Spice Route

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  The Overseas Chinese of South East Asia

  History, Culture, Business

  • I. Rae, M. Witzel(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  7 The Spice Route: The Early Economy of South-East Asia Economics and politics have always been closely linked together in South-East Asia, even more so than in the West. The political and cultural development of the region, including the Chinese migration and settle- ment described in the first half of this book, have had a strong impact on the economies and business cultures of the region, and continue to do so. At the same time, business and commerce, especially trade with China and with the West, have in turn helped shape the politics and culture of the region. To understand the history of South-East Asia, it is also necessary to understand its economy – and vice versa. In the second half of this book we turn to matters of trade, economy and business culture. We begin with a short history of the economy of the region up to the 1990s, and show how long distance trade, colonial domination and independence coincide with three separate phases in economic development. In all three of these phases, the Chinese of Nanyang have played a role. The first phase we will discuss, when South-East Asia’s economy was dominated by long-distance trade with China, India, the Arab world and Western Europe, is by far the longest. We do not really know when this trade began; certainly it was in existence for many centuries before the birth of Christ. Spices from South-East Asia were known to the ancient Chinese and the ancient Egyptians alike; resins and perfumes of South-East Asian origin have been found in the tombs of the pharaohs. There is even a suggestion that some of the pharaohs were interested in developing direct trade, rather than relying on Indian middlemen. One pharaoh, probably Neko II (610–595 BC), sent out an exploring party of Phoenician sailors, who circumnavigated Africa looking for the ‘Spice Islands’ in the mistaken belief that they lay to the south rather than the east. 91

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  Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  A Spice Odyssey

  • Gary Paul Nabhan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Spice trails of the Desert Silk Roads and Maritime Silk Roads Strait of Malacca S O U T H C H I N A S E A Moluccas Bali Canton Xi ‘an Zayton Beijing Nanjing SPICE TRAILS of the DESERT SILK ROADS and MARITIME SILK ROADS Trade Route ✚ ✪ ❂ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❥ ❥ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❍ ❂ 144 | Chapter 6 brokers, and bankers was anchored in commonly held values. It devel-oped rules for fiscal exchange between banking institutions located considerable distances from one another, so that funds could be trans-ferred, loans could be paid off, and venture capital could finance proj-ects throughout the Islamic world. 7 Further, the Umayyad caliphs demanded that those who bene-fited from this system, especially Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians who traded in aromatics, horses, camels, precious metals, silk, and other textiles, were expected to direct a significant portion of their earnings back to the power base of the Umayyad dynasty. The Muslims were the network facilitators to some extent, but they acknowledged the knowledge and wealth of other players. Protection could not and did not come without a price. The Umayyad elite of Quraysh descent accumulated fortunes for themselves and for their institutions by unilaterally setting that price. Some members of that Quraysh clan must have wondered why their grandparents back in Mecca had ever opposed Muhammad to begin with, for now they them-selves were raking in the cash and feasting on far richer fare than the thar ī d of unleavened bread soaked in broth that their humble Prophet had favored. 8 Perhaps they remembered that their Arab ancestors from the des-erts of the peninsula had never been able to accumulate much wealth. Instead, they had been constantly on the move with their caravans or herds, reinvesting whatever gains they accrued in more camels and horses. They had forked over pay-offs to petty sheikhs who offered them the privilege to pass through their territories.

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  Spices, Scents and Silk

  Catalysts of World Trade

  • James F Hancock(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • CAB International

    (Publisher)

  6 Origins of the Spice Trade in the Indian Ocean Setting the Stage – Central Role of Rivers

  The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Harappa all evolved along mighty rivers that provided rich alluvial soils, irrigation waters and transportation. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers were the backbone of ancient Sumer and the Mesopotamian kingdoms that followed. The ancient Harappa civilization relied on the Indus River. The Nile served as the lifeblood of the Egyptian kingdoms. These rivers fed the agricultural productivity of these great states and served as a vehicle to move grain, ores, stone and luxury products.

  Ultimately, these great societies became connected by their seafarers following their rivers through linking seas and gulfs to the Indian Ocean. Once linked, they became united through maritime trade. This trade was driven by the human desire for the exotic – manufactured goods, precious stones, metal ores, unusual animals and spices. In particular, the spices cinnamon, ginger and pepper came to generate the lion’s share of profits to the merchants willing to tackle the treacherous sea journeys. The movement of these spices came to be known as the ‘Spice Route’ and eventually spanned 15,000 kilometres (9300 miles) from the west coast of Japan, through the islands of Indonesia, around India to the Middle East and across the Mediterranean to Europe.

  Persian Gulf Routes

  Water transport down the Tigris and Euphrates was likely born about 6000 years ago to transfer copper from the Ergani mines in Anatolia to the southern Sumerian settlements around Uruk in southern Iraq. Travel down the turbulent rivers would have been rapid with prevailing north to south winds; upstream travel would have been very difficult. The earliest vessels of the Mesopotamians were made of reeds or skins to prevent their hitting the bottoms of shallows (Paine, 2013

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  A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era

  • Alain Touwaide(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Figure 3.2 ). Other land routes crossed southwestern Arabia up to the Gulf of Aqaba, and Palestine up to the Mediterranean Sea, or they proceeded to Transjordan, Damascus, and the Orontes Valley up to Antioch.

  FIGURE 3.2 The Silk Road and the Trans-Asian trade, from Past Worlds. The Times Atlas of Archaeology (London: Times Books Limited, 1988), 190–1. © Times Books, HarperCollins Publishers (1988), used with permission.

  The tax codes regulating commercial activity in Byzantium listed the products imported into the Empire from the East. The so-called Alexandrian Tariff in Justinian’s Digest (533) enumerated, under the title Species pertinentes ad vectigal (Types [of products] Subject to Taxation), goods (chiefly spices) that were subjected to a 25 percent tax in Alexandria. Although the Tariff does not cite all the spices traded from the East and Arabia to Byzantium, it is a good indicator of the substances in demand for medical and culinary uses in the eastern Roman Empire. Among the plants of Asian origin and their by-products, were cinnamon bark, long and white pepper, folium pentasphaerum (perhaps nard-leaf), folium barbaricum (an unidentified Barbary leaf), putchuk, costamomum (an ointment prepared with costum and amomum), spikenard, Turian cassia and cassia bark (Cinnamomum aromaticum), myrrh, amomum, ginger, malabathrum (possibly cinnamon leaves), aroma indicum (an unspecified Indian product), galbanum and asafoetida (Ferula spp.), aloe-wood, sarcocolla (Astragalus gummifer), cardamom, and xylocinnamomum, that is, cinnamon-bark. Besides these spices, Byzantine trade with the East also included linen, raw cotton fabrics, and opia indica vel serica

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