Weekend Playlist: The Spice Route

Goodlifer: Weekend Playlist: The Spice Route

Spices were an important component of ancient commerce well before the 15th-century, but were monopolized for centuries by Middle Eastern and North African middlemen who guarded the Asian provenance of their valuable sources closely and became fabulously wealthy for it. Back then, the colorful grains were used for flavoring food, but also for such tasks as making perfume, embalming the dead, preserving meat and sprucing up salve recipes in traditional medicine. Europe dangled at the far end of the trading chain for spices, without access to eastern sources or the power to contest exorbitant prices. At one point in the 1300s, when tariffs were at their highest, a pound of nutmeg in Europe cost seven fattened oxen and was a more valuable commodity than gold.

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Excerpt from How the Spice Trade Changed the World, by Heather Whipps, LiveScience’s History Columnist

About author
Cuban born with Catalan roots and raised in the Miami, Baradat came to New York to study at Parsons School of Design, New York. Committed to beauty and order, his original art ranges from home furnishings to product design, conceptual illustrations, book covers to promotional and institutional graphics. He has received numerous awards for his work, has been commissioned to design several U.S. postage stamps and is featured in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design in New York and The Postal Museum in Washington DC. In his free time, Baradat is an amazing cook, frequent dinner party host, art aficionado and hardcore lover of music.
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