Roger Crowley Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World Yale University Press 320 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN 978-0300267471
Roger Crowley
On Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World
Interview of
October 9, 2025
In a Nutshell
The content of my book is very much what the title proclaims: ‘Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that shaped the Modern World’. The sixteenth century was a break point in the acceleration of human exploration and our understanding of the planet. Columbus was a forerunner, followed by Vasco da Gama and a dynamic age of maritime discovery. In the process it witnessed a knowledge explosion through the medium of printing and cartography. The catalyst for this was the spice trade.
It’s hard for us now, as we look at our spice racks, to understand what all the fuss was about. The lure of spices reaches far back into antiquity; 4000-year-old clove buds have been excavated from cities on the banks of the Euphrates. Across millennia, spices have been valued as antiseptics, analgesics, and aphrodisiacs, to cheer up food and drink and as intimations of paradise. They were traded across vast distances by sea. Parallel to the Silk Road there was a maritime spice route that transported spices through the hands of many merchants, from the furthest east, across the Indian Ocean and into Europe. They were the ideal long-distance cargo: lightweight, highly valuable and reasonably imperishable. Before the Europeans came, the spice business was a peaceful trading commonwealth. It saw the spread of Islam into the Indian subcontinent, created powerful kingdoms and enriched Venice: by the time spices reached Europe, they were extremely expensive, as much as a 1000% mark up from source.
It was the desire to acquire spices at source and cut out the middlemen that set the Portuguese and the Spanish on their so-called ‘voyages of discovery’. Their ultimate objective was a scatter of small islands in the Philippine archipelago, the only places on earth where the most desirable spices, cloves and nutmeg, grew. My book chronicles their extraordinary, and often ghastly, voyages and the attempts to monopolize the trade that resulted in a bitter micro-war between the two countries on the other side of the world.
The race for the spice islands set in motion a chain of long-term consequences: the exploration of the Pacific Ocean; then the first contacts with China and Japan. In the process we see the development of a world-wide trading system and the creation of a global currency – silver – that allowed goods and technologies to circulate around the world: it made it possible to buy Ming pottery in Amsterdam and it introduced firearms into Japan.
The wide angle
What started as a contest for spices between Portugal and Spain had many consequences. It hugely expanded European understanding of the world and allowed people, through the resulting medium of cartography, the making of globes and the development of book printing, to visualise the world as an entity. This sense of planetary awareness was highly significant. It prefigured a global trading system. At the same time, it sowed the seeds for centuries of western imperialism and conquest that would also have profound environmental consequences. The new world that the spice voyages set in motion saw the planet as a limitless natural resource for plunder and extraction, culling the wealth of lands and their peoples.
I came to write this book because of my long-term interests in maritime history. I had written a previous book about the Portuguese attempts to explore the world in the fifteenth century. They worked their way down the coast of Africa, and eventually, under Vasco da Gama, reached India. Their explorations became more and more extensive. My previous book saw the Portuguese establish themselves on the coast of India, at Goa, then finally capture Malaka on the Malay peninsula. This was a hub of spice trading. The Portuguese appetite for further and further exploration was insatiable. I was curious to see them make the next leap – to find the source of the most valuable of all spices and nutmegs. This book was the natural sequence.
A close-up
I would hope that a reader would start with the introduction. It frames the issues and activities that develop in the book, sets the geographical scene, and explains quite why the spice islands, the key objective of scores of voyages in the sixteenth century, commanded such a magnetic hold on the imagination of early modern Europe. It explains how and why the planetary collision of geological plates in the Malay Archipelago gave rise to extraordinary species, sketches the historical backstory of the magnetic attraction of spices over thousands of years, explains the triggers that set in motion an astonishing exploration of the world and the development of planetary understanding with a chain reaction that the European set in motion that have had long-term influences on global history.
Of the many voices that are heard in my book two quotes stand out. It’s still difficult for us, as we look at our spice rack for granted, to grasp exactly why the lure of spices was so strong that thousands of European risked their lives to make hellish journeys with very high mortality rates and terrible suffering for something that added a bit of taste to food. Even at the time, there was bewilderment: a Portuguese monk, Gaspar da Cruz, thought they were non-essential luxuries. ‘pepper and ivory which is the principal that the Portuguese do carry, a man may well live without.’ The answer is that spices provided a glimpse of better lives – and large profits. A second perspective on what the spice discoveries of the long sixteenth century set in motion lies in one telling line from Shakespeare ‘the world is mine oyster and I with sword will open it’ - the development of western imperialism and resource extraction by the use of violence.
Lastly
My book’s aims are twofold. First to carry the reader as far as possible into the world of the sixteenth century and to get a sense of where and how the runaway train of globalisation got going. Second, and quite simply, to provide an engrossing read. The first-hand experiences of Europeans exploring the world are by turns gripping, marvellous, humbling – and ghastly.
