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Spice : the 16th-century contest that shaped the modern world
Crowley, Roger2024
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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. 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 eyewitness accounts of the adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters - and remade the world economy for centuries to follow.
Spice : the 16th-century contest that shaped the modern world / Roger Crowley.
Crowley, Roger, author
New Haven : Yale University Press, 2024.
320 pages : illustrations (black and white, and colour), maps ; 24 cm
9780300267471 (hbk)
382.41383
English
Spice : the 16th-century contest that shaped the modern world
1482500