Small World After All
The Strange Roots Of Globalization (And Its Discontents)
Roughly three hundred kilometers east of the Indonesian mainland lies a string of small, tropical islands that formed only ten million years ago. Technically, they are called the Maluku archipelago, but the five islands at the northern tip of the archipelago — Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, and Bacan — have long been known by another name: the Spice Islands. Until the late 1700s, every single clove consumed anywhere in the world began its life in the volcanic soil of those five islands.
Despite their remote location and diminutive size, the islands have served as nodes on a global network of trade for at least four thousand years. Archeologists in Syria have found cloves preserved in ceramic pottery at the Old Babylonian site of Terqa, dating back to 1721 BCE. We think of the spice trade as a practice that belongs to the Age of Exploration, but its roots are far older. Somehow, in an era before compasses, accurate cartography, or printing presses, word had spread across the planet of the clove’s alluring taste and aroma, and a network of trade had assembled to transport these tiny flower buds six thousand miles, from the Molucca Sea to the banks of the Euphrates. Those tiny spices traveled thousands of miles farther than any individual human had ever traveled.
Imagine trying to explain to some Babylonian gourmand, savoring the flavor of cloves over dinner, that the forces unleashed by his taste for spice would still be shaping our daily lives — and our political elections — four thousand years later. That taste compelled human beings to invent new forms of cartography and navigation, new ships, new corporate structures, not to mention new forms of exploitation — all in the service of shrinking the globe so that cloves or pepper or cinnamon harvested in Ternate or Sumatra might more efficiently be delivered to the kitchens of Terqa or Rome or Amsterdam. Those strange new flavors propelled human beings around the globe like nothing that had ever come before them, creating, for the very first time in the history of our species, a marketplace where one community’s workers and consumers could be engaged in complex forms of trade and interdependence with another community on the other the side of the planet. Today’s global economy has its roots in the frivolity of spice.
The legacy of the spice trade extends far beyond the marketplace. The first group to build a single integrated system for global trade were the Muslim spice merchants who came to prominence in the seventh century CE. Muslim traders worked the entire length of a network that stretched from the Indonesian archipelago to Turkey and the Balkans all the way across sub-Saharan Africa. Alongside the cloves and cinnamon, they brought the Koran. In almost all the places where Muslims attempted to convert local communities through military force — Spain or India, for instance — the Islamic faith failed to take root. But the traders turned out to be much more effective emissaries for their religion. The modern world continues to be shaped by those conversions more than a millennium later. The map of the Muslim spice trade circa 900 CE corresponds almost exactly to the map of Islamic populations around the world today. Indeed, it is entirely possible that Islam would not have become a major global religion without the long reach of the spice traders’ integrated network. The geography of Islam in the twenty-first century is, in effect, the afterimage of a much earlier map: places where Muslims turned a profit introducing delightful new flavors to the taste buds of consumers.
Spices, of course, were just the beginning. A thousand years or so after those cloves made their way to Babylon, Indian dyers located on the Coromandel coast established an elaborate system of soaking vibrant dyes like madder and indigo into cotton fabrics, employing lemon juice, goat urine, camel excrement, and metallic salts. Most colored fabrics at the time would lose their pigment after a few washings, but the Indian fabrics retained their color indefinitely. When Vasco da Gama brought back a cargo full of textiles in 1498 from his landmark expedition around the Cape of Good Hope, he gave Europeans their first real experience of the vivid patterns and almost sensual textures of calico and chintz.
Cotton was initially perceived to be too light for the climate of Northern Europe, particularly in the winter. But in the final decades of that century, a strange feedback loop began to resonate among the fashionable elite of London society. They began to crave cotton on their bodies. Drapes were cut down and converted into dresses, settees plundered to sew into jackets or blouses. Perhaps most important, cotton undergarments that could be worn in the depths of winter, buffering the skin from the irritations of wool, became an essential element of a lady’s wardrobe.
The surge in interest in Indian textiles was a tremendous boon for the East India Company, which went from importing a quarter of a million pieces in 1664 to 1.76 million twenty years later. (More than 80 percent of the company’s trade was devoted to calico at the height of the craze.) But the news was not as encouraging for England’s native sheep farmers and wool manufacturers, who suddenly saw their livelihoods threatened by an imported fabric. Before long, what we might now call a “Make England’s Wool Industry Great Again” movement emerged; hundreds of pamphlets and essays were published, many of them denouncing the “Calico Madams” whose scandalous taste for cotton was undermining the British economy. Daniel Defoe wrote multiple screeds on what he considered “a Disease in Trade . . . a Contagion, that if not stopp’d in the Beginning, will, like the Plague in Capital City, spread itself o’er the whole Nation.” Plays, poems, and popular songs were composed decrying the spread of calico. Rioting weavers marched on Parliament and ransacked the home of the East India Company’s deputy governor. One can safely assume that at no other point in human history have women’s undergarments provoked so much patriotic fury.
Responding to the outrage, Parliament passed a number of protectionist acts, starting with a ban on imported dyed calicos in the 1700s, which left open a large loophole for traders to import raw cotton fabrics, to be dyed on British shores. In 1720, Parliament took the more draconian step of banning calico outright, via “An Act to Preserve and Encourage the Woollen and Silk Manufactures of this Kingdom, and for more Effectual Employing the Poor, by Prohibiting the Use and Wear of all Printed, Painted, Stained or Dyed Callicoes in Apparel, Household Stuff, Furniture, or otherwise.”
Ironically, the fears that ladies’ fashion trends would undermine the British economy turned out to have it exactly backward. The immense value of the cotton trade had already set a generation of British inventors off in search of mechanical tools that could mass-produce cotton fabrics: beginning with John Kay’s flying shuttle, patented in 1733, followed several decades later by Richard Arkwright’s spinning (or water) frame, then Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, not to mention the endless refinements to the steam engine rolled out during the 1700s, many of which were originally designed to enhance textile production. Instead of deflating the British economy, the Calico Madams unleashed an age of British industrial and economic might that would last for more than a century.
In part, this is a story — then and now — about economic anxiety and exploitation, a story about elites enjoying luxury goods, accumulating wealth, while global competition devastates traditional industries. Some new wonder emerges from the other side of the planet, and a whole system of production and trade swings into motion to bring that new delight to the homes of the well-to-do, setting off chain reactions that alter everything from the rhythms of fashion, to scientific breakthroughs, to the daily routines of the working classes, to the map of world religions.
The challenge in thinking about this interconnected world is that you have to hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. On the one hand, there is something hideous in the idea that so much human suffering could be triggered by the pursuit of something as frivolous as cloves or calico, or that so many manufacturing jobs today could be lost so that our iPhones and 4K TVs could be produced more efficiently in China. But the story also contains a progressive thread woven alongside it, like a double-helix or a braid: that extraordinary capacity that humans have for wonder and delight, for the seeking out of new experiences. That drive — as frivolous as it can sometimes appear — brought us closer to other cultures, and laid the groundwork for new miraculous communities where citizens of every nation of the world live together with a level of peace and prosperity that would have been unimaginable five hundred years ago. Globalism has made it harder for some parts of the US economy to compete, which creates a climate where calls to “Make America Great Again” resonate, just the backlash against the Calico Madams resonated in the early 1700s. And at the same time, globalism has engendered the miracles of our technological revolutions, and the diversity and dynamism of 18th-century London or modern-day New York. Both things are true. Both things have been true for a long time.
The extent to which the spice trade had bound the globe together was perceived sharply by many of the participants — even those who never boarded a vessel and set sail for the Far East. After commissioning the East India Company in 1600, Elizabeth I wrote a handwritten letter to the “Great and Might King of Aceh,” who controlled much of the pepper markets that had prospered around Sumatra (now Indonesia) in the 1500s. Elizabeth’s language is remarkable in its supplication; she talks a great deal about the “love” between her nation and Sumatra, no doubt trying to distinguish the British from the rapacious Dutch and Portuguese. But perhaps the most extraordinary passage comes when she attempts to integrate the global reach of the spice trade into a broader story of Divine Purpose: God, she explained, saw fit to distribute the “good things of his creation . . . into the most remote places of the universal world . . . he having so ordained that the one land may have need of the other; and thereby, not only breed intercourse and exchange of their merchandise and fruits, which do so superabound in some countries and want in others, but also engender love and friendship between all men, a thing naturally divine.”
Knowing the grim history that was to follow — almost four hundred years of colonial exploitation and slavery in pursuit of those “good things” — it is hard not to be cynical, if not outright appalled, by the talk of “love and friendship between all men.” But Elizabeth does hit upon an essential fact: that spices were distributed into the “most remote places of the universal world.”
Like many forms of delight, the taste for spice propelled us far from our roots — not just geographically, but also existentially. It pushed us to expand what would seem to be deep-seated biological barriers to what we can experience as enjoyable. The taste of pepper triggers biochemical alarms in our taste buds designed, by evolution, to detect the presence of fire or dangerously high temperatures. And yet somewhere along the way, we discovered that this strange new taste on the tongue — a taste that would send any child into howls of pain — could be savored by an adult, its pain turned into pleasure. Spices enlarged the map of possible desires, which in turn enlarged our mental map of the world itself.
This boundary pushing, this constant reimagining of our needs and appetites, may not be a “thing most divine,” as Queen Elizabeth had it. It will probably always be bound up in complex chains of turmoil and displacement, if not outright exploitation. But that boundary pushing is what makes us different from most organisms. What makes us human is, in part, our ability to expand the limits of what it means to be human, to peer over the walls that define us as biological organisms, or as members of a single nation or culture. The exploratory need for new experiences, new desires, and new tastes is, more often than not, the force behind that expansion. You might even call it the spice of life.
This essay is adapted from several chapters of my new book, Wonderland: How Play Made The Modern World, now on sale from Riverhead Books. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be discussing the book here at Medium, in a special book club brought to you by Heleo. Related reading:
