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.
