The long-distance commerce in aromatic plant products — pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace — grown almost entirely in South and Southeast Asia and carried west to the Mediterranean and beyond. For thousands of years a handful of dried flavors could command gold-like prices in distant markets; the hunger to reach their source directly launched the Age of Exploration, built the armed trading companies, and produced atrocities such as the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands, even as the spices themselves slid from treasure to ordinary grocery.
For most of recorded history, a small bag of dried buds from a few tropical islands could be worth more than gold. Nutmeg grew on a single cluster of islands in what is now Indonesia, and nowhere else on Earth. Cloves grew on a handful more. Pepper came from the coast of India. These flavors crossed oceans and deserts through dozens of hands, multiplying in price at every stop, until they reached Europe as costly luxuries. The wish to reach their source directly sent Columbus west and Vasco da Gama around Africa. It built the first global corporations. And in 1621 it drove the Dutch to slaughter and enslave almost an entire island people for control of nutmeg. The spice trade was glamorous, world-shaping, and drenched in blood, and all three are the same story.