Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source, setting in motion a fierce competition for control. From 1511 to 1571, European powers linked up the oceans, established vast maritime empires, and gave birth to global trade, all in the attempt to control the supply of spices.

On October 9, British historian Roger Crowley will join an online talk on his book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2024). Drawing on vivid eyewitness accounts of adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters, he will show how this struggle shaped the modern world and remade the world economy for centuries to follow.