Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World by Roger Crowley


Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World
Title : Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0300267479
ISBN-10 : 9780300267471
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 320
Publication : Published June 18, 2024

The story of the sixteenth-century’s epic contest for the spice trade, which propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific   Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portuguese finally reached the spice islands of the Moluccas in 1511, they set in motion a fierce competition for control.   Roger Crowley shows how this struggle shaped the modern world. From 1511 to 1571, European powers linked up the oceans, established vast maritime empires, and gave birth to global trade, all in the attempt to control the supply of spices.   Taking us on voyages from the dockyards of Seville to the vastness of the Pacific, the volcanic Spice Islands of Indonesia, the Arctic Circle, and the coasts of China, this is a narrative history rich in vivid eyewitness accounts of the adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters—and remade the world economy for centuries to follow.

Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World Reviews

  • Dax

    In one of his earlier books, Crowley covered the rise of Portuguese exploration around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian ocean. In 'Spice', Crowley now turns his attention to the rise of the spice trade and the contest between Portugal and Spain in the Pacific. We actually start with Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe in the early 16th century, but that is well-traveled ground in historical works. The more interesting aspects of this book were the mini-wars between Spain and Portugal in the spice islands, the attempts to establish trading ports in the Philippines, China and Japan, and the routing back across the Pacific that opened that arena to international trade. He really covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time. That will appeal to a lot of readers as it makes for a fast read, but I would love to see Crowley drill down on some of these episodes a little more. He seems to have a wordcount in mind when he begins a new project. A very good book, to be sure, but maybe not quite excellent. High three stars.

  • History Today

    As we slide towards Earth’s sixth extinction event and look covetously towards planets endowed with precious rare metals, Roger Crowley’s new book should be required reading for those commanding future conquests of resource extraction. Written with the verve of a detective novel, Crowley charts a 16th-century version of the ‘moon shot’ to the fabled ‘Spice Islands’ of the Moluccas.

    Then the sole known source of cloves, nutmeg, mace and sandalwood, trading profits on these rare but easily portable commodities could reach a thousand per cent. Such profits were the stuff of dreams, spawning a frenzy of map-making, schools of navigation, travel accounts, commercial espionage, state-sponsored exploration and oversight bodies, with Seville’s Casa de la Contratación de las Indias (established in 1503) leading the way. It would not last, but for a moment in the 16th century, buoyed by the silver of the New World, it would catapult Spain to superpower status.

    Crowley’s book spans an action-packed 60 years, stretching from the Portuguese conquest of Malacca (Melaka) on 15 August 1511 to the Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi’s capture of Manila on 24 June 1571. Both provided secure bases for the Iberians in the Malay world and the Philippines thus ensuring them a temporary global advantage: ‘Whoever is Lord of Melaka has his hand on the throat of Venice’, as the astute Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires put it. The fact that both victories occurred on major Catholic feast days – the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist’s Day respectively – was not lost on the pious Iberians.

    Read the rest of the review at
    HistoryToday.com.

    Peter Carey     is Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College, Oxford and former Adjunct Professor in Humanities at the University of Indonesia.

  • David

    I had a lot of fun with this one, as I almost always do with Crowley’s work. This book bills itself as a story about the spice trade, and that’s certainly present throughout the narrative, but really what it’s about is Spain and Portugal forging the last few links in a global trading network while doing their best to wipe each other out, all while exploiting every natural resource and oppressing every indigenous person they come across. The book walks a pretty fine line between being exciting, informative, and depressing.

    Lots of good stuff in here, including a really engrossing summary of Magellan’s expedition and its aftermath, stories about early European contact with China, and a section on the Spanish galleon trade. My favorite bit of the book occurred during a one chapter aside about an attempt by the English to establish their own north east route to the pacific, only to get derailed in Russia. This section of the book includes an account of an honest to god ghost ship, and even though the explanation for that ship is very logical and very mundane, there were still a few genuinely creepy moments where I was like “what the fuck is even happening in this book right now?” Not a feeling I ever expected to experience while reading a history book about boats and shit. Very good stuff all around.

  • William

    A must read for any interested in the genesis of our modern world and economy, the struggle between the Portuguese and Spanish for global primacy of the new trade routes shaped our world innumerable ways.