How Cloves Rewrote The Course Of History
Image Credit: Cloves, once Ternate's prized commodity, drove European rivalries, colonisation, and global trade, before declining as cultivation spread and demand diminished.

Editor's Note: Wild Fictions (HarperCollins) — a new collection of essays by Amitav Ghosh, from which the below excerpt is reproduced — brings together the Jnanpith awardee's extraordinary writings on subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; human lives, travel and discoveries. From the significance of the commodification of the clove to the diversity of the mangrove forests in Bengal and the radical fluidity of multilingualism, Wild Fictions is a fascinating exploration of the fictions we weave to absorb history. This excerpt has been republished with due permission from HarperCollins.

Cover of Amitav Ghosh's (right) latest book Wild Fictions.

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‘TREES WERE MY TEACHERS,’ wrote the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and if there is any place on Earth that could say the same of itself, it is Ternate, a tiny island in the archipelago that was once known as the Moluccas or Spice Islands. It is now part of the province of North Maluku, in the far eastern reaches of Indonesia.

The seas here are dotted with volcanic islands and Ternate is one such; the surface of the island is nothing but the gently sloping cone of a volcano, Mt Gamalama, which rises from the seafloor to a height of over 5,000 feet.

Ternate is a place that would, by most reckonings, be considered very far removed from the pathways of history. But the island was, in fact, a driver of global history for many centuries, as will be evident to anyone who sets eyes on the innumerable colonial forts that line its shores. The reason for this was a uniquely valuable tree that happened to grow on Ternate and the islands around it: Syzygium aromaticum, the tree that produces the clove.

This spice, which was once immensely valuable, made Ternate prosperous and powerful for hundreds of years. But in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of the era of European colonisation, Ternate’s ‘tree of life’ also brought disaster upon the islanders. Various groups of European colonisers fought over Ternate and its surrounding islands in the course of a bloody struggle to establish a monopoly over the trade in cloves. The Dutch eventually prevailed, and in the seventeenth century they turned the island into a colony and decreed that henceforth cloves would only be grown on another island, in the southern Moluccas.

The people of Ternate were forced, by the terms of a Dutch-enforced treaty, to ‘extirpate’ every clove tree on their island. The tree that had been Ternate’s teacher would not return to the slopes of Mt Gamalama until the next century, when cloves were already being cultivated elsewhere and had drastically declined in value.

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Ternate and [the near-identical Indonesian island] Tidore were sustained by the clove trade, and their sultans competed actively with each other to attract traders from different countries. This was the practice of many other rulers of ports and city-states in the Indian Ocean, including, for example, the aptly named Samudri Rajas (or Zamorins) of Calicut.

These rulers could not afford to offend one group of traders over another; their prosperity depended on the number of merchants they could attract to their ports, and to that end they would cut taxes, offer goods at lower prices and provide land and protection for foreigners and their places of worship. Ruler competed against ruler and merchant against merchant; often there was not much to distinguish the one from the other.

These practices were very different from those of Europe and the Mediterranean, where maritime powers commonly sought to monopolise the trade in certain goods. Among the most lucrative of these monopolies was that of the spice trade, which had for several centuries belonged to the Venetian Republic. But this was essentially a transhipment trade that depended on alliances with the Islamic realms of the eastern Mediterranean, most notably Egypt. By the time Asian spices reached Venice, they had already changed hands many times in the course of their long journey across the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.

This gave other European maritime powers very good reasons to find an alternative route to the Indian Ocean: by doing so, they could at one stroke destroy Venice’s monopoly, weaken the Muslim states of the Middle East, and also eliminate the chain of middlemen who profited from the handling of spices on their journey to Europe.

So it happened that spices became the grail that launched the great voyages of the Age of Discovery: they were the prize that caused Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan to hoist their sails. What they all hoped to do was control the mechanisms of the spice trade and create monopolies.

On reaching the Malabar coast, Vasco da Gama lost no time in trying to impose terms that would exclude other buyers, particularly Arabs and Muslims, from the pepper trade. But pepper was too widely cultivated for a monopoly to be feasible. The tiny, almost defenceless islands where clove, nutmeg and mace were found offered much greater scope for monopoly building... or so it must have seemed to the Portuguese, who soon set off in search of the ‘spiceries’ of the East Indies. In 1512, just ten years after seizing Goa, they arrived in Ternate, where they immediately tried to take exclusive control of the trade in cloves.

But their European rivals were hot on their heels: first the Spanish, followed by the Dutch and the English, who fought each other as pitilessly as they did the inhabitants of the Moluccas.

Ultimately it was the Dutch who triumphed, and the Moluccas became the foundation of their empire in Asia. It was in the Moluccas too that the British acquired their first Asian possessions, two tiny nutmeg-growing islands in the Banda archipelago called Ai and Run. They would cling doggedly to Run Island for decades and be richly rewarded for their tenacity.

The Dutch were so eager to evict them from their toehold in the East Indies that in 1667, they signed a treaty in which the English gave up their claim on Run in return for the confirmation of their right to territories on the other side of the planet. Included among these was another island: Manhattan.

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The journey of the clove is itself illustrative of the pace at which civilisation accelerated once the conditions were right. The earliest forms of writing appeared around 3,200 BCE, and within a millennium and a half, cloves had already become articles of luxury consumption more than 10,000 kilometres from the islands where they grew. From then on, the demand for them mounted steadily, not so much because of the purpose they served but because of what they had come to represent.

Cloves were a product that people needed in order to keep up with others, or to prove a point to their neighbours. They were the progenitor of the luxury good — the Fabergé egg or the Gucci handbag — except that they played that role for thousands of years. ‘[The clove] is the precious Commodity,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Spanish historian, ‘which gives Power and Wealth to ... Kings and causes their wars. Tis the fruit of Discord ... for it there has been, and still is, more fighting than for the Mines of Gold.’

What this passage describes, however, is just a moment in the life cycle of this commodity. Eventually, seedlings of cloves and nutmeg were smuggled out of the Moluccas and transplanted elsewhere. As spices became more easily available, they lost their mystique. In Europe, where foods had once been very heavily spiced, tastes changed, and the per capita consumption of spices began a long, steady decline. By the late eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company was mired in corruption and effectively bankrupt.

This cycle too is representative of something much greater than itself — it is a cautionary tale about processes of phenomenal growth that burn themselves out, depleting the very resources that fuel them.

Wild Fictions by Amitav Ghosh | HarperCollins | Hardback | Non-fiction | 496 pp | INR 799.