The story of spices

Abstract

As was stated in a review of this book (EcoNOMIC BOTANY, July-September, 1954), every school child learns, presumably, that Columbus discovered America as a result of his effort to find a new route to the Indies, the lands of spices, but that the full significance of this statement, very likely, is appreciated by few. The importance lies in the fact that for two or three hundred years, beginning about five centuries ago, spices were of such great importance to the peoples of Europe that efforts to obtain them led to the greatest period of exploration the world has ever known, and to wars between nations contending for control of the routes to the sources of spices, once those sources had been found by the Europeans. Other groups of plants-food plants, drug plants and timber trees, to mention only three-have been of greater importance for the welfare of mankind, but none of them has had so great a world-wide influence on the political destinies of man as did spices. References to this role of spices are abundant in the popular literature on economically important plants, but nowhere else, at least in recent years, has the story been brought together and so admirably presented in delightful reading style as in this book. Excerpts, totaling 20 pages of the book, and abstracts of other parts constitute the following condensed version. So much more is contained in the book, however, that the student of ethnobotany, particularly of its historical aspects, will want to read the original in its entirety.