Trading Empires and trade routes
From the Archives: A Spy in the Spice Trade
One more post from the past dealing with the spice trade You know the beginning of this story. In the fifteenth century, Portugal under the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator(opens in new tab) * began maritime exploration along the coast of Africa. More or less a hundred years later, a Portuguese fleet commanded by…
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From the Archives: Asia’s Inland Trade, or How the Spice Trade Worked
While writing my most recent newsletter(opens in new tab), I had reason to spend some time thinking about my historical roots, and looking for an old blog post about the organization of the Dutch and British East India Companies. I evidently never wrote that post, but I found a couple of related posts from 2016…
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Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China
In my last blog post, I mentioned Lord Macartney’s embassy to China in 1793. It was an aside to a post that was itself not much more than an aside, but, as so often happens around here, one story led me to another. A beautiful copy of the journal Macartney kept about his time in…
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