act that until very recently they were rare and expensive commodities.
Indeed, the history of commerce and trade is the history of spices and it's no exaggeration to say that America would not have been discovered were it not for the European desire to break the Arab traders' monopoly on spices. But to understand the spice trade we need to go back to its origins, which can actually be traced back five thousand years in the historical records (and probably represents a trade that's thousands of