imported vegetables, fruits, and spices. (Photo by the author.)
PLATE 6. View of the facades of tombs cut from the rock cliff in Petra, Jordan, a Nabataean trade hub that once received tons of spices annually. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002698303.)
PLATE 7. Ships arriving for trade in the harbors of the South China Sea. (Photo by the author of an exhibit at the Quanzhou Maritime Museum.)
PLATE 8. Stand selling mole preparations from San Pedro Atocpan at the Flower Festival of San Angel, Mexico City, 2009. (Photo by Thelmadatter.)
PLATE 9. The “crafty” Arab is transformed into a taco vendor at a mobile food stand in the desert oasis of San Ignacio, Baja California Sur, Mexico. (Photo by the author.)
Introduction
The Origin of “Species”: Trading Spices to the Ends of the Earth
Perhaps my lifelong love of aromatics—from allspice to za’atar—served as the genesis of this reflective inquiry. But somewhere along the line, I realized that one could not truly love spices without conceding that their use is never politically, economically, or even culturally neutral. It is impossible to reflect on the significance of aromatics and their history without acknowledging that imperialism, cultural competition and collaboration, religious belief, and social status are embedded in every milligram of cardamom, cinnamon, or cumin.
And so, this book is less the story of any single spice or spice trader and more about the cultural, economic, and political factors that propelled spices across the face of the earth, depleting some species while causing others to proliferate. It is a multilayered narrative that is as much about alchemy as it is about chemistry, cultural history as it is about natural history, and culinary imperialism as it is about transcontinental and multicultural collaboration. In short, the history of the spice trade is an object lesson in how, step by step, globalization has developed and sealed off other formerly prevalent options for business and cross-cultural negotiation among the world’s diverse peoples.
If this story line occasionally strays away from the trajectory that particular incenses, gums, and culinary and medicinal herbs took as they traveled around the world, so be it, for I am ultimately trying to answer a series of much larger questions. When, where, how, and through whose hands did the process of globalization begin? What have we gained and what have we lost by entering into this Faustian bargain? And finally, how has globalization irrevocably changed the human condition? How has that thirteen-letter word come to be perhaps the most pervasive expression of the current cultural tendency to trade a place-based existence for one that is essentially placeless?
I was encouraged to ponder this issue after reading “The Dawn of the Homogenocene,” a fascinating essay by the deeply thoughtful environmental historian Charles C. Mann.1 Mann, like another fine contemporary writer, David Quammen, likes to use ecologist Gordon Orians’s term homogenocene, which refers to the present era in geological history, one in which the world’s biota has become blandly uniform in place after place due to “recent” biological and cultural invasions on every continent. In his essay, Mann suggests that the roots of globalization and homogenization can be traced back to 1493 and the Casa Almirante (Admiral’s House) of Cristóbal Colón (our Christopher Columbus) on the island of Hispaniola.
Indeed, the initiation of the Columbian exchange of plants, animals, and microbes between the Old World and the New World was a bench-mark in the onset of “ecological imperialism” that not only reshaped life in the Americas but on all other continents as well.2 It is a “rupturous” moment in history that I have elsewhere referred to as the Great Colónoscopy.3
Nevertheless, I believe that while Mann understands and writes eloquently of the socioeconomic and ecological processes associated with globalization, he has grossly erred in dating its onset. So has Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his lovely 1492: The Year Our World Began.4 It certainly did not emerge from humanity’s economic endeavors as late as 1493 CE, nor even as late as 1493 BCE. Depending on what we might use to date the earliest evidence of spice (or copper) trade occurring between regions or continents,5 Fernández-Armesto, Mann, and I would likely agree that the initial phases of the inexorable process that led toward ever more pervasive globalization occurred at least as early as thirty-five hundred years ago.
I would argue that the same mentalities, skills, and economic drives that led to the colonization of the Americas were already well articulated by the time the inhabitants of the Middle East colonized regions of Africa, Asia, and southwestern Europe. After 1492, they simply extended their base of operations to two other continents, using many of the same entrepreneurial and political strategies employed first to capture transcontinental trade in spices from the New World and then to expand their hegemony over other arenas of economic activity. And although none of us would necessarily grant its “invention” to an Italian-born immigrant such as Christopher Columbus, I believe that we could agree that Semitic peoples such as Phoenicians, Nabataeans, Arabs, and Jews left legacies of navigation, geographical exploration, culinary imperialism, and globalization that clearly informed Columbus.
For almost anyone who has lived on earth over the last four millennia, it is difficult to imagine a world without extra-local herbs, spices, incenses, infusions, and medicines next to our hearths or in our homes. It is as if their fragrances have always been wafting into the culturally constructed spaces where our saints and sinners, prophets and prodigal sons come together to be healed or to celebrate a communal meal. The aromas of leafy herbs, dried fruits, crushed seeds, ground roots, and droplets of tree gums lodge deeply in our memories. Although we have difficulty verbally describing what distinguishes one fragrance from another, the most memorable of them nevertheless insinuate themselves into the holiest of oral histories and the most sacred of ancient scriptures we have shared as a species.
The words species and spices come from the same roots in Latin, spec (singular) and species (plural), which referred to kinds, forms, or appearances of items within a larger assortment. But according to etymologist Walter W. Skeat, by the time Middle English was in use, spis, spyses, or species more particularly denoted different kinds of aromatic plants or drugs in trade.6 Following Skeat, our current usage of the Modern English term species seems to have evolved out of the need to speak collectively of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and saffron, and then to be able to distinguish among them as distinctive aromatics; only later was this sense of species extended to other non-aromatic plants and to animals. Thus, the origin of species as a construct within English may very well be rooted in the economic or aesthetic need to discern various kinds of spices from one another. Spices and our own species have certainly traveled together and shaped one another as far back as our surviving mythic narratives reach.
In the Hebrew scriptures, a Jew named Joseph is sold off to a caravan carrying spices out of Palestine into the ancient Egyptian cities along the Nile. In the Christian scriptures, in the part known as the godspel among Christian speakers of Old English, we hear the “good news” that three traders of incense came from the East to encounter another Joseph, his young wife, Mary, and their newborn baby, Yeshu, one winter night when the stars were bright. In the Qur’an, we learn that before receiving his call to be the Prophet, Muhammad assisted his uncle Abu Talib and his own first wife, Khadijah, with their spice caravans, riding dromedaries from Mecca to Damascus and Aleppo. They became used to guarding from pirates and competitors
