Pepper: The Spice that Built World Trade


From early times pepper was cultivated in the tropics of South East Asia where it was highly regarded as a condiment and, with Cinnamon, was the first spice to be traded throughout the Indian sub-continent.

 At the height of the Roman empire’s power, Pliny (AD23-79) tells of his astonishment over the speed at which pepper gained popularity in Rome, noting that it was bought by weight like gold and silver! It sold for today's equivalent of £400 per lb and was one of the five essential luxuries that made life worth living and were the basis of the empire’s foreign trade, the others being Chinese silk, German amber, African ivory and Arabian incense.


The King is offered fruits of the Pepper Harvest

From "Livre des Merveilles du Monde"  Marco Polo's journeys

 As overland trade grew in importance so did pepper and by the early Middle Ages it became a unit of international exchange, tributes and taxes were levied in pepper, dowries were paid in pepper and in France a serf could buy freedom for a lb of pepper.

From the 8th to the15th century the republics of Venice and Genoa prospered from the spice trade with the Middle East.  Spices were amongst the most expensive and desirable products available in Europe and the rivalry between the two cities came to a head with the naval war of Chioggia (1378-81) which was won by Venice, who secured the monopoly of trade in spices for the next century, making exorbitant profits as middle-man between the Middle East and Europe. This trade made Venice rich, it is estimated that around 3000 tons of pepper, as well as other spices, were imported into Venice each year during the late Middle Ages, their value being equivalent to a yearly supply of wheat for 1.5 million people. 


Dutch Ships Docking at Cape Colony

The end of the 15th century saw the beginning of the “Age of Discovery” when ocean going ships became larger and faster and the race to discover sea routes to the East was intensified.  The fabled voyages of Columbus, under the flag of Spain in 1492 and John Cabot in 1497 under the English flag both failed to find a route to the spice lands.  However after the Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama opened up the sea route to India and his compatriot Alvares Cabral led the  first expedition to bring spices back to Europe, via the Cape of Good Hope in 1501, Portugal had unopposed access to the Indian spice routes. The country maintained a monopoly on the pepper trade for several decades.  It was not until a century later that other European powers were able to challenge Portugal’s  naval supremacy of the Cape Route.

By the time Britain’s North American colonies became independent in 1784, American merchants with their fast Clipper ships became involved in the pepper trade.  Salem in Massachusetts became the new Venice and in 1805 re-exported 7.5 million pounds of pepper.  The first American millionaire, Elias Hasket Derby, made his fortune importing black pepper into America, then used this fortune to endow Yale University. This seems fitting as Elihu Yale, for whom the university was named, made his own fortune in the spice trade as an employee of the British East India Company.   

Today black pepper is the most popular widely used spice world wide, more than 200 million pounds are traded annually accounting for 20% of all spice traded.  Most still comes from Asia, with Vietnam being the biggest producer and exporter.  In 2018 Vietnam exported 262,658 tons of Pepper or 36% of the world market.


Comments

  1. JeanieMarch 23, 2021 at 5:30 PM

    Really interesting - used for so much more than just rent!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Idols

Image
  Francis Bacon was an English scholar and philosopher who lived from 1561 To 1626. Amongst other things he wrote and thought about thinking.   I was Googling “idols” and Francis Bacon’s Four Idols kept cropping up, so I read a bit about them and it seemed very difficult and complicated. Then I kept on reading about them and actually it’s not that difficult, in fact I think it’s really interesting.   As I said, Francis Bacon thought about thinking and, long before the birth of modern psychology, he understood that the human mind doesn’t always reason correctly. He argued that this fact needed to be understood before new ideas could be developed.   He advocated using inductive reasoning and experiments to gain insight and to prove or disprove a theory.   He wrote a book called Novum Organum and in it he outlined the Four Idols which (I think) basically described four major errors in mental processing that result in obstacles to new and innovative thinkin...
Read more
Image
  Propagation, oo-oo-oo Propagation Propagation's what you need, If you want to plant a seed, make a rose bush or a reed, Propagation’s what you need! If you’d like to make new roots, or grow some tasty fruits, Propagation’s what you need! If you want to grow a plant, but think that you can’t, Oo-oo propagation's what you need! Do you want to be a propagate-er, Ooooo!!! For those of a certain age, you may have broken into song. Memories of Roy Castle and the McWhirter brothers on Record Breakers have been (dare I say it?) propagated in your mind!   Plants for free! There are lots of different ways in which plants can be propagated; the most common is by sowing seeds, after all, this is how it is usually done in nature. Because seed production relies on flowers producing seed by combining male pollen with female ovule, the resulting seed may produce a plant with different coloured flowers from the mother plant’s, leaves might be larger or smaller, ...
Read more