Spice Trade Research Paper

Words: 581
Pages: 3

Modern trade and their trade routes all started in the same place at relatively the same time. Some of the events caused many more to occur with it. The Spice Trade is an example when it was all started at the end of the Silk Road; it went on to become the most profitable time of trade, and changed the course of the modern world.
The Silk Road was an “ancient network of trade routes used between 130 BCE-1453 CE” established by the “Han Dynasty” (Mark 1). The Silk Road connected China to the Middle East, Greece, Rome, and Britain (Mark 15). Some of the items traded on the Silk Road included: spices, medicine, rice, slaves, gold and silver, horses, weapons and armor (Mark 3, 4). At the end the closure of the Silk Road in “1453” caused the Age
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Spices such as, cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger and turmeric were some of the important cargos of commerce in the “earliest evolution of trade” (Bhutia 2). The main reason the Age of Discovery occurred was because the countries dependent on the spices needed to discover new spice producing lands. One of the largest discoveries to come from the Age of Discovery was the finding of the Americas, as well as new trade routes, and spices. When the Spice Trade was in its prime, some of the major countries and governments included: the Romans in Egypt and India, Spain, Britain, China, and the Middle East (Bhutia 3). These countries obtained economic success by exploring and controlling trade routes. To gain the most control and profit over the trade routes Spain created the “prosperous Dutch East India Company” founded in 1602 (Bhutia 8). With the same idea, “Louis XIV”, the king of France, by “state authorization” created the “French East India Company” in “1664” (Bhutia 9). The Chinese crossed the “Malay Archipelago” to create trade in the Spice Islands or formally known as the East Indies (Bhutia 2). The majority of these major trade routes “stretched form the west coast of Japan, through Indonesia, around India”, through