Between East and West

Home > American Philosophical Society >

Between East and West: The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the Arrival of Europeans (Memoir 248)

Our Price: $40.00

By R. A. Donkin
Year: 2003
Pages: 274
Binding Hardcover
ISBN 0871692481

Product Code: 0871692481

Description

Memoir 248
Up to & including the Age of Discoveries, the wealth of the East was thought in Europe to consist primarily of spices & aromatics. Cloves, nutmeg, mace, & sandalwood all were thought to come from a few small islands in easternmost Indonesia, which no European reached before 1500. Yet supplies of these luxury products were reaching China, India, western Asia, & the Mediterranean lands more than a thousand years earlier. This study of Moluccan spices opens with their natural history & nomenclature, & the discovery of the Islands by Europeans near the opposing (& controversial) limits of Spanish & Portuguese jurisdiction. Donkin traces the expanding interest & long-distance trade in cloves, nutmeg, & sandalwood, first to India & then to the adjacent Arabo-Persian world. The medieval West & China lay on the margins of diffusion, the former in touch with the Levant, the latter with the trading world of South East Asia.

Share your knowledge of this product with other customers... Be the first to write a review