In 1494, two European neighbours signed a treaty at Tordesillas on the Douro river, agreeing to share power over the Atlantic and the Americas along a meridian that would cut the entire world into two half-spheres of influence. “Show me,” King Francis I of France protested, “where in Adam’s will the sea was bequeathed to the Spanish and Portuguese.”
In his new narrative history of Iberian rivalry over the coveted spice trade, Roger Crowley emphasises both the “absurdity of this attempt to neatly divide up the world” and how it took these “restless Europeans just eighty years to weave the oceans together” into a global “maritime belt” of trade and empire.
Today, China’s “Belt and Road” has focused attention on the overland “silk routes”, but it has always been the high seas that dominated intercontinental trade. Most lucrative of all were spices, “lightweight and durable”, “the first truly global commodity”. Throughout ancient and medieval times, Europeans coveted the culinary and medicinal uses of pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon and other fruits from the Molucca Islands in southeast Asia. The lucrative trade was dominated by Ottoman merchants who controlled trade through the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, a monopoly Europeans longed to break.
On the continent’s southwestern edge, Portuguese mariners were pushing the boundaries of ocean navigation, seeking their own route to the east. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama used the African route to reach India. From new bases there, Alfonso de Albuquerque would conquer Hormuz to control the Gulf, and then in 1511 Malacca on the Malayan peninsula, within striking distance of the “Spice Islands”. Crowley argues that Iberian competition over these small islands in the subsequent six decades (before the Spanish founding of Manila in 1571) set in motion a global revolution.
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Crowley has compiled his narrative primarily from printed translations of early modern Iberian travellers and scholars, which brings a vibrant immediacy to the events and descriptions. But there is limited engagement with recent historical research in Iberia, the Americas, and southeast Asia on ideologies, contacts and conquests. This limits the book’s ability to go beyond its sweeping narrative. But Crowley’s ability to weave threads together makes his story flow effortlessly across time and space. His details of maritime expeditions in particular emphasise their mix of adventure, ambition and cruelty.
Spanish power would fall with the price of silver, something that would also doom the Ming dynasty
The Portuguese had left their rivals “playing catch-up”, especially because the Tordesillas line put the valuable eastern routes in their hands, while Spain’s risky bet on Christopher Columbus (rejected in Lisbon) had got them nowhere near Asia. The ambitious new emperor Charles decided on another “moonshot”, enraging the Portuguese by hiring their own out-of-favour Fernão de Magalhães (rebranded Fernando Magellan) to sail west to reach the east. Magellan’s orders were to “proceed straight to the spicery”, but his search for straits through the Americas proved tortuous, as did the intra-Iberian rivalries in his crew. Yet despite mutinies and disease, Magellan “stumbled his way into the end of the world”.
Like Columbus, Magellan had assumed the Pacific was small, but his crew found it “more vast than mind of man can conceive”, covering a third of the entire planet. Incredibly, the expedition made its way to Cebu, but there Magellan’s arrogance led to a disastrous conflict with the indigenous people in which he was killed. The last dilapidated ship limped home under the command of the Basque Juan Sebastian Elcano, evading its Portuguese tormentors to land back in Spain with just 18 men.
Despite the expedition’s failures, the circumnavigation was “the wonder of its age”. The arrival of the next Spanish expedition, its remnants led by Basque Andrés de Urdaneta, in the Moluccas themselves “changed the game” by turning the spice Cold War hot. A “dirty war” between the Iberians fed “tribal and inter-island conflict, amplifying grievances between the native people”, creating “spirals of violence” that became “increasingly violent and convoluted”. The unsustainability of the circumnavigation, however, gave the Portuguese a huge advantage, and in 1529 Charles gave up.
The Portuguese, however, were finding the Spice Islands bittersweet. Joao de Barros wrote that the value of nutmeg made it “the apple of all discord”, cursed “more than gold itself”. To Antonio Galvao, the Moluccas were an “infernal labyrinth”, a “Babel” of different polities and languages that the “monstrous cases” of Portuguese colonial evil turned into “the hotbed of all the evils of the world”. Albuquerque himself feared that “the time will come when instead of our present fame as warriors we may only be known as grasping tyrants”.
The Portuguese worldview of “discovery” (still today a euphemism for rapacious imperialism) envisaged “an unending map, forever scrolling up over further horizon”, with a cartographic revolution “literally reshaping the world”. Both Portugal and Spain maintained a “master map”, kept as a state secret, but even published maps and globes transformed how Europeans thought. “You could hold the world in your hand”, and its “blank spaces” became territory to “discover” and possess. Iberian travellers were ravenously curious for detail about the worlds they “discovered”, collecting endless information, “none of it quite innocent”.
For Portugal, Crowley writes, “trade and conquest went hand in hand”, a “confusion of mentalities” that would eventually contribute to their downfall. Their other greatest threat was espionage, and they guarded their navigational advantages with secrecy and deliberate misinformation. The Genoese complained that the Portuguese had “taken wholly into their hands all the trade of spices… to sell them at a more grievous and intolerable price to the people of Europe than ever was heard of before”. Venetian spymasters prowled the Lisbon docks, Spanish agents carried manuscripts across the border, and eventually a Dutch secretary to the bishop of Goa used information he had stolen to publish “a blueprint for voyaging to the East and trading there”.
Crowley’s details of maritime expeditions emphasise their mix of adventure, ambition and cruelty
At times, Crowley’s own analysis contradicts his bolder claims. The Dutch would indeed be explicitly “pitiless” in their exploitation of the Indies, but the “more idealistic” Portuguese justifications had been mere window-dressing for their own cruelty. While he argues that “the years 1511–1571 saw Europe, hungry, competitive and aggressive, shift decisively from the margins to the centre”, in conclusion he rightly notes that “despite the noise of exploration, it was China that sat at the centre of the world and around whose needs and industries the Europeans rotated”, with the Europeans still “confined to the archipelagos and peripheries of great continental empires”.
The Ming dynasty’s insularity had given the Portuguese an opportunity in Japan (where they introduced gunpowder and printing), and careful negotiation (and bribery) gained them a priceless entry point into China itself through the tiny outpost of Macau in 1557. As Portugal completed its eastward network, the Spanish finally found a reliable route from the west. A 1565 expedition led by Basques Miguel López de Legazpi and Urdaneta reached Cebu from New Spain, beginning the conquest of “the Philippines”, and creating an entirely new “Galleon route” between Asia and the Americas that the Spanish hoped would make the Pacific “a Spanish lake”.
In Mexico and Peru, Spanish conquest had brought catastrophe and genocide to indigenous populations. Most hellish of all was the Andean “wild west” of Potosi, by the early 1600s the fourth largest Christian city in the world. Enslaved and exploited Quechua people would labour and die in its silver mines for centuries: locals called it “the mountain that eats men”. In Portuguese Brazil too, exploitation and enslavement expanded. Now, Crowley writes, American silver “flowed in all directions”, running through the world “like wildfire, an element beyond human control”. It fed the “slavery machine” in the Atlantic, and - after the Ming dynasty adopted silver for tax payments - the booming trade with the east.
By contrast, the spices that had sparked this new “global economy” faded in importance, and they are themselves often a minor character in Crowley’s grand narrative. Food historians have noted how Europe’s taste for spices waned as tastes evolved, but we still don’t entirely understand why. Sugar (often considered a spice in medieval minds, making its absence here at times confusing) would become Europe’s next addiction. Crowley briefly notes how the spice trade and its global networks and currencies had put “the apparatus in place” for the new sugar-silver-slavery nexus.
Both Iberian empires would sink under the burden of their own greed as “money vanished like water in the sand”. Portuguese excess would spark local backlashes from Japan to the Moluccas, with the rising Dutch and the British taking advantage: their Golden Ages would be “paid for, in part, by the suffering of the people of the Malay archipelago”. Spanish power would fall with the price of silver, something that would also doom the Ming dynasty.
While the totalising ambitions of European imperialism quickly outstripped the original search for spices, Crowley is right to remind us of the transformative impact of the new ocean routes they inspired. Truly “global history” requires more than narrative, but it was indeed these mariners who brought a global world into reality. “Although we call them the ‘Old World’ and the ‘New World’”, the half-Inca Spanish chronicler Garcilosa de la Vega wrote in 1609, “that’s because we only came across the latter recently, and not because there are two worlds; there is but one.”
Christopher Kissane is the author of Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe
Further reading
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh (Chicago University Press, 2021). The acclaimed Indian novelist uses the Banda Islands, the source of nutmeg, to explore the catastrophic environmental impact of colonial capitalism.
Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan by Felipe Fernández-Arnesto (Bloomsbury, 2022). Fernández-Arnesto reveals Magellan to have been a cruel, deluded failure, whose fame for circumnavigation is based on later propaganda.
Navigations: The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance by Malyn Newitt (Reaktion, 2023). Newitt explores the intellectual, ideological and navigational backgrounds to Portuguese imperialism.
