Taste of Place

Episode 2

How Pepper Changed Our World

[00:00:00] Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look at the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout this series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:37] Anna Sulan Masing: On the second episode, how pepper changed the world, we dive into how Pepper made its way into Europe via medieval trade systems, and how that in turn changed the way trade was structured and became key to the growth of capitalism. I speak with professor Dr. Paul Freedman, historian and archivist for the Company of Grocers, Dr.

[00:00:58] Anna Sulan Masing: Helen Clifford [00:01:00] and historian and author Lizzy Collingham to help tell this story.

[00:01:09] Anna Sulan Masing: When talking about origins, there is no one set story or beginning, but when the merchant James Lancaster, commander of the East India Company's first fleet arrived back in England in 1603 with ships laden entirely of pepper that marked a turning point, a place where the Western world shifted and there was no going back.

[00:01:36] Anna Sulan Masing: It shifted to a space of desire, a thirst for consumption of product and profit. The unknown became known and ownable. In the words of the late novelist and activist, Ambalavaner Sivanandan when discussing post-colonial migration, "We are here because you were there." [00:02:00] James Lancaster's ship and its crgo of pepper is a part of my story.

[00:02:05] Anna Sulan Masing: How I came to be today as an Iban from Sarawak, raised in New Zealand, and now a British citizen working in London. It is a story of trade, of colonialism and of migration. My interest in Pepper began as mere curiosity. I started seeing Sarawak pepper being sold in fancy stores or displayed on expensive restaurant menus in the UK and Europe.

[00:02:35] Anna Sulan Masing: But in my experience, few people even knew where Sarawak was. So why was this pepper so popular now? It seemed to me that Sarawak Pepper was being portrayed as exotic and exciting. However, at the same time because of the fervor surrounding the upcoming Brexit referendum, I was seeing all around me an idea of nationhood being [00:03:00] created in Britain that was growing more and more violently singular, marginalizing anything or anyone that represented an other.

[00:03:10] Anna Sulan Masing: One of the key points of this rhetoric is a desire to return to the glory days of the British Empire when "things were better." Pepper perfectly shows how a nostalgia for an imagined past, the effects of colonialism and the exoticization of non-Western cultures all connect. As someone who is mixed race with parents from post-colonial spaces, colonialism is extremely relevant to my personal history. Pepper, which originates from and has grown primarily in post-colonial places, guides me on the path I walk today. This episode explores the history of the pepper trade so we can understand the power relationships in this complex system and where our nostalgia truly [00:04:00] comes from.

[00:04:04] Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper is the most traded spice in the world. It was one of the first spices that was traded into Europe and became the blueprint with which colonialism was built. Colonialism was a project in trade in capitalism spearheaded by the English East India Company. To quote, historian and author Alex von Tunzelmann from her book "Indian Summer, The Secret History of the End of Empire,"

[00:04:29] Anna Sulan Masing: "In the beginning there were two nations. One was a vast and mighty magnificent empire, brilliantly organized. The other was an undeveloped, semi feudal realm driven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate masses. The First Nation was India. The second was England." She is referring to the year 1577.

[00:04:53] Anna Sulan Masing: Alex goes on to explain that in 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted charter to the governor and [00:05:00] company of merchants of London trading into the East India, otherwise known as the East India Company. This was for 15 years, but her heir, James I, first canceled the expiry date with only one rule. The company had to turn a profit to keep its charter and in Alex's words, "thus a beast was created whose only objective was money," and she explains

[00:05:23] Anna Sulan Masing: this was pure capitalism unleashed for the first time in history. It was a private empire of money, unburdened by conscience, rampaging across Asia, unfettered into the 1850s. From the late 16 hundreds, the English East India company had its own army, could wage wars, minted its own coin, and brutally acquired new territories to meet its object of profit.

[00:05:53] Anna Sulan Masing: It is through capitalist venture that our modern world is built and to create one that is based on equality, we need to [00:06:00] reimagine a world away from this colonial structure, to decolonize. Looking at Pepper is my way into some of these stories and understanding the past.

[00:06:16] Anna Sulan Masing: I speak with Dr. Paul Freedman to find out about pepper in medieval England and the lead up to colonial times. 

[00:06:26] Dr. Paul Freedman: I'm Paul Freedman. I am a professor of history at Yale University in the United States. My field is medieval history. I'm also interested in the history of food and cuisine. I've written on both subjects, including a book on spices in the Middle Ages, and why the demand for spices was so great.

[00:06:48] Dr. Paul Freedman: For a long time, these were marks of luxury, but in fact, by the late Middle Ages, so the 15th century, pepper is common enough so [00:07:00] that some lords demand small quantities of pepper as part of the rent that their peasants are paying. And pepper in literary works becomes a mark of peasant tastes. So then other spices become prestigious and pepper becomes a little bit what it is in modern times.

[00:07:20] Anna Sulan Masing: It is important to note that there were already vast and complex trade routes throughout the world. A trade that Europe was already a part of, if not directly importing themselves. The Roman were known to love pepper. Both Paul Freedman and Lizzy Collingham spoke to me about how documented pepper was during Roman antiquity.

[00:07:38] Anna Sulan Masing: Helen Clifford makes note in her book on the history of the grosses company that the taste of Pepper in Europe was in part disseminated by the crusaders who returned home with a liking for its hot and dry flavor. Pepper was a known flavor in Europe for a long time.

[00:07:58] Anna Sulan Masing: The story of [00:08:00] spices has always been one of empire. The Mongol Empire, the largest the world has ever seen, was built through brutal campaigns of subjugation, but also resulted in a vast territory that became safe and stable for travelers and traders, which led to the spread of spices to places far from their homelands.

[00:08:22] Dr. Paul Freedman: Up until Marco Polo, so about 1300 and his reports about India, it was widely believed,

[00:08:30] Dr. Paul Freedman: while Pepper came from India, they weren't really sure where India was. It was thought that pepper grew in great profusion in India, in forests, on trees, but that these forests were infested with poisonous snakes and that the only way to get the pepper was to burn the trees, killing or driving out the snakes.

[00:08:54] Dr. Paul Freedman: And by the way, that's why peppercorns look like they've been toasted or burned. That [00:09:00] wrinkled hard surface is because they've been through this fire.

[00:09:06] Anna Sulan Masing: Poisonous snakes and burning trees. It turns out that none of this, of course, was actually how pepper was harvested. Paul tells us the reason for these tales.

[00:09:16] Dr. Paul Freedman: That also was called sometimes a merchant's fable. It explains why the price is so high. You've gotta plant the trees all over again and then wait another how many years before they produce pepper.

[00:09:36] Anna Sulan Masing: What is clear in Paul's telling of spice in the medieval period and in the lead up to colonialism, is that there is some fairly detailed understanding of where spices come from and the idea of the lands beyond Europe. Therefore, any notions of discovery of lands in Asia that often gets perpetuated when discussing the European explorers in the start of Western empires is inaccurate even in their times. [00:10:00] Maps as early as 1492 help understand the trade route. A map by German, Martin Behaim, showed that in the late 1400s, there was at least 12 stages that spice traveled to get West, which is primarily where the costs of spices come in, aided by stories to help them sell at high prices. 

[00:10:19] Dr. Paul Freedman: So those middle men include Italians, particularly the Venetians and the Genoese, Islamic intermediaries, people in India, and those who took the spices either up the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea.

[00:10:34] Dr. Paul Freedman: So they'd be traded, the Venetians and the Genoese would pick them up from places like Beirut, Damascus, Alexandria. 

[00:10:43] Anna Sulan Masing: These maps show that there was a huge desire to understand, find, and acquire these spices. There was a sense abundance in these distant places, which drove countries like Portugal, Spain, and England to find these lands themselves.[00:11:00] 

[00:11:00] Anna Sulan Masing: In 1498, the Portuguese succeeded in finding a sea route to Kerala, circumventing existing trade routes and middlemen, and breaking the Venetian monopoly on the spice trade. The race was on for the other European nations, and in the coming centuries, numerous wars and battles would be fought both diplomatically and militarily for control over these routes..

[00:11:29] Dr. Paul Freedman: You couldn't grow nutmeg in Europe or pepper. Their exotic nature is very much part of their appeal. Their expense, the fact they come from lands that were little known but greatly admired, and about which a lot of legends were elaborated. That doesn't mean that the actual taste wasn't important. On the contrary, they were fascinated by flavors, aromas, [00:12:00] and had a kind of notion of wellness, of spices as beneficial.

[00:12:06] Dr. Paul Freedman: The medical teachings of the time emphasized balance of what were called the humors. These are bodily fluids, blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm, and these correspond to levels of heat and moisture. So, Pepper was hot and dry in the fourth degree. That's as many degrees as there are, so it's very hot and very dry.

[00:12:33] Dr. Paul Freedman: And therefore, according to medical recipes was important to balance out things that were very cold and very wet. So for example, lamprey, which is a kind of eellike creature, very highly prized in the Middle Ages. But dangerous because of its cold and moist nature. 

[00:12:58] Anna Sulan Masing: So listeners, if you'd like [00:13:00] to see what a lamprey looks like, and I'm not sure I would recommend it, to be honest to Google, the spelling is L A M P R E Y.

[00:13:10] Anna Sulan Masing: It's a rather unusual fish. 

[00:13:14] Dr. Paul Freedman: So a hot pepper sauce, hot in the humoral sense, black pepper sauce was ideal with lamprey. Beginning in the 17th century, spices start to disappear from European cuisine. Either they're relegated to desserts like cinnamon or cloves, so by this time the attractive foreign products are things that the Middle Ages didn't know.

[00:13:40] Dr. Paul Freedman: Things like tea or chocolate or coffee, which all have the advantage of having caffeine. Or tobacco, which has the advantage of having nicotine. 

[00:13:52] Anna Sulan Masing: Paul's insight into the way pepper and other goods were understood and consumed during this time made me want to know about the logistics [00:14:00] and power behind these ingredients trade. Here I speak with Dr. Helen Clifford, the historian of the guild that was responsible for pepper and other spices during the medieval Tudor and Jacobean period. 

[00:14:17] Dr. Helen Clifford: I'm Dr. Helen Clifford, and I'm the company archivist for the Worshipful Company of Grocers. My task really is to write the company histories. I'm now on volume two. It's an extraordinary place to work deep in the city with all the skyscrapers, but then we've got a hall that dates back to 1427.

[00:14:37] Anna Sulan Masing: 1180 was when a Guild of Peppers is first recorded. And we know this because there is documentation that they received a fine for operating without a royal license. This fine was happily paid, meaning that the guild existed even if illegally. This fraternity was named "Peppers" because as Helen points out in her second book about the history of the company, it [00:15:00] was the chief staple of their trade.

[00:15:02] Anna Sulan Masing: Enough Pepper was flowing into England in the 1100s for a group to gather to protect their trade. In 1345, the fraternity of peppers was officially founded. 

[00:15:14] Dr. Helen Clifford: Guilds probably originated in Anglo Saxon Times. It's about gathering together people with whom you have a relationship, it might be a trading relationship.

[00:15:24] Dr. Helen Clifford: Many of them started as religious groups. They're really underpinned by this idea of fellowship of of coming together. If they're a trade fraternity, craft fraternity, then they're going to protect that craft so that they flourish, that they outdo competition. So it's important to increase your size and your power over time.

[00:15:48] Anna Sulan Masing: By the late 1300s, they were known as the Company of Grocers.

[00:15:59] Dr. Helen Clifford: About the early [00:16:00] 1300s, this word grocer comes in. You see it in medieval manuscripts and sort of wills and accounts, things like that. But clearly this word has a greater resonance for them. And the word grocer comes from gross. So it's about dealing in bulk. They're seeing themselves as dealers in bulk commodity, as wholesalers, and unfortunately there's a gap in the accounts of the company.

[00:16:26] Dr. Helen Clifford: So we can't actually pin pop the exact date they've decide to become grocers, but certainly by 1375. And I think perhaps it's indicating a, a broadening out of their horizons. 

[00:16:40] Anna Sulan Masing: In 1394, the Guild petitioned the king saying they needed someone to check the goods to ensure they hadn't been doctored. The king agreed.

[00:16:49] Anna Sulan Masing: The grocers became responsible for the goods that came into the country. They had the privilege of weighing the goods. Everyone had to have their goods weighted, and in doing so, they paid a [00:17:00] fee, which the grocers from the time they were known as the pepperers got a percentage off and the crown received the rest. On the company's crest is a camel with a sack of pepper on its back,

[00:17:12] Anna Sulan Masing: as camels were an essential part of the trade route that England was part of up until the end of the medieval times. Helen explained to me that although their focus was in England, their business was trade, and so they had interests much further afield. As global trade grew along with the population of England, the Grocers' members also changed, including mathematical instrument makers, often those who moved to England from the Netherlands, whose inventions were used in navigation and map making. All important for those sailing to newly acquired lands and trading posts. 

[00:17:46] Dr. Helen Clifford: It's very noticeable that grocers are key members of the earliest companies in the 1550s, the Muscovy company, the Levant company.

[00:17:55] Dr. Helen Clifford: They are the movers and shakers, and therefore, it's no surprise that [00:18:00] grocers are very, very key in the East India company. 

[00:18:04] Anna Sulan Masing: After the great fire in London in 1660, when the company lost all of its property and became bankrupt, there is a shift where the grocers try to divorce themselves from trade and go back to the idea of fraternal fellowship to rebuild their reputation, particularly through charitable work.

[00:18:22] Dr. Helen Clifford: Since starting work at the grocers over 10 years ago, I've got a much more complex understanding of this tiny, tiny little seed that's come from so far is a very complex little thing. 

[00:18:33] Dr. Helen Clifford: A peppercorn. 

[00:18:36] Anna Sulan Masing: Demand for pepper and other spices and the desire to acquire them at a lower cost led the British to establish their own trade routes via the East India Company, a historic milestone that, for better or for worse, would change the world. To learn more, I speak with author and historian Lizzie [00:19:00] Collingham.

[00:19:00] Lizzie Collingham: I'm Lizzie Collingham. I'm an independent historian and I write mainly about food and history. I've written about curry. I've written about food and war, a very grim book about food as a weapon of war and food as a driving force for empire, and my latest book was about biscuits. A standard curry that I make for my family all the time is a chicken and potato curry.

[00:19:26] Lizzie Collingham: I'm fed up with eating it, but they still want it. You put 10 whole black peppercorns in with green cardomons and cinnamon and curry leaves or bay leaves. So that's what I think of when I think of black pepper. 

[00:19:39] Anna Sulan Masing: Everyone I interviewed for this season, I asked what does pepper mean to them? And for those that predominantly grew up in the global north, when did they learn that pepper was from somewhere else, was not grown in the global north?

[00:19:54] Anna Sulan Masing: Most people, including those of diaspora, of where Pepper is grown, hadn't thought about it [00:20:00] much until they were adults and interests in history or food, got them thinking. It was an ingredient so ubiquitous to the US and UK tables that it sparked little curiosity. 

[00:20:14] Lizzie Collingham: Like many British people, I think for most of my life, pepper didn't really mean very much at all.

[00:20:20] Lizzie Collingham: When I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, it was just this thing that you had on the table. It was always pre-ground, so it was never actually that nice. I don't like pre-ground. I didn't really pay any attention to it. But once I became interested in India, once I became interested in Indian food, it started to play a large role in my life.

[00:20:42] Anna Sulan Masing: Why I love Lizzie's books is that through storytelling, being engaged in a wide cultural look at a period of time, the small things like Pepper come into focus. Her book "Curry, A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors," is one I lend out so frequently when friends are curious about how food travels. Her book, "The Hungry Empire, How Britain's [00:21:00] Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World," is particularly relevant to the questions I had for this series, and particularly this episode.

[00:21:06] Lizzie Collingham: By the early 17th century, people are beginning to view what happens in your digestive system, particularly in the stomach as a process of fermentation. So they start to favor fermenting food. But at the same time, chemistry is sort of coming up and a French chemist experiments with pepper and he says, Oh, there are in pepper something he calls ironic salts.

[00:21:28] Lizzie Collingham: And these ironic salts are seen as being useful in promoting fermentation. And so pepper stays in the savory dishes as it's good to put on your dishes to help fermentation in the digestive system. And so salt and pepper become the pair of spices that you put on the table, that you put in your food. Most of the French nouvelle cuisine, 17th century dishes have salt and pepper in them. Just the second [00:22:00] when he's reinstated in 1660 up to the throne,

[00:22:03] Lizzie Collingham: he's been in exile in France, he brings that way of cooking with him into Britain. 

[00:22:10] Anna Sulan Masing: What Pepper does is bring England into the Indian Ocean, into a complex and vibrant trade system. As Lizzie says in her book, "The Hungry Empire," the Europeans who sailed to the Indies muscled their way into the liveliest commercial zone in the early modern world.

[00:22:29] Anna Sulan Masing: It was an incredibly diverse system and complex trading chains stretched across many ports, and therefore there were more things than spices to be interested in. 

[00:22:42] Lizzie Collingham: So the Romans brought silver to buy pepper, and the Portuguese and the Dutch and the British do that too. Silvers what they can sell in return for pepper.

[00:22:55] Lizzie Collingham: But they soon discover that they can get pepper for it in India. But [00:23:00] if they sail on further east to the Spice Islands in the Malaccas and where Indonesia is now, people aren't so interested in silver. What they want is the Indian textiles. And you take those textiles then to your spice lines. You swap the textiles for spices, and then you sail back.

[00:23:20] Lizzie Collingham: The British start to realize, Oh wow, these are amazing textiles with these beautiful, I mean, if you look at Indian textiles, still these printed fabrics and so on, so they become very fashionable and soon pepper actually becomes a fairly unimportant trading good. And instead they're focusing on bringing back bales and bales of Calicos and so on.

[00:23:44] Lizzie Collingham: And that creates a desire for these things. You get a desire for beauty in terms of a lovely soft Calico underwear and so on, and that drives the trading circuits further. [00:24:00] So before that, you might go to a fair or the local town to the market to buy your food. And peddlers would come round with sacks, with ribbons in for girls' hair and stuff like that, that you might occasionally buy these things.

[00:24:16] Lizzie Collingham: But with the growth of these empire commodities coming in, these are new tastes, new flavors. They're exciting and exotic. They reach down into ordinary people. And so the consumer revolution is sort of getting going. People are able to buy more products. And you get these little village shops that set up maybe in somebody's front room or a little awning on the side of an inn where they sell tea and sugar, a few spices and you can pop in and out.

[00:24:50] Anna Sulan Masing: This expansion of trade led the British, in particular, the East India company with its trade monopolies to other areas of Asia in pursuit of various good. [00:25:00] To quote Lizzie in her chapter, How Pepper took the British to India, new consumables were arriving in England from the colonies in unprecedented quantities.

[00:25:10] Anna Sulan Masing: One of these was tea, and with it the demand for sugar used in likeliness to temper the bitterness. The thirst for sugar led to the expansion of sugar plantations, particularly in the Caribbean, which ultimately led to the transport of people to work those plantations. In his book, "Sweetness and Power, The Place of Sugar and Modern History,"

[00:25:31] Anna Sulan Masing: American anthropologist, Sydney W Mintz writes, "English people came to view sugar as essential.. Supplying them with it became as much a political as an economic obligation." His book explains how riches from these colonial plantations were accumulated to quote, "by the labor of millions of slaves stolen from Africa on millions of acres of the new world,

[00:25:58] Anna Sulan Masing: stolen [00:26:00] from native peoples."

[00:26:05] Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper is a plant that launched a thousand ships. It sits in my hand today, black and wrinkled, coarse against my fingers as I tip it into my mortar and pestle. I'm a product of colonialism. I'm a child of the empire, a mother of milk and honey, a father of rubber and guilt money and other of all places that have been mapped in, my existence began when those ships set sail when royalty granted trade.

[00:26:35] Anna Sulan Masing: My past is woven across bodies of water. It's part of my senses, the texture of my being. It feeds into my belonging, my understanding of home, my longing and desire for places that exist across time. The past sits with me now alongside the possibility of a future. Pepper became the tool to pave the way for desire for commodities that far [00:27:00] surpassed our needs.

[00:27:02] Anna Sulan Masing: A tool for greed, of profit that demanded labor beyond any idea of equality and ethics. One that enslaved tens of millions of people, indentured communities, stole land and took people far from home. The riches that pepper provided created wars and has our history soaked in blood, in sweat, in tears. These routes across the globe sought out for the privilege of a few are now ingrained in the systems we live in.

[00:27:34] Anna Sulan Masing: These pathways become ones that many traverse, people, plants, knowledge. We cannot undo what has been done, but we can see it with fresh eyes and see the worn in lines, and try instead to find better ways across the world. We can realize the pain and also give power to those original farmers by honestly investigating the past [00:28:00] and by thinking critically about the systems of trade we participate in now.

[00:28:08] Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you so much for listening to episode two of Taste of Place. Thank you to my guests. Dr. Paul Freedman, Dr. Helen Clifford, and Lizzie Collingham. And thank you to Celine Amendola for assisting with recording for this episode. I would recommend listening to Black Material Geographies, especially episode eight which looks at cotton, on how textiles became one of the catalysts for British colonialism.

[00:28:36] Anna Sulan Masing: This podcast is part of the Whetstone Radio Collective family, and explores how to create more sustainable systems through the lens of blackness and textile material culture. I'd like to thank my producer, Catherine Yang, audio editor Dayana Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi. I'd also like to thank [00:29:00] Whetstone founder Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer Celine Glasier, Sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, Music Director Catherine Yang, managing producer Marvin Yueh, Associate producer Quentin Lebeau, Production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production assistant Maha Sanad, and publicist Melissa Haughton. The music created by Catherine Yang and cover Art created by Whetstone Art Director, Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, on TikTok, @WhetstoneMedia,

[00:29:42] Anna Sulan Masing: and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media, for more podcast content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at WhetstoneMedia.com.