Asia’s Inland Trade, or How the Spice Trade Worked
The official trading area of the Dutch East India Company
The way we learn the story in elementary school in the United States, European trading companies sailed East in search of spices and other luxury goods. What those merchants took with them to trade is generally left unmentioned–perhaps because it makes it clear that Europe was a backwater in the global marketplace until well into the eighteenth century.
The truth is that in the early centuries of the Asian trade most European-made merchandise was a dud in the Asian marketplace. Some products, like mechanical clocks and toys, were too expensive for any but the wealthiest to purchase. Others, like heavy woolen cloth, were simply not useful or appealing. The only thing Europeans had that Asian were interested in was precious metal from the mines in Latin America.
The Portuguese, who controlled the trade routes from Europe to Asia for almost a hundred years, were content to pay silver for the luxury goods that reached their Indian stronghold at Goa. When the Dutch entered the spice trade in 1595 , they didn’t have the luxury of paying for everything with hard currency. It was too expensive to simply trade with the Indies. Instead they learned to trade within the Indies: carrying goods from one Asian market to another as part of what they called the “inland trade”.
The Dutch didn’t invent the inland land. Merchants from all over Asia bought and sold goods at busy seaports along the Red Sea, on the coast of India, throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and in China and Japan. Islamic merchants in the Persian Gulf shipped raw cotton, coffee, dried fruits and nuts, and attar of roses across the Indian Ocean. Chinese merchants sold silks, tea, porcelain and zinc. India produced printed cotton textiles that were popular throughout Asia. South East Asia was the source for pepper, sandalwood, spices, and ivory.
Asia ships seldom sailed all the way from the Persian Gulf to China. Instead, an Arab ship would sail from Mokha to Surat and back. An Indian merchant would travel between Surat and Java. Chinese junks controlled the trade between Canton and Bantam. A chest of tea or a load of pepper would be bought and sold several times , and transported from port to port in several different ships.
Instead of concentrating on trade between two ports, the way most Asian merchants did, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded throughout the entire system, trading one type of goods for another, which was then used to buy a third. From one end of the chain to the other, Dutch traders handled more than one hundred Asian products, including raw silk, sandalwood, saltpeter, tin, opium, and cowry shells. Each item was bought for a low price in the place where it was made and then sold for a higher price in another part of Asia in which it was in demand.
In order to make the most of this complicated series of trades, the VOC set up a network of permanent trading stations along the major trade routes in Asia–a process that often involved violence against local rulers and other European merchants. By 1785, the company had roughly 20,000 employees in twenty settlements spread across Asia, including company-owned spice plantations in Indonesia and walled warehouses in port cities in China, Japan, and India.
The spice trade–more than just pepper.
Imprisoned
In 1979, at the age of 56, Italian writer and artist Arturo Benvenuti and his wife drove across Europe in a motor home in search of former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. He saw the journey as a secular Via Crucis—a pilgrimage in which the Stations of the Cross were Auschwitz, Terezin, Mauthausen and Buchenwald. He met with dozens of concentration camp survivors, many of whom shared not only their stories but the artwork they created in the camp.
Benvenuti originally published those drawings in 1983, under the title KZ, the German acronym for Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp. He chose drawings only from people who had a direct experience with the camps. Most were drawn by internees during their time in the camps, though a few were drawn by soldiers who entered the camp as liberators.
The drawings vary in their skill, but not in their power. Some are the work of professional artists. Most are the work of what Benvenuti describes as “bonafide ‘naifs”. A few were made by children. Primo Levi summed up their effect in the foreword, saying that words are insufficient to describe the horrors of the camps but these drawings “say what the word is not able to.”
Benvenuti’s work has recently been released in a new edition, titled Imprisoned: Drawings from Nazi Concentration Camps. The new edition includes several poems by Benvenuti and several explanatory essays but leaves the arrangement of the drawings untouched and uninterpreted. As Benvenuti intended, the book is both a work of art and an act of testimony.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
From the Archives. Déjà Ve All Over Again: Closing the Boarders
If you’ve been hanging out here in the Margins for a while, you probably have a pretty good idea about where I stand on political issues in general even though I try not to shove my opinions in your face because this is a history blog, not a political blog. One thing I feel strongly about is immigration. This post first appeared in November, 2011.
Concerns that immigrants flooding across the border threaten the nation’s basic institutions. Construction of armed posts to defend the border. Passage of new, more restrictive immigration laws. Sound familiar? Welcome to Mexico in 1830.
The story began when Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821. At first the newly independent country welcomed settlers from the United States. The government signed contracts with immigration brokers, called empresarios, who agreed to settle a set number of immigrants on a set piece of property in a set amount of time. In exchange for the right to buy land, settlers agreed to obey Mexican law, become Mexican citizens, and convert to Catholicism. At the same time, the US Congress passed a new land act that made emigration to Mexico even more appealing. Public land in the US cost $1.25/acre*, for a minimum of eighty acres and could no longer be bought on credit. Public land in Mexico cost 12 1/2¢/acre and credit terms were generous. Not a hard choice for anyone who was cash-poor and land hungry.
Some empresarios brought in groups of settlers from France or Germany. More, including Stephen Austin,** brought in settlers from the southern United States. Most new colonists settled in new communities east of modern San Antonia. By the mid-1830s, Anglo settlers outnumbered native Tejanos by as many as 10 to 1 in some parts of Texas. These settlers brought the culture of the American South with them, including slaves and slavery.*** In addition, many Anglo settlers traded (illegally) with Louisiana rather than with Mexico.
Concerned about growing American economic and cultural influence in the region, the Mexican government passed a law banning immigration into Texas from the United States on April 6, 1830. They also assessed heavy customs duties on all US goods, prohibited the importation of slaves, built new forts in the border region and opened customs houses to patrol the border for illegal trade.
The law didn’t have the intended affect. Instead of re-gaining control over Texas, Anglo colonists and the Mexican government were in constant conflict. The law was repealed in 1833, too late to staunch the wound. The first shots in what would become the Texas War of Independence were fired on October 2, 1835.
*$31.44 in today’s currency. Still a bargain.
** Hence Austin, Texas. (I don’t know about you, but I’m always curious as to how a town got its name.)
***Outlawed in Mexico is 1829–so much for obeying the laws.