ADVENTURERS, missionaries and spice traders were the most important agents for the exploration of the world. Spices have been attracting Roman and Chinese traders to India since before the time of Christ. The spice trade developed throughout West Asia in around 2,000 BC with cinnamon and pepper. The Egyptians used herbs for embalming and their need for exotic herbs helped stimulate world trade. Spices were among the most luxurious products available in Europe in the Middle Ages with the most important being black pepper, cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg, ginger and clove. They were all imported from plantations in Asia and Africa that made them extremely expensive.

According to popular belief, Europeans sought Indian spices to make their meats more palatable after being frozen during the winter. Pepper enhanced the shelf life while the aroma of the spices, more than its piquant taste, cast a strong spell on European imagination. The romance associated with spices, the mystery of their origins and the dangers involved in collecting them made the Europeans willing to pay the high prices demanded by the Arab traders who transported them.

For 1,500 years, until the Europeans found the direct route to the east, Arabs enjoyed a virtual monopoly.

Recent archaeological discoveries suggest that clove, indigenous to the Indonesian island of Ternate in the Malaku islands, could have been introduced to west Asia earlier than thought.

Clove on the floor of a burned down kitchen in a Mesopotamian site that is now in modern-day Syria dated to 1,700 BC. In South Asia, nutmeg originated from the Banda islands in the Mollukas. In any case, it is known that the Romans had cloves in the 1st century AD because Pliny the Elder wrote about them.

Indonesian merchants went around China, India, west Asia and the east Africa. The city of Alexandria then became a major trading centre.

From the 8th until the 15th century, the republic of Venice gained the monopoly on this spice trade and became phenomenally rich. It has been estimated that around 1,000 tonnes of pepper and 1,000 tonnes of the other common spices were imported into western Europe each year during the late Middle Ages. While pepper was the most common spice, the most exclusive was saffron that was used as much for its vivid yellow-red colour as for its flavour.

The control of trade routes and the spice producing regions were the main reasons that drove the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, who sailed to India in 1499 as Spain and Portugal were unhappy to pay the high prices that Venice demanded. At around the same time, Christopher Columbus returned from the New World, he described to investors the many new, and previously unknown spices available there.

With the discovery of the New World came new spices, including especially chilies.

Although new settlers brought herbs from North America, before 1750 it was thought that they could not grow outside their native habitats. This belief made the spice trade, with America as a latecomer.