Abstract
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European efforts to get access to Asian spices have long been a topic for compelling narrative histories but seem to be making something of a comeback over the past few years, albeit in a different light than before. 1 In 2021, Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis became a major international bestseller. 2 Published 400 years after the Dutch East India Company's genocide of the population of the Banda Islands, the book used these events as a parable for the way in which the present capitalist world view wreaks havoc on the planet. In 2024, Roger Crowley's Spice retold the dramatic stories of the Iberian efforts to get and retain access to Asian spices, but in a way that was likewise far more mindful of the violence, greed, and cultural and environmental destruction inherent in this history. 3 The authors of these works stand in a long tradition of seeing the European quest for Asian spices as a harbinger for our present global and capitalist world, but more readily emphasize that this is far from an unproblematic legacy.
Nicholas Nugent's The Spice Ports might be considered part of this recent wave of books on the spice trade, but it is far less revisionist than most. While Nugent also briefly mentions the darker sides of the history of the spice trade and occasionally touches on slavery, violence and greed, this is certainly not the work's main concern, which, rather than providing any kind of new insights or perspectives, simply tries to give a bird's-eye overview of the histories of what he terms ‘the spice ports’. In so doing, he takes a remarkably broad approach. The book discusses a total of 12 ports that played a role in the spice trade, or in early seaborne commerce more generally, from Venice and Alexandria to New York and Singapore.
The history of each of these ports is broadly and eclectically described, so that the trade in spices in these ports, supposedly the main theme of the work, or even their role in global trade more generally, sometimes disappears into the background. The chapter about Alexandria, for instance, has a brief section entitled ‘The Venice Connection’ (Venice being the topic of the previous chapter) but, in reality, only a few lines actually address the spice trade between these two ports. The chapter as a whole takes us from the conquests of Alexander the Great all the way to the digging of the Suez Canal, touching on the various conquerors of the region (Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Napoleon), discussing a first-century travel handbook and then making a quick detour to Aden to discuss the history of coffee. While global trade in spices might have originally inspired the selection of the 12 ports, it therefore does not necessarily drive the narrative.
This approach gives the book the feel of an elaborate guided tour rather than a historical narrative, and Nugent is certainly an engaging guide. However, it also makes the book somewhat unfocused, as it lacks a clear and compelling narrative framework. The wide scope also means that the author is not always on solid ground in terms of up-to-date and specialist knowledge. Largely based on earlier broadly accessible histories and source publications, the book sometimes has a slightly old-fashioned and Eurocentric feel in its choices and characterizations. This is, for instance, apparent in Nugent’s portrayal of the early history of what was to become New York, which, apparently taking his cue from the works of Russell Shorto, he describes mainly as a contest between the English and the Dutch, meanwhile characterizing New Amsterdam as a New World extension of the liberal and tolerant society of the Dutch Republic. 4 He barely goes into the colonial encounter with the indigenous Lenape, except for retelling the myth of the purchase of Manhattan as ‘the best bargain in history’, which has long been recognized to be a simplistic mischaracterization. This reviewer also occasionally noticed small factual errors, such as the assertion that fully half of Amsterdam's population was Jewish at one point in the seventeenth century (124); a slightly jumbled causality and chronology in telling the story of the conquest of Jayakarta and foundation of what was to become Batavia in 1619 (144); and an incorrect explanation of which areas produced cloves and why (149). The book, all in all, works well as a broad and accessible introduction to the history of these ports for the armchair traveller, but its very generalist nature makes it less useful for specialist readers or the academic classroom.
As a visual documentation of this history, however, The Spice Ports is impressive, due to the rich, capable and appealing way in which it is illustrated. Nugent himself is an avid collector of maps, and over half of the images in the book are from his own collection, with a great number of additional ones from the collection of the British Library (the publisher of the book in the United Kingdom) and a wide array of other collections worldwide. Both the author and the designers of the book took care to really let these images speak – the book is in a large format, its design is beautiful, and the images get the space they need for the reader to study and appreciate them. Often, Nugent dedicates considerable parts of the narrative to discussing one particular map, albeit usually to be able to guide us through the depicted port or region rather than critically engaging with questions around the power dynamics and world view inherent in maps and images. All the same, the manner in which the images and the narrative mutually reinforce one another is the strength of a work that, while not aimed at the specialist reader, gives a wide-ranging, accessible and visually appealing overview of the history of 12 port cities.