Explorers trading flavours

YOU can’t understand the history of the world from the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs to the Partition of India in 1947 without a reasonable appreciation of the importance of spices, most particularly pepper.

While in today’s world we may consider these ingredients as little more than culinary rounding errors, bought for a couple of dollars a packet at any supermarket on the planet, for centuries, millennia even, they were one of the principal elements of international trade.

Indeed, it’s not excessive to state that spices were a central propagating factor in dozens of major wars, the rise of empires, the birth of the modern navy and the exploration of the planet and even the evolution of modern globalism.

Christopher Columbus was never looking for the New World, rather, with his firm appreciation that the world was, in fact, round, he had set off to discover a westward passage to India, home of the spice trade, in order to give the Spanish Empire a material advantage over the Dutch, Portuguese and English.

The Portuguese responded by sending Vasco da Gama to secure their own route that would be faster than the traditional overland trail, and in doing so he discovered the Cape of Good Hope, thereby joining the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for future generations.

The English and Dutch wars in the Far East saw the establishment of Batavia (that would one day become Indonesia), and even led to the initial surveys enabling the journey of

Captain Cook and the European colonisation of Australia.

The Greek, Roman and Persian empires relied on spices as a source of their national wealth and projected power, and even today spices feature in cultural understandings of national heritage.

So yes, that stuff in the grinder next to your stove is just pepper. But actually it’s a lot more than that.

It’s a visceral, flavourful, compelling souvenir of how our world evolved and how we came to be.

IT’S A VISCERAL, FLAVOURFUL, COMPELLING SOUVENIR OF HOW OUR WORLD EVOLVED AND HOW WE CAME TO BE.