37Old spice
An 18th-century illustration of clove leaves and buds.
Cloves, which were extremely valuable, were among
the crops that inspired Portuguese and Dutch traders
to find quick sea routes to the Spice Islands (Maluku)The huge economic cog
of the triangular trade,
conveniently powered by
the wind patterns of the
Atlantic, generated huge
profits for its masters
to sail the Brouwer Route was half that of the traditional pas-
sage – around six months, rather than a full year. It also had
another notable impact: the critical gateway into the East Indies,
which had been the Strait of Malacca, became the Sunda Strait
between Java and Sumatra, and the Dutch colony of Batavia
(present-day Jakarta) replaced Portuguese Malacca as the key
strategic port in the region.
In 1652, the Dutch founded a colony at Cape Town to
resupply ships that were about to undertake the long voyage
across the chill southern waters of the Indian Ocean – hence
this use of the Roaring Forties wind belt is the reason
why Afrikaans (which is derived from the Dutch spoken
by 17th-century settlers) is spoken today in South Africa.
The Dutch East Indies, headquartered in Batavia, became the
dominant trade power in that part of south-east Asia as a result,
expanding its control to encompass all of what’s now Indonesia
until the Second World War.
Whereas the quest for spices had been the prime motivation
during the early years of the Age of Exploration, by 1700 other
commodities were beginning to dominate oceanic trade. Crops
such as cotton, sugar, tobacco and coffee had been transported
to and grown in plantations in the Americas, creating a high de-
mand for labour to produce them in mass for European markets.
The Atlantic triangular trade that emerged from the late
16th century had arguably the greatest impact on the modern
world. Though Portuguese traders began transporting slaves
from the west African coast to Brazil around 1502, it was duringthe following century that the triangular trade became the
primary pattern for English, French, Portuguese and Dutch.
Ships involved in this trade sailed south from Europe laden
with goods such as textiles and weapons manufactured in these
developed nations; these were sold on the west African coast.
Those cargoes were replaced by enslaved people who had been
captured in west and central Africa, and who were sold to the
European traders. Transported west across the Atlantic, these
people were sold to plantation owners in Brazil, the Caribbean
and North America; the ships then carried the produce of slaves’
forced labour in the New World – sugar, cotton and tobacco, in
particular – back to Europe (and, sometimes, New England,
where sugar was used to distil rum) to complete the loop.
Each turn of this huge economic cog, conveniently powered
by the wind patterns of the Atlantic, generated huge profits for
its masters, and the supply of cheap overseas cotton helped
drive mechanisation in the early stages of the Industrial Revo-
lution in Britain in the latter 18th century.
It’s clear, then, that the pattern of winds and fundamental
circulation systems within Earth’s atmosphere determined the
routes of huge continent-linking
trade networks – and, therefore,
the pattern of colonisation and
empire-building that emerged
during the modern era, planting
the foundations of globalisation
and the modern world.Lewis Dartnell is a professor
at the University of Westmin-
ster, and the author of Origins:
How the Earth Made Us
(Bodley Head, 2019)ИЗП
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