Dutch spice trade

By 1799, the British held northern Borneo, India, Ceylon, Siagapore, and the mainland of Malay to the borders of Siam, and allowed the Dutch to retain the islands of the Malay Archipelago. The center of the spice trade ia the West shifted to London. 

Figure 2.5. When the Dutch gained a near monopoly on the spice trade into northern Europe, the resulting wealth made Amsterdam one of the richest cities in the world, with a consequential blossoming of the arts, education, medicine and science.

Not just the House of Orseolo. A hundred years ago the Republic was great, and the Orseolos were great, but then the accursed Portugese found a way around Africa and now the Dutch heretics are stealing our spice trade. Every mercantile house has been declining. The last twenty years have been especially hard for some, but the old man perhaps did not see this as well as he should. He may have blamed Enrico unfairly. ... 

In 1780, the Dutch and English fought a war over the spice trade and the Dutch lost all spice trading centres. The Americans began their entry into the world spice race in 1672 (ASTA, 1960). 

In the seventeenth century, nutmeg became an important article in the spice trade, which the Dutch monopolized for a long while with their naval superiority. "So precious were nutmegs, writes the botanist William Em-boden in Narcotic Plants,... 

The Dutch were the first to challenge Portugal s domination of the East. Late in the sixteenth century, the Dutch East India Company established its overseas headquarters at Batavia on the island of Java. From this outpost, it quickly took control of the spice trade and deliberately destroyed plant life in the East Indies to dry up supply sources. The effect of an increasing demand for sugar, cinnamon, and other spices, and a market deliberately crippled through manipulation of raw materials, was a skyrocketing increase in prices. The wealthier the Dutch became, the harder they tried to keep other nations from securing a foothold of their own in the rich spice lands of the East. 

Control of the spice trade passed through several hands over the ages. The initial supremacy of the Portuguese was replaced at the end of the sixteenth century by the Dutch who maintained their control of the spice trade until well into the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century Great Britain dominated this position, but today the U.S. is the major importer of these materials with New York as its trading center. 

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