Spice trading stretches back to antiquity, with the earliest recorded references dating from Egyptian records of 2600 BC. By that date, tropical Asian spices had already reached the north of Africa - labourers building the great pyramid of Cheops were fed spices to enhance their production capability.

From early times, complex trade routes carried all the main spices still grown today - cinnamon, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, and many others - from the tropics to the furthest-flung regions of the known world. Generally at the centre of the trade were Arab merchants, who exercised powerful control over supply. At the far end of the trading chain was Europe, a vast and highly lucrative market for such exotic seasonings.

Arab traders managed to maintain a near-monopoly over the sale of spices to Europe, predominantly through their Venetian agents. Looking at the elaborately ornate, orientally-influenced marble palaces that still characterise Venice today, we get some sense of the value of the wealth that the spice trade was able to generate. Spices were for a time the most valuable commodities in the world. Black pepper was a more reliable currency standard than gold, and in the 14th century one pound of nutmeg had the value of seven fattened oxen.

During the 15th century, several powerful forces began working together to disrupt the traditional spice trading system. The Arabian monopoly was tightening, and prices were starting to skyrocket. At the same time European military and naval technologies were beginning to overtake those of the world's other seafaring nations, while maritime developments were also making long-distance sea voyages a much less risky undertaking.

By the 1490's, all the conditions were in place for a dramatic change in the power balance of world trade. First off the blocks, Spain despatched Christopher Columbus westward in search of the spice regions of India. His voyage, although ultimately highly profitable for Spain, did not turn up any spice (although Columbus' use of the words 'Indians' to describe the people he met and 'peppers' as a name for chilli and capsicums, which he did find, survive to this day). In 1498, a Portuguese fleet led by Vasco da Gama successfully rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Indian port of Calicut which was then, as now, the most important port in the pepper trade. Bringing home from this first voyage a modest shipment of spices, da Gama returned to Calicut in 1502 with an armada of twenty warships, destroyed the local fleet, and created a Portuguese monopoly of pepper. 

The race for control of spices was well and truly on. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English were soon all in on the action, setting up factories, forts and eventually colonies all across the Indian Ocean in order to protect their control over the production of various spices. A Spanish fleet, led by Ferdinand Magellan, even circumnavigated the world in an attempt to corner the trade of cloves.

Such powerful control generated huge wealth for these European powers and fuelled the cataclysmic development that would follow - the wholesale takeover of any country deemed ideal for planting other lucrative crops such as sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco. Massive numbers of slaves were transplanted to grow the new crops, and help to maximise the returns to Europe on their colonial investments. It is no stretch to suggest that the foundations of today's world trading structures - wherein the Western powers still make the vast majority of profit from the commodities trade - were laid as the smoke cleared off the coast of Calicut in 1502. 

The Sri Lankan experience

Sri Lanka was not spared in the rush for spices

Famed as the traditional home of the world's best cinnamon, Sri Lanka was occupied by Portugal by 1536. The Portuguese, delighted to find on their arrival an abundance of cinnamon forest along the western coast of the island, established a fort and ordered the local king to pay a massive tribute - 110 tonnes annually - to the Portuguese crown. As time went on Portugal's demand for cinnamon tributes grew, and the cinnamon fleets that arrived in Si Lanka's ports on the trade winds from Goa each October were loaded with ever-growing quantities of spice for shipment to the markets of Lisbon. In 1658, the Dutch wrested control of Sri Lanka's cinnamon harvest and made their own huge profits from it's trade. Already experienced traders, they established a more effective monopoly and developed a more efficient method of cultivation. They also ordered the construction of an extensive system of canals for inalnd transport, and exercised harsh control over the workers on their plantations. Burning stockpiles of cinnamon in Holland at times of excess supply also helped them to maintain high prices on the world market.

By 1796, the British in turn seized control of much of Sri Lanka. Not such astute traders as the Dutch, they soon flooded the European market with cinnamon. Eventually, under pressure to relax their monopoly and facing competition in Europe from cassia, Britain relented and allowed private traders to re-enter the market - but not without slapping a hefty export tax of up to 500% of the value of any cinnamon leaving the island. Cinnamon sales continued to decline, and the British turned first to coffee, and later to tea, in search of better profit on their Sri Lankan investment. This proved troublesome - finding the local population unwilling to work on land which had been taken from them, Tamils from southern India were eventually brought in to provide the cheap labout required on the extensive tea plantations. Working in conditions tantamount to slavery, these pickers and their descendants still make up the backbone of the Sri Lankan tea workforce.   

Perhaps the biggest losers of all from the arrival of Europeans in Sri Lanka were the salagama, the island's traditional cinnamon peeling caste. As cinnamon consumption grew, so too did the demands on the salagama, who were charged with providing for no return an annual tribute which grew sixfold during the period of Portuguese control alone. Dutch demand for cinnamon was more intense than that of the Portuguese, and by the era of British control mortality rates among salagama had sharply increased. It became common practice for cinnamon peelers' children to be registerd under the names of other castes in order to spare them a life of ever-growing misery.

The Fair Trade response

At last, 500 years on, for some of these salagama a very recent trend offers them and their families more hope for the future - fair trade.

Anthony Silva - PODIE

Anthony Silva sells his cinnamon not to a typical trader but to PODIE, a Negombo-based organisation which has found customers - fair trade organisations, including one based in the Netherlands - who will pay up to 40% above the market rate for his sweetly-perfumed harvest. The extra income provided through the fair trade system is vital for a cinnamon grower; it helps, for example, to educate children, it improves sanitation and housing, and provides basic health care for the family. Today, there is no need for Anthony to change his childrens' surnames. Fair traders have found that there is a growing number of people in their countries who recognise that if they will only pay a little more for their cinnamon, or for an ever-growing range of other fairly traded products, that they can make a significant difference in the lives of the people who grew them. They can, in effect, help to redress the effects of hardships that have been endured by growers for up to 500 years. What could be fairer than that?

There is a great amount of literature available on the history of the spice trade; for an excellent online introduction to the history of spices, and for information on the spices themselves visit the Epicentre