smells like cinnamon grows in only one place, drives an empire to war, and makes whoever controls it the most powerful force in the known universe. Frank Herbert wasn't making it up. He was reading his history. The spice is ordinary now because the monopoly broke, because enough people grew it in enough places that the price collapsed. That collapse is in its own way a kind of justice for access, for abundance, for the thing that was once reserved for the powerful, now sitting in everyone's kitchen. But ordinary doesn't mean the story didn't happen. It just means the story did its work. History isn't only in museums. Sometimes it's in your kitchen, in a jar you haven't thought about in months. If this sent you to your spice rack with different eyes or made you want to re-watch Dune, good, that's what I'm here for. The Hidden Life of Things is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. A follow or a like genuinely helps. And if there's someone in your life who has a spice rack they take for granted, or someone obsessed with Dune who doesn't know the real history behind it, send this to them. And here's your clue for next time. It's in every room of your home right now. You walk past it without seeing it, you open it without thinking, but someone somewhere spent years learning how to make it properly. How to fit it so it closes without a gap, how to proportion it so the room feels right with it in it, how to join the pieces so they'll still be sound in a hundred years. Before the mid-1700s, nobody really designed this. You just had one made, functional, serviceable, forgotten the moment it was finished. And then a man from Yorkshire decided that was. Wasn't good enough, that the things we live alongside every day should be beautiful as well as useful. That a room deserves to be considered as a whole, that proportion matters, that fit matters, that the space between an object and the wall it stands against is not empty, it's part of the design. He published a book. Catherine the Great owned a copy. So did the King of France. What was he making? Stay curious, I'm Alexandra and I'll talk to next week.