Dutch espionage, Portuguese tempura, and the Spanish dollar: how the 16th-century Spice Wars changed the world

The 16th century marks the beginning of our modern globalized world. A world initially driven by the desire for luxury and the miraculous properties attributed to spices. Combined with the desire to eliminate the Islamic intermediaries who profited so much from the trade of nutmeg and cloves, Columbus was already searching for Asian spices but along the way found America. The Portuguese would indeed reach the Moluccas, the Spice Islands, in 1512. A great game would begin in which they would face the Spanish, with the British also entering the fray, and finally the Dutch. In the process, the Spanish would even circumnavigate the globe—although Magellan would die in his excesses when, believing himself almost superhuman, he faced the local peoples with few men—and the English would circumnavigate the Arctic, skirting Russia. The European impulses that would change the world were set in motion, leading to global trade and colonization.

“In the 16th century, there was a growth in exploration, information, and cartography. Our knowledge of the world grew. With the printing press, we have 150 to 200 million copies of printed books. It was an extraordinary time; Europe was advancing faster, and the importance of the spice trade in driving this century forward is underestimated,” notes British historian Roger Crowley, who published Spices (Ático de los Libros), the account from the 1512 arrival of the Portuguese in the Moluccas until the founding of Manila in 1571 by Miguel López de Legazpi. The story of an explosive century.

The Spanish dollar became a global currency and espionage helped the Netherlands get its hands on spices.

“People find it difficult to understand why spices were important. Marco Polo came back with extraordinary stories. He talked about spices. And they captured the imagination of Europe. They represent a kind of idea of ​​paradise. People think of them as medicinal, pain-relieving, aphrodisiac. And they were very expensive because their trade goes through so many merchants. The cost in Europe is ten times higher than at the source. They have an aura of luxury. Added to that, Europe in the early 16th century suffered from claustrophobia because the Ottoman Empire had entrenched it in the east. So accessing the spice trade requires an access to the Atlantic. And it was the countries on its doorstep, Spain and Portugal, that were the pioneers in Europe’s exploration and colonization of the world,” Crowley says.

“The big game,” he recalls, “was initially between Portugal and Spain, with their conflicts in the Spice Islands, where they fought a kind of small, extraordinary battle. But it's the beginning of European domination.” So much so that the Spanish dollar, the silver real of eight, will become the global currency: “The discovery of the silver mountain of Potosí in 1545 almost coincides with the Chinese changing their tax system and deciding that taxes would be paid in silver. There's a convergence. When the Spanish arrived in Manila and were able to trade with China, they wanted its porcelain, silk, and other manufactured goods. All this continues today: China produces, and we give them money. And the Spanish silver dollar was the medium used by everyone around the world,” he says.

Silver flows and allows global trade to soar. “It's the consequence of the people of Seville and Lisbon deciding to set sail to sail around the world. The Portuguese established their shipping ports from the west and the Spanish from the east. And Seville became Europe's gold rush city in the 16th century, with merchants from all over. Everything takes off, and the ability to sail around the world was key,” he adds.

Trade will be of all kinds: Europeans introduced corn and sweet potatoes to China, which was able to double its population. The Portuguese introduced tempura and firearms to Japan, and this allowed one shogunate to wipe out the others and turn Japan into a single country. Europe was filled with millions of pieces of Ming porcelain, there were slaves... And cryptography was developed: there was espionage. Despite this, he says, "Jan Van Linschoten, Dutch secretary to the Bishop of Goa, stole a lot of commercial information from Portuguese navigational records. The Dutch sailed to the Moluccas and destroyed the Portuguese market; they quickly gained complete control of the spice market."