Spice: the commodities that shaped the modern world with Roger Crowley

0:00Welcome to the HC Comortis Podcast, a podcast dedicated to the Comortis sector and the people within it. I'm your host Paul Chapman. This podcast is produced by HC Group, a global search firm dedicated to the Comortis sector. Today we are talking spice, namely nutmeg and cloves and how their credible value drove technological change, political change and the birth of the modern Comortis sector. Our guest is Roger Crowley, author and historian and we're discussing his book Spice, the 16th century contest that shaped the modern world, a time's history book of the year published in 2024 by Yale University Press and available in all good bookstores. As always you can really support the show by leaving a positive review on the platform you're listening on. It really does support us and allows us to continue to get great guests just like Roger

1:03and as always I hope you enjoy this episode. Roger welcome to the show. Thank you very much Paul and delighted to be with you. Yeah, I'm excited for this conversation. This is one of our sporadic forays into commodities of days past and this one I think is these two are particularly fascinating as both drive well, the story we're about to tell, the commodities themselves and what they meant for the world for thousands of years but also the driver of technology and innovation and politics and geopolitics that they they wrote and we're zooming into the 16th century to tell that story and the commodities we're talking about are nutmeg and cloves and mace associated with that nutmeg. Can you tell us exactly what they are and why they were kind of the you know the oil or the you know the gold of those centuries? Well nutmeg and cloves are two spice plants we can grow or grow in only one place on the

2:04whole planet in the 16th century which was in the Malay archipelago in some tiny islands which you know in the Philippines called the Malakas and there are only five small islands where cloves grew and only three small islands when a nutmeg grew. Malay archipelago is kind of like a laboratory of evolution where two species meet the species from Asia and the species from Oceana and the spices which created out of this extraordinary mix of natural history were very rare and very much thought after by people because of their unique I think by their rarity value but also by their uniqueness in terms of taste and flavor and the magical properties which people believe that they had. Prior to the 16th century in the story we were about to tell these were very important

3:05in cuisine throughout the world particularly obviously in European cuisine and they were as you say they also had medicinal purposes can you just give us some sense of the value of nutmeg and cloves when they made it to your your Roman dish or your sort of early medieval European banquet hall and how exactly they got there prior to this the technological revolutions we're about to talk about. The further away you live from the Malaccos the more expensive they became. The spice trade was in the hands of many many merchants a whole linking chain which which stretch say from the Philippines to Malacca on the coast of the Malay archipelago up to India to go around Calicut then across the Indian Ocean to Aden and as far of Europeans are concerned they would then be sailed up the Red Sea they would pass through somebody else's hands they'd be put on a camel and taken over to the Nile they would then be sailed up from Nile to Alexandria where Venetian and Genries just would come and then European

4:11merchants would come from all over Europe to Genoa and to Venice and of course with each link in the chain they're the markup and the further away you were the more expensive they became so by the time these got to say to England the markup could be a thousand percent so it's an extraordinary it's a global product in the hands of many players and the price and the rarity of these of these products I think was part of what gave them their lure people obviously in Europe did not know where these commodities came from they seemed to be something from a magical world beyond Europe and they have strived to the spices which they obtained are kind of almost a mystical value in terms of their properties in terms of their medicinal properties as antiseptics and analgesics for a deserts you name it or just cheering up food so this was a global commodity chain in the hands of many players this is sort

5:19of the the worth is waiting gold right at the time this was the most valuable by weight commodity in the world or these two were and it's kind of it's worth emphasizing as well because it really does I guess I didn't know this before reading the book but yeah so so nutmeg comes from one tiny island or chain of iron the bandus islands which I think are now in modern Indonesia and then 500 miles away is where the clothes came from sort of at turnati and till door if I'm pronouncing that right and and you had you know there was as you say there's merchants at every stage and you had a thriving you know the merchants of these islands would trade with one another they'd have micro wars and all the rest of it over these commodities I think the banders had some sort of quite unique at the time sort of consensual government arrangements but yeah it just there was this entire trading network in place that meant that if you were roaming yes you saw nutmeg and it was the most you know you you presumably lock it up in your lock box at night it was so valuable and this is a world pre-sugar this is a world pre sort of modern condiments that we would think about and

6:22yeah as you and I chatted offline you know it would also mask some quite putrid foods at times so you you have this incredibly lucrative trade from commodities that are found in tiny islands the other side of the world are from Europe it's making it's giving Venice all of its glory and the Genoese and there's you know it's very secretive where these spices come from that's held in the hands of the merchants and then I guess we the story really starts kind of with Vasco de Gammo in sort of 1498 and this the technological revolutions around seafaring that basically meant that the Portuguese could realize that they could probably skip a lot of those middlemen and go and start getting toward the source can you could you pick the story up there yeah exactly I mean the Portuguese are on the Atlantic end of Europe they're rather locked out of Europe and the Portuguese are the people who develop Atlantic sailing and more sophisticated way than anybody else really the the idea

7:26of going for spices is one that develops over about a hundred year period as they work their way down the coast of Africa as they understand how the Atlantic winds work really how to sail down there and how to sail back and they develop the skill of of sailing down the west coast of Africa and how to sail back again and tracking the code of the Atlantic winds of critical really because you needed to swing out into the Atlantic and get a wind to come back where you came from and eventually by the 1490s they are ready for a major expedition to the Spice Islands to India led by Vasco de Gammo and de Gammo's mission really was to develop a spice trade in the Indian ocean 1497 yes and so and and and there's sort of the many threads that are fascinating for today's commodities world and some of the which are pioneered by the Portuguese so Vasco de Gammo

8:30sort of unlocks this straight to good hope passage and then there's this I mean this kind of the standout character of the book really is Alfonso de Albuquerque who you know needs to have a sort of HBO mini series written about him but he's kind of the one that like is sort of the individual who truly goes for the prize right and figures out that there's some key spots on the way in particular Malacca which is now I guess modern day goa is a key point to control that sort of this way station that starts to bottleneck up the spice trade because that's where everything all the spices from the Malacca's come through can you just tell us a little bit about Albuquerque and kind of his plan and how he is the first one to really send ships that get actually to those Spice Islands Albuquerque was a successor or of Vasco de Gammo the Portuguese really they enter the Indian Ocean with one commodity if you can call it that which is gunpowder weapons on ships with nobody else

9:31had and this really leads them to believe there's a kind of anti-Islamic thing going on here because there are Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean there's also monopoly trading which is really what Portuguese are trying to do that trying to grab control of the trade of the Indian Ocean this is 26 million square miles of ocean it's kind of quite ambitious undertaking but Albuquerque worked out that effectively there were never more than about 2000 Portuguese in the whole of the Indian Ocean but that he worked out that if you control the choke points of trade and fortify them you could really control the Spice trade so he developed a kind of fortress model of dotting around all the choke points of the Indian Ocean with thoughts with a few Portuguese sailors so we go from Zanzibar, Mozambique, Bahrain, Ormuz, Aiden, Goa which became the capital of Malacca and he said to the king that with a good thought

10:35Portuguese soldiers with helmets on their heads can control the Spice trade until the day of judgment so actually this is a prototype model of what small countries do the foreign nations do in Europe and British naval sea power worked on exactly the same principle, certain divinations you just control critical points there's a lot of violence involved in this in sub-doing any rivals and the Portuguese really are fairly brutal got honestly but they managed to more or less get control of all these choke points it's not as if they could prevent leakage of spices to other people but they'd severely upset really what would be in a kind of maritime commonwealth the sea was open to all of these it was said before the Portuguese came so this naval hegemony doctrine really becomes the blueprint for the Portuguese control of spices yeah and the book is fascinating because

11:39this sort of runs up until the end of the century but waiting in the wings of this book are the Dutch and the English who throughout the book are also doing some death spycraft and say for to get their hands on ruttas and pilot notes and maps and you know the value of a map is extraordinary this time the I guess firstly it is that confluence of naval technology but also military power and the militarization of trade and this the perspicacity of this chap Alfonso to kind of figure out exactly strategically what you need to do to achieve this it immediately gets the backs up of the spaniards which we'll talk about in a moment if you were like you know we're not talking a tremendous number of ships here but essentially in 1511 they get they get some ships to the islands they you know one ship loaded up with nutmeg and clothes can you just give us some sense of the scale of the value of what that would I mean that this would profoundly transform the Portuguese economy right I just a ship turning up with this stuff absolutely I mean you know this

12:41is I mean the ideal global product really because they're lightweight they're valuable and they're reasonably imperishable so wealth is flowing into to Lisbon and unfortunately a lot of the wealth that went into Lisbon is no longer visible because of the earthquake in the 18th century which has destroyed a lot of it but Lisbon turns into the go-to place in Europe everybody wants to go there cartographer spies fortune hunters so this wealth is pouring into the country if you think that the markup is a thousand percent and you're controlling it at the same time the Portuguese are desperate to redact information so there's a great deal of secrecy around maths which they are unable to control in the long run they prevent the publication of certain books so they've for a good period for about 56 70 years they they are the monopoly the monopolist of Europe with this product and everybody has to come to Portugal it was an extraordinary achievement

13:42it was a very small nation you can call it an achievement because it obviously involved a great deal of unpleasant behavior yeah we get what you might call commodity imperialism I think in your phrase by violence and certainly by coercion of peoples but it and it is an extraordinary story that for this short period Portugal becomes the wealthiest place in Europe you know it's the gold mines in Europe yeah there's no real I mean it's it's harder it's sort of yeah it's it's hard to describe the immense wealth that sits on one galleon right you know whether that's sort of a 50 ton galleon or two you know it's just unbelievable there there is obviously that you know there's this chap Francisco Serral you know I'm saying that right my Portuguese colleagues will obviously I butchered it but he's the one who actually gets to the spice islands and again there's even the spice islands banners and the and Tildor and Tanati are kind of 500 miles away from each other you know the typical sort of horrors start and one one polity is picked over

14:46another and and thoughts kind of yeah they kind of quickly it would seem over time they settle into kind of it's certainly going to be worse under the dutch right I think it's the easiest way to say they settle into kind of like monopolizing those local trays they're working with local merchants and local polities the problem in some ways is that this chap Serral's best mate is Ferdinand Magellan who is a Portuguese at this who he's writing notes to about you know what a wonderful thing we've done finding these spice islands and Magellan Magliau goes unfortunately to the Spanish king and says hey I've got a plan for us and that sort of supercharges but what's going to happen with the Spanish turning up going the other way and going the westward route and unfortunately all of that rivalry lands quite locally within Indonesia and the Philippines and the spice islands so can you give us a few words on that on that story and again it's kind of the fascinating you know that

15:46that's a big part of the book is is Magellan's voyage westward and you know the consequences of that and the fact it was all driven by this geopolitical rivalry halfway around the world was driven by spice yes Magellan sets off sailing west down the coast of South America it's all the great deal of mystery around there's nobody new for sure that the water barrier through the Americas or not and there are gaps there that we will never know Magellan seems to be mysteriously confident of this as they go along there are mutinious because people find going very tough but they manage to thread their way through one another straights and Magellan make it into the Pacific Ocean sail across the Pacific Ocean which takes them something like six months I think and then they pitch up on one of the rival islands of the ones which the Portuguese are really basin and we see an extraordinary micro scale colonial war going on between the two little kingdoms really one of the two called Tarnata and the other called Tidal with the Portuguese

16:50and the Spanish blasting each other with cannons and ship attacks across really a distance of about five hundred yards but there can only be one winner of this really because although Magellan had pioneered a route across the Pacific Ocean it isn't a coherent link in a global chain because they can't sail back again they couldn't crack the problem of the of the Pacific winds and so what happens is that there are about four expeditions Magellan was killed on the first one in the Philippines when he had kind of overreach himself and the Spanish sent about four expeditions between about 1520 and 1540 sailing across the Pacific first run the straights Magellan but then later they built ships on the coast of Mexico getting to the Spice Islands and it was a lobster pot they couldn't sail back again because they hadn't cracked the problem of the Pacific winds so effectively the Portuguese who could sail back to Malacca had a long supply chain

17:54from their end effectively defeated the Spanish in successive micro wars captured them and sort of sent them repatriated them on their own ships so local native people are kind of bystanders of this kind of weird little colonial war which obviously involved a great deal of exploitation for local people as well so although Magellan's voyage makes another link in the chain it doesn't complete that chain unless Europeans learnt how to sail back across the Pacific Ocean the energy and resources sector is experiencing unprecedented change to help navigate this change and capture its opportunities HC Group launched Enco Insights a global advisory network dedicated to the sector providing senior advisors and subject matter experts to investment and infrastructure funds law firms and corporates Enco Insights leverages HC Groups 20 years of connections in energy

18:58and commodities to give clients the expertise they need when the stakes are high and insight matters learn more at Enco Insights.com And it's kind of these amazing sort of letters you recount exchanged between the two kings that are kind of brotherly and nice and making nice and all the rest of it and everyone's sort of got this fiction of the Treaty of Torticia where Spain and Portugal split the world on a on a latitude that they couldn't actually quite quite calculate at that point and you know and as a result of that they're claiming where the bits of you know where the mulluckers the Spice Islands are in whose territory but as you say de facto Portugal owns those strategic choke points on the way back and it was never Spain's fight and eventually they kind of the Treaty of Zaragoza I think it is you they sort of divvy it up and and Portugal essentially what happens I mean again sort of just for our world the commodities world you know this is

19:58earthshaking right we're talking essentially within 20 years the entire Spice trade is disrupted what happens I mean there's other stuff going on in the 16th century for Venice it's you know it's that sort of peak wars with with the Ottoman Empire that's resurgence and so forth but what is the impact on the existing you know you've got incredible and obviously topical at the moment credible wealth sat in the streets of Hormuz that have been controlling that particular flow Alexandria's peak Alexandria you've got Venice and in general powerful policies and then within within basically the century is it's curtains for them right can you give us some sense of the impact outside of kind of this main narrative between Spain and Portugal yes I mean you can always pinpoint it to a day but um a Portuguese said he who has control of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice and when the Venetian first heard or well initially of Tabasco

21:00the government's voyage there were bank crashes in in Venice and really Venice had really you know it wasn't built only on spices but spices are a very important part of of their trading rational and merchants came from all over Europe and so this is going to have a fundamental consequence for the for the Venetians it's going to lead to sort of this gold rush to the Atlantic coast one way or another from you know it's a veil and Lisbon and it's going to disrupt the Islamic world particularly the Mamlocks in Egypt in Cairo who were the ruling dynasty of the time who depended very heavily on the spice trade and which will actually collapse quite quickly because the Ottomans will come and take them over so it Earthshaking it did change the way that people looked at the world who are the winners who are the losers and we can see Venice that sort of

22:05beginning slow beginning decline of Venice really as a result of what the Atlantic pioneers were doing or the Pacific pioneers as well so it shook and started to reshape Europe and there's no doubt about it and at the same time you've got you know the English there's quite a good English spy in Seville sending info back and maps to London and Henry VIII and John Cabot and so forth who are thinking about whether there's a northern route there's the same time the you know the Dutch are very much watching the next company will be the the Dutch East India company or the VOC just like one of the other things that's happening at the same time as you have this you have this technology develops the Caraville and ocean fairing you also have obviously the rise this is right at peak kind of gunpowder entering kind of the European wars and and lots of competition between these small sort of micro-states in Europe that is driving that technological change

23:09you also get this sort of this is and you argue in the book as well this is kind of early birth of capitalism as well you you start to because you have these very risky long-distance journeys there is you know the start of kind of risk pooling and credit and kind of commodity spec I mean can you give us some sense of the financing and the setup of these trips yeah it's interesting really I mean but Spain and Portugal effectively had a crown-based model which was that everything needed to come back to the king and then be dispersed this is very inefficient in terms of the involvement of the people who are actually making the voyages buying the stuff and so on and there's a huge amount of corruption around this but these are very inefficient commercial models and really it's when when you move to venture capitalism if you like and the East India company and the VOC where the decisions are taken not by a king who's you know 10,000 miles away and has

24:13no idea what's going on but the guys on the ground have shareholders and who can be much fleet of foot in terms of taking decisions and and really that's that's the story particularly of the VOC the the Dutch trading company who were not constrained by the Christian mission for the Spanish and the Portuguese there's no mission to convert people to Christianity among the merchant ventures of Europe with these new commercial models in which people many merchants can invest and so you get a kind of the all the stuff that went round exploration for for Spain and Portugal which was also sending out missionaries to convert people to Christianity and so on and recognize the king of Spain's there king you don't get any of that anymore you just get the VOC and indeed in due course the English equivalents that they just want the stuff and they

25:14act with a kind of cold-blooded ruthlessness if you like to to control the trade to cut out any competitors and to maximize their own profits so we're moving to very much more of a capitalist entrepreneurial model from one from crown back venture and so this is really you could call it the proto-modern capitalism a move away from kings being the controllers of this to teams of merchants and you know this is a critical moment I think in the development of you know it's small state exploration of the world the Dutch and the and the English particularly and and you know they're certainly the Dutch behavior in the milkers was pretty awful really you know they they would massacre people they would quell any any competitor they managed to push the rip up you know if a neighboring island started having you know had also had some clove trees those would get ripped

26:14up and all I mean it was quite I mean as you say the sort of the Portuguese and that's used to tell the story of what happened to the Portuguese but they they're burdened in some ways by other territories right they've you know they were also trying to control Brazil and so forth is a very small country but as you say there's there's also this sort of multiple mission of evangelizing of the Catholic Church all you know they've started this idea that the choke point is what matters but they can't quite go full hog on it whereas the Dutch do and that ultimately leads to the 17th century you know the Netherlands and the incredible wealth that's then there is you know and Rembrandt and the the golden age of Dutch maritime and Amsterdam and so forth is all driven by they've captured this by silence and what they do there is as you say you're all glued to in the book talk about in the book kind of this transition pretty devastating stuff what what happens to Portugal why why does Portugal you know it sort of well firstly it gets combined with Spain can you just tell the story of Portugal and kind of how it won and then subsequently lost

27:17this vast fortune and yes I think what happens is really that the monarchy model of exploration is very inefficient unfortunately for the Portuguese they also because of the I mean this is a Protestant economic revolution effectively in in Northern Europe and so the rise of Protestantism and there's a lot that you can say about what the Protestant thing brought to merchant communities firstly the translation of the Bible into English meant that people could read more and literally merchants are different people to people who can't read but the trouble with the Portuguese is that alongside the commercial mission was a religious mission and they were not so about crusading for stock and the Portuguese effectively came to their nemesis at the end of the 16th century 1517 I think 1570s when the king of Portugal and more to all the nobility get wiped out

28:19I'm a crusade in Morocco at a battle so then their model there if you like their commercial models I you know we've talked about it but they're on collapse is under the weight of the pressure of the competition for the more ruthless more pragmatic peoples of Northern Europe and ditto with Spain I mean Spain you know again had the same kind of mentality and and couldn't embrace the idea of a fully entrepreneurial commercial system and they just get outflanked outgunned by these nimble small Protestant merchant-based countries hello i'm David Hunt found remanagement director at Hyperion Search founded over a decade ago Hyperion Searchers helped organizations from major utilities to startups recruit their leadership teams and keen individual contributors to accelerate both their growth and the energy transition our

29:20three main verticals are renewable power energy storage and the immobility the energy transition and the talent that delivers it has been our passion since day one to find out more of is at Hyperion Search.com or listen to my ladies and clean-set podcast available on all platforms who invent essentially you've got a couple of unlocking factors there one is the joint stock company right and then also it different well the Dutch don't have a monarchy in the same way so you just don't have that same sort of funneling and centralization but I find it I find that fascinating the other thing so then let's talk about the spice trade in general because obviously today I was marvelling up my my pantry this morning and we've got six nutmeg clothes what are they called fruits dried so you know and that would have been worse a couple of bars of gold five hundred years ago not that my son seen that interest when I told him that but obviously today they aren't worth what they were so you know what happened to that spice trade and this is a story ultimately of it was too expensive and substitution but also yeah can you tell that story too

30:27yes I mean I think two things happened really I think by the 18th century we can see culinary taste change and and the French of the leaders in this they move away from a heavy spice laden cuisine to more natural flavors fresh vegetables I mean one of the things that spice did was the sort of cosh your taste buds and also to disguise meat that wasn't actually quite up to it so that there's a cultural shift away from heavy taste and the French of the leaders in this but what really makes the difference is it's sugar and actually we don't think of sugar as a spice but actually sugar first home is somewhere in that laboratory of evolution and in the melee archipelago sugar and you could say that the popularity of sugar is actually a byproduct of the

31:30expression of the world because one of the things of course that happens is that the Portuguese among that many things they did were that are actually the you could call them the fathers of the spice trade so fathers of the slave trade so we start to see the human labor is available to harvest sugar much more cheaply shorter distances and I think in England the 18th century sugar consumption quadruples so it's it's both a cultural thing it's a popularity and cheapness of this new flavor and in a sense I think of people being absolutely fed up with having to buy spices from the Dutch at enormous prices so the VOC is finally wound up somewhere in the early 18th century I think so we're seeing that you know the revolution if you like of taste of imperial power and the imperial power now being tied up with you know the slave plantations

32:30of the Americas bringing in this very cheap much much cheaper spice if you can call sugar a spice knocking out the popularity but it's although it tastes different I think from from those kind of heavy full-on taste of spices to something well which is also full-on I suppose sugar it's not not quite as full-on as nutmegmice and cloves no so you know people start to rot their teeth you know by curiously sugar yeah the Dutch didn't enter that trade right because they got you know the beat with the English did them over no they didn't because they didn't really have quite quite the colonial reach I suppose of other countries really I don't know why they you know I mean there's you know it's no population I mean we had quite a few I mean basically it was who who won the wars of the 17th century between the British with the English and the Dutch kind of then determined sort of future you know opportunity a lot of that was ultimately down to

33:32maritime skill and we you know the British office have a very long coastlines and pretty pre-country winds that they developed that skill over but yeah I mean that's a different needs to be your next book well yes that is interesting Britain the British get it together in the 18th century in terms of commitment to see and managing their economy and a national buy-in around a maritime identity and a national debt and a well you you could argue that the Dutch win in the sense that William of Orange became king of England in 1688 so yes so perhaps they you actually that's I'm using the wrong wrong lens there but the different stories you say what are the spice islands today I know now they grow not making Grenada and you know but these are they're very unique environments like and I think to this day the region celebrates the the death of Magellan yes they do yes I mean there are all sorts of impacts really of course

34:33do all these spices and I had a quick look at it you know they grow spices can be grown in Vietnam in Africa in China the genus out of the bottle once you export the seeds to other places they still do grow not making and close on those islands it had been my plan to go but unfortunately Covid intervened but they remain as far as I can understand from people who have been absolutely sophisticated laboratory of evolution you know they are completely remarkable places and they're part of the the Philippines in terms of cultural impact yes the death of Magellan or Magellan I know quite no if he's Magellan Magellan I think you might find him with the band manager which gives is celebrated every year on what they call Lapu Lapu Day which is when Magellan was killed in a battle and they reenact this very cheerfully with somebody else's dress up and being Magellan but there's two sides to it actually because at the

35:35same time Magellan introduced to them into Christianity and he brought within a tiny little Christ figure called the Santanino and Decebu I think he's called which is the most revered of the Filipino Catholic figurines or or Saint figures in their religions so Filipinos are Christians and the result of what the Europeans brought them so you know it's kind of interestingly the side products if you like of the whole spice thing you know they kept multiplying in all sorts of different directions so yeah for the Filipinos you know it's and Magellan apparently it's a not uncommon name in the Philippines so I'm not quite sure where that one's going mixed it makes me yeah and the book also recounts we don't have time for it here but obviously the Portuguese also make forays into the Pearl River and China which I guess is so you know that's how you get Macau and eventually they'll see the British take that over or take you know that they ain't take on that trade with a different suite of commodities in tea and opium

36:39and that whole world that one day will hopefully do a podcast on I guess when you when you what's sort of fascinating about this and it's still very much true today is how technology change as well as kind of technologies in terms of hard things like ships but also soft things like contracts and risk and pooling and stable and taste oh you know drove this dramatic change in the world that was sort of wrought over this 70 hundred year period that completely upended 2000 years worth of trade networks and and it itself then drove change to sugar as well right I mean I just find it kind of fascinating how the commodity shaped the society previously a change technological change then re utterly reshaped society and then the commodity itself became substituted and somewhat abandoned in the wake of new tastes and new technologies in the form of sugar and subsequently all of the condiments we have today I mean it's it's quite a it's a fascinating I guess I find the book is is really powerful in that it takes what is quite a short lens of this

37:45you know the the early 16th century but really I guess a lot therefore the commodity world to see and recognize in today's trade and especially what's going on at the moment with the streets of all moves yes no absolutely I mean I think it was a moment you know an explosion of cartography and an explosion of what people are understanding of the world in Europe you know that the you could own a globe you know and you could spin the world around you could see the world of you could have a planetary imagination developing the result of this and the world is my noise and I with mine sword will take it to the Shakespeare's end but but the explosion of knowledge that comes after this really both in in terms of of printed accounts of literacy of cartography of the imagination of the world developed very fast in the 16th century you know it's absolutely fascinating you know period of growth really in terms of the European knowledge of the world

38:49the way that it experienced it so you know it's one of those break-point moments I think in in world history and the life trade certainly has you know quite a significant part of you know because this this these decades particularly 1511 1520 1530 I mean the world history I read or the history I read you know we were always seeing these decades through the lens of what Spain and Portugal doing on the the other half of the world right what they're doing in the Americas and the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incans and the rivalry between the two and so it's fascinating to realize at the same time and probably as consequential was this other trade you know that was going on certainly as consequential when it came to people you know to to the middle you know to the Eurasia from a winners and losers standpoint so I just found it a really refreshing lens and then once again it rams home that at the center of technological innovation center geopolitics and geo rivalry and at the center of economics ultimately sits

39:52commodities and you could tell the same story through the lens of as we have you know with salt we had yeah Mr. Kilansky on talking about his book there you know yeah through spice through oil through gold and I just find it fascinating that actually the way that the world intersects is one of the good or ill and a lot of ill in this book you know is through commodities so it's been a it was a great read and you know very much appreciate you coming on yeah well it's fascinating to talk about it but also to hear from what you were saying you know about the way that twice is just one commodity and you could and you could pause the history of the world through a whole range of commodities of different periods you know and it's fascinating to think about just take a commodity centered view of world history which I'm sure you know is your stock and trade so yeah I mean so well it's not meaning the lessons are still an employee today right you have these privately owned trading houses and many of our listeners are work there today you know who are

40:55fabulously successful at solving problems of commodities in time form and location and as a result fabulously wealthy companies at the same you know doing that but you know they are it's the same lessons right they're not you don't want to control the the country you want to just control the the choke points on that commodities route if you own the pipeline or the refine the one of you know control the flows in and out of a particular refinery in one region it's a tremendous source of wealth you don't and all the risk pooling and the risk taking and all the rest of it is you know as we all know right now trading oil is as risk is it was trading spices back in the day but well we'll put links to the book in the show notes what's next on their rise and if you started it dream up the next book the next book is if going to be I'm fascinated by the sea my dad with the naval officer I'm collecting a range of articles that I've written or intend to write about there is mainly mainly about the maritime things about Mediterranean about the rise of

42:02European sea power in the 18th century it's it's going to be sort of not quite great as hits it's going to be sort of some of the material that I've collected in the writing of books that I have written really in series of kind of short short pieces it's kind of like my my self-indulgent holiday I mean you could patricate Brian vignettes and well no I'm not quite the cop down there but I mean each of these books takes about four years quite almost every time you know so so this is kind of like you know this is this is my baking a short vacation from heavy lifting and after that we'll see but they're fascinating to write and when I knew so a little bit about this but once I started exploring this topic it just unfolded in so many different ways and so many different directions you know there's just so many aspects to it that you know my brain was kind of hurting under the impact of trying to manage all the

43:04potential material that was available not necessarily because some fool invented printing and 16th century and no with tons more to read but which actually was good because you know two few sources is not good so anyway that's my that's my next task the holiday the holiday writer well I love the book I'll leave give Dominic Sambrook the the final word where he calls it a story of tremendous verb and scope and indeed it is and we haven't covered but a but a tenth of the stories within the book and yeah see I'll put links to the show notes and Roger I think all of us really appreciate your time thanks very much Paul it was a joy to talk to you thank you for listening to find out more about hc group our global offices and our expertise in search within the commodities sector please visit www.hcgroup.global