Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (2024) by Roger Crowley

Roger Crowley is a faithfully entertaining and informative popular historian. His latest effort – Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (2024) – is not everything I hoped it would be, but it was certainly a worthwhile and enjoyable read.

Spice chronicles the six-decade struggle between Spain and Portugal – and later Britain and the Netherlands – to dominate the spice trade from 1511 to 1571, which primarily focused on the elusive Moluccas, the world’s only natural source of nutmeg and cloves. Crowley brings to life a series of dramatic voyages: the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, Magellan’s perilous circumnavigation, disastrous forays into China, and the founding of Manila with its galleon trade route. Though driven largely by greed, these expeditions spurred critical advances in shipbuilding, navigation, and cartography, forging the first global trading networks linking Europe, Asia, and the Americas. While Crowley shows how the spice-fueled scramble reshaped the world, he emphasizes that silver – flowing westward from the mines of the Americas – was the true engine of globalization. Bullion financed voyages, fueled imperial expansion, and provided the indispensable currency demanded by Asian markets, especially China. This steady stream of silver bound together the first global economy and, in the process, shifted Europe from the periphery to the center of an interconnected world.

The 4,000-mile-long Malay Archipelago is a true “laboratory of evolution,” where four tectonic plates collide to form the most geologically active region on earth. The result is a dazzling abundance of flora and fauna, many found nowhere else. Nowhere is this more striking than in the spice islands: five tiny Moluccan islets, the world’s only source of clove trees, and, 400 miles to the south, the Banda Islands, home to nutmeg and its even more valuable outer shell, mace. The Portuguese first pushed into these waters in 1511, shortly after Francisco Serrão seized the strategic trading post of Malacca near the tip of the Malay Peninsula. Lightweight, durable, and endlessly fecund – nutmeg ripens year-round and can be harvested monthly – these spices were also fantastically profitable. In 1515, for instance, one of the first cargo ships returning full of spice in Lisbon returned 700 per cent. Spices became, in Crowley’s words, “the first truly global commodity.” These tiny islands thus stood at the epicenter of a sixteenth-century great game, one driven by the worldwide flow of silver as the universal medium of exchange and powered by the irresistible lure of spices and their gargantuan financial returns.

Political and economic control of the Spice Islands was fiercely contested from the outset. In 1494, Pope Alexander VI brokered the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the non-European world between Spain and Portugal along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands – effectively granting Spain dominion over most of the Western Hemisphere, excluding Brazil, the part of South America that juts out into the Atlantic and across the Tordessillas line. The deeply contentious issue was how that line – the antemeridian – extended on the far side of the globe in Asia. Ambiguity over the boundary, combined with the immense wealth at stake, made conflict all but inevitable. History would eventually vindicate Portugal’s claim that the Moluccas and the Philippines were in its possession based on the papal arrangement, but that would not be proven for many years. Only possession would solve the issue in the near term. 

Portugal held a critical advantage: a direct sea route to the Spice Islands that lay securely within the waters already allotted to them by papal decree. Spain’s only option was to reach the islands by sailing westward around the Americas and across the newly discovered “South Sea” (the Pacific Ocean). When Ferdinand Magellan – a disgruntled Portuguese captain now in the service of Spain’s King Charles V’s Casa de Contratación – won approval for his audacious mission in March 1518, no one could have imagined the extraordinary voyage that lay ahead. To make matters worse, the secretive, prickly, stubborn, and conceited Magellan led a five-ship expedition that was captained largely by Portuguese and navigated by Spaniards – a volatile mix that soon erupted into deadly conflict.

Crowley offers a sharp fifty-page account of Magellan’s extraordinary voyage: a grueling 43,380-mile circumnavigation of the globe completed by only eighteen of the original 240 crew. It remains one of the most epic adventure stories in human history. (For a full retelling, Laurence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe [2017] is superb.) Antonio Pigafetta, the expedition’s official chronicler and one of its few survivors, believed the ordeal so horrific it would never be repeated. Yet just six years later García Jofre de Loaísa launched a second expedition, which took 440 days to reach the Spice Islands. Of its seven ships, six were lost, along with 345 of the original 450 crew – including both Loaísa himself and his successor, Juan Sebastián Elcano, a veteran of Magellan’s circumnavigation.

Exploration and conquest were inseparable in the minds of the Portuguese and Spanish. In the Moluccas, the two principal spice islands – Tidore and Ternate – were bitter rivals, divided only by a narrow strait a thousand yards wide. When the Portuguese under Serrão allied with the ruler of Ternate, Tidore in turn opened itself to Spanish influence. Open warfare between the Portuguese-Ternate and Spanish-Tidore alliances broke out on New Year’s Day 1527. Crowley refers to the struggle as a “microwar” – fifteen months of Iberians attacking and killing each other in tit for tat raids and ambushes. In theory, the Portuguese had access to resources through their base at Malacca located some 1,200 miles away. The Spanish were effectively on their own. “The Portuguese could not dislodge their rivals,” Crowley writes, “the Spanish could never win.” By 1530 the Spanish conceded defeat. They sold their claim to the Portuguese for 350,000 ducats with the option to buy it back at a future date. They had essentially bullied the Portuguese into paying for something that was already rightfully theirs.

Perhaps even more consequential was the Portuguese collision with the Ming Dynasty. Crowley notes that the conquest of Malacca disrupted China’s suzerainty in the region, setting the stage for what he calls “the collision of two incompatible worldviews.” In 1514, the Portuguese sought to establish a trading post at the mouth of the Pearl River, thirty miles from the bustling port of Canton (Guangzhou). The lure of profit was irresistible: spices like Indian pepper carried markups as high as thirty to one. The Chinese dubbed these new, aggressive arrivals Folangji (“Franks”), and while the Portuguese pressed for a monopoly trading agreement, China’s bureaucracy – with its deeply ritualized and grueling pace – stymied Portuguese efforts to pry open the enormously lucrative Chinese market. By 1519, Portuguese ambassador Tomé Pires was still waiting for permission to proceed to the imperial court, even as a string of cultural missteps mounted. In Ming eyes, the Portuguese had devolved from Folangji to Fangui (“barbarian devils”). Worse still, the Chinese demanded that they relinquish Malacca – a demand Lisbon considered unthinkable. By 1522 the Portuguese and the Ming were in a shooting war. Two Portuguese ships were sunk at the Battle of Trade Island and forty-two Europeans were taken prisoner. The prospect of legal and open trade with the Middle Kingdom was smashed for years to come. Ambassador Pires was trapped in Canton for years and ultimately imprisoned, likely dying in captivity and marking a disastrous start to Sino-Portuguese relations.

In 1521, conquistadors under Hernán Cortés reached Mexico’s Pacific coast. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, dreamed of turning the Pacific into a Spanish lake. But two daunting obstacles stood in the way: the ocean’s sheer vastness and the absence of a reliable eastward return route from the Spice Islands. As Crowley notes, for Spain the Pacific was a “lobster pot” – easy to get into, impossible to escape. Yet the ocean remained the gateway to the riches of the Orient, and the secret to mastering it lay in the elusive tornaviaje, the return voyage. “It was a problem that would haunt Spanish dreams of expansion for decades,” he concludes.

The first attempt to cross the Pacific from New Spain came in 1528 with the Florida, a Spanish carrack. The voyage took five months, and sixty percent of its 110-man crew perished along the way. By the 1530s, a few lessons were evident to the Spanish. Future expeditions to Asia would depart from the new port of Acapulco, since the route through the Straits of Magellan proved prohibitively harsh. The Philippines, not the Spice Islands, became the new strategic goal. In 1542, a fresh expedition was organized under Ruy López de Villalobos, brother of New Spain’s viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. Seven ships with 550 men left the Mexican coast on November 1, 1542, and reached Mindanao ninety-three days later. Crowley describes the mission as a “slow-motion catastrophe”; at nearly every turn, Villalobos seemed to make the wrong choice. It was the sixth and final failed attempt of Charles V’s reign to solve the problem of the tornaviaje. Four years later, only 117 survivors straggled home on Portuguese ships – an expedition casualty rate of nearly eighty percent.

The Spice Islands were, in Crowley’s words, “a hornet’s nest of inter-island rivalries and Portuguese corruption.” He describes the Moluccas as “a sort of Botany Bay for the criminalized flotsam of Portugal’s imperial project.” For the sixty years that Portugal clung to Ternate, the captain-generals who ruled there operated as near-absolute warlords. Communication with Lisbon was so slow that a letter could take three years to receive a reply. All commercial and topographic knowledge was tightly controlled and ruthlessly suppressed, which generated “the lure of incomplete maps.” The result, Crowley notes, was “a catalogue of cruelty and avarice.” It was only a matter of time before the Dutch arrived to seize the prize. Crowley says that the Dutch replacing the Portuguese in the Spice Islands was a disaster for the locals as the private sector merchants of the Dutch East India Company dropped any pretense of converting or civilizing the natives – the objective was pure and calculated capitalist exploitation.

The British entered the Age of Discovery in the mid-sixteenth century. In 1553 a private joint-stock company called “The Merchant Adventurers” whose mission statement called for “the discovery of regions, dominions, islands, and places of unknown” to which the English could sell their woolen cloth, which made up eighty-five percent of their foreign trade at the time. They would seek a northern passage to the East Indies over the top of Russia. Like the Dutch East India Company, it was a purely commercial enterprise; it made no claims to foreign lands for the English crown, not to convert any natives to Christianity.

Europe had only a few things that China truly valued, and above all, silver was king. Beyond that, only a handful of non-essential luxuries – such as ivory and pepper – piqued Chinese interest. Pepper that sold for four ducats in Malacca fetched fifteen in China. This “high-value, low-volume” trade deeply concerned Chinese officials. “The problem on both sides,” Crowley notes, “was how to accommodate the valuable trade with these interlopers [the Portuguese], who were outside the tributary system, without compromising Chinese territorial and imperial integrity.” At Macau, located at the head of the Pearl River, the Chinese permitted a tightly controlled but carefully managed hub – “the turntable of a short-distance three-cornered trade” (China–Macau–Nagasaki–Macau–China). Here, a “permeable membrane” allowed goods to pass back and forth, enriching both sides without forcing China to yield dignity or sovereignty. Macau soon emerged as “something of an oriental Venice,” Crowley writes – a trading city run by and for merchants.

Japan marked the furthest reach of Portuguese exploration – and one of its most profitable. In the sixteenth century alone, Jesuit missionaries converted some 100,000 souls. Meanwhile, from the opposite direction, the high-water mark of westward Spanish expansion was Manila, officially founded in June 1571 – the same summer as the pivotal naval battle of Lepanto – which Crowley calls “a pivot of world history.” Manila gave Spain an extraordinarily valuable entrepôt for trade with the fabulously wealthy Orient. As decisive as gunpowder and steel were in enabling these Western conquests, Crowley emphasizes that it was the endemic local conflicts among small communities that gave both the Spanish and Portuguese their greatest advantage: the chance to conquer so much with relatively so little.

Spain still faced the deceptively simple yet intractable problem of how to sail back from the East Indies to New Spain. Crowley calls this Spain’s “moon shot,” and the man chosen to solve it – their Werhner von Braun, so to speak – was Andrés de Urdaneta. He believed success depended on stout, well-provisioned ships of 400 to 500 tons, carried eastward by the strong northwesterly winds across the Northern Pacific. After years of preparation, Urdaneta estimated the return voyage might take as long as eight months. In June 1565, the San Pablo slipped its moorings with everything riding on Urdaneta’s unshakable confidence. The crossing took 123 days – the longest nonstop ocean voyage completed up to that time – and covered more than 11,000 miles without landfall. What Urdaneta thought might require eight months had taken only four. In solving this problem, Spain had cracked “the last great riddle of sixteenth-century European navigation,” Crowley says. Within just eighty years, Europeans had woven the oceans into a global trade network that proved nearly 80 percent more efficient than overland transport. The consumer reaped the benefits of lower prices on a wider variety of goods.

Between 1571 and 1815, almost every year one or two Spanish galleons – “the container ship of the age,” as Crowley calls them – set sail from Manila in June for the grueling six- to eight-month voyage eastward to Acapulco. Starting at 300 tons and eventually growing to 2,000, these ships completed what the author describes as “the final buckle in the belt of circumnavigation, allowing the flow of people, materials, and trade in all directions.” The distances and hardships were staggering. The journey itself was deadly and immense: more than 9,000 miles from the East Indies to Mexico’s Pacific coast, followed by a 450-mile overland trek from Acapulco to Veracruz, then nearly 4,000 miles by sea to Seville, and finally another 250 miles to the royal court in Madrid. In all, a one-way journey spanned some 14,000 miles, while a round trip could take upward of three years. Of roughly 400 voyages, at least fifty – just over one in ten – were lost, often with every life and all treasure aboard. In 1638, a statistical disaster struck – three large galleons sank in succession, crippling the global economy and triggering a Chinese uprising that nearly destroyed Manila. 

One of the most consequential events in world history was the discovery in 1545 of the immense silver lode at Potosí, perched 16,000 feet above sea level in present-day Bolivia. What followed, as Crowley notes, “was the largest mining boom in history.” Some 10,000 indigenous slave laborers were forced to toil in the mines, each compelled to deliver twenty-five 100-pound sacks of silver-rich ore every day. The Quechua name for Potosí was grimly apt: “the mountain that eats men.” At its height, the city’s population swelled to 160,000 – making it the fourth-largest in the Christian world, rivaling London and Paris and surpassing Seville and Milan. Potosí’s silver, smuggled east by the Portuguese through the River Plate, fueled the first great wave of the transoceanic slave trade, financing the export of Africans to the Americas.

In the sixteenth century, the Potosí mine produced nearly half the world’s silver, just as China centralized its tax system around the metal – conveniently supplied through Manila, the linchpin of the new global trade network. Between 1600 and 1650, an estimated 1,600 tons of silver – both legal and contraband – crossed the Pacific bound for China. “The hunger for silver in China was enormous,” Crowley observes; “it was silver that oiled the wheels of global trade.” Valued in China at nearly twice the European rate, silver quickly became the lubricant of a truly global economy. The Spanish silver dollar emerged as the first world currency and direct ancestor of the U.S. dollar. As Crowley puts it, “Silver became the currency that facilitated the birth of global trade,” spreading across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries like wildfire – “an element beyond human control.” The pattern was clear: China produced, Europe consumed, and silver made it all possible. Spices may have ignited Europe’s trading ambitions, but it was finance – the ability to profit from the flow of money itself – that sustained it. “A quantity of gold bought in Europe,” Crowley notes, “converted into silver and carried to China, could be changed back for double the original amount of gold.”

“Despite the noise of exploration,” Crowley says, “it was China that sat at the center of the world and around whose needs and industries the Europeans rotated.” One of the great mysteries of this period is the catastrophic failure of the Spanish empire in the seventeenth century. “Money vanished like water in the sand,” Crowley says, “the empire [which produced untold riches in silver and gold] was an unsupportable burden.” How is that possible? Crowley never makes it entirely clear.
In Spice, Roger Crowley transforms the often abstract story of early globalization into a vivid, deeply human drama of ambition, greed, faith, and violence. By weaving together the experiences of merchants, missionaries, sailors, and emperors, he shows how the pursuit of a handful of coveted commodities reshaped the world’s oceans, empires, and economies. Crowley’s gift lies in his ability to connect the local to the global, the tactical to the epochal. The result is a sweeping yet accessible narrative that reminds us how the spice trade did more than flavor food – it bound continents together, fueled rivalries, and set in motion the first great wave of globalization whose echoes still reverberate today.