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The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire*
PAULA DE VOS
San Diego State University
| It is a little-known fact among historians that the Spanish crown sought out and encouraged the cultivation of spices for most of its imperial history, both in the Americas and in the Philippines. We are well aware that the search for direct access to the Eastern spice trade was a major motivation for support for Columbus's voyages—but once it became clear that Columbus had found no such route, our attention veers away from spices. Yet for colonial Spanish administrators and entrepreneurs, spices continued to be a product of considerable interest and investment throughout the three centuries of Spanish rule in the Americas. The purpose of this essay is to trace the various manifestations of that interest in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and to discuss what it reveals about Spanish imperial aspirations and the strategies used to accomplish them. |
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Why is it that Spanish efforts to cultivate spices have received so little attention from historians? It could be argued that the lack of attention is due to the fact that a significant spice trade never resulted. The Eastern spice trade continued to be dominated by Portuguese merchants in the sixteenth century and was overtaken by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth. Most spices collected in Indonesia and China still made their way to Europe westward along the routes of the "monsoon fleets," from Macao to Goa, across the Indian Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope to their European destinations. And although the Manila galleon trade route between Manila and Acapulco did supply Mexico with some of its cinnamon, Spain's American colonies continued to receive most of their Eastern spices from Spain—via the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic rather than the more direct route across the Pacific. |
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Yet what appear to be the doomed efforts of the crown to overtake the spice trade actually reveal much about the crown's imperial aims and help to clarify the rationale behind policies that have often been deemed inefficient at best. Accounts of the rise of English and Dutch global commerce in the early modern period often dismiss the Spanish imperial system as one steeped in secrecy and xenophobia, based on protectionist principles that choked entrepreneurial spirit and hindered economic development. What these assumptions fail to recognize, however, is that many of the protectionist policies of the Spanish crown were not only perfectly rational given the goals and needs of imperial policy, but actually fostered innovative practices usually seen as distinctly "modern." To illustrate this point, this essay focuses on one particular area of the imperial economy—the support for spice cultivation and trade—in order to demonstrate how this support constituted a policy of state-sponsored economic botany initiated in the sixteenth century and pursued for three centuries. |
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Economic botany is essentially the practice of studying the botanical properties of plants that may be of use to human society and cultivating them for profit. According to the modern, formalized definition put forth by economic botanists, it is "the study of plants, fungi, algae and bacteria that directly or indirectly, positively or adversely affect man, his livestock, and the maintenance of the environment. The effects may be domestic, commercial, environmental, or purely aesthetic; their use may belong to the past, the present, or the future."1 |
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