[.ca] The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade (ISBN 1568362498)

An Inconsistent History of the Spice Trade:
Charles Corn's "The Scents of Eden" seeks to document the history of the spice trade, focusing on the control of a few key islands in the East Indies where the historically most valuable spices (notably cloves and nutmeg) originated. Corn's effort is a little spotty: I found him both interesting and readable in some places, and neither in many other places. I think about 60% of this book presents interesting and relevant material, but the remaining 40% felt like filler to me. The portions of the book where Corn discusses the key spice-producing islands, their discovery and the imperialistic practices that controlled them, were generally very interesting, and read quickly and with satisfaction. Moreover, I found Corn's writing style generally pleasant to read, and appropriate (or at least acceptable) for "popular" history. The early chapters were among the better ones. However, Corn doesn't seem to have enough material to make all 319 pages interesting, or perhaps the topic just isn't robust enough for that much book. Either way, I found many chapters off topic, and felt like I was suffering through a droning lecture. For example, Corn provides long descriptions of Amsterdam, London and Salem, none of which seemed more than peripherally relevant to me. More irritating was a rather gratuitous description of Dutch atrocities to both native inhabitants and other pesky Europeans (most notably, the English). While these seemed well documented (among the best documented material Corn presents), I thought he'd made his point adequately in earlier discussions of the topic, and this elaboration didn't seem to add anything to the book. For my money, "The Scents of Eden" isn't polished enough to make for a serious academic work, and isn't interesting or consistent enough to be top shelf "popular" history. While it had its moments, I found myself struggling through mediocre material in the later parts. And the abundance of chapters that I found off-topic made me question the significance of the entire subject. If you're considering reading this, you may enjoy the book somewhat, but I'd recommend something by Tuchman or Gleeson well ahead of this book.

Poorly documented and annoying use of English:
I didn't like this book. In fact, it was so annoying that I didn't finish it. The writing is at times ridiculously fancy - e.g., "as exotic as the plumage of a bird of paradise." YUK! The documentation is worthless. For example, in the preface the author claims that Europeans didn't know how to transplant trees and plants until the late 18th Century. I found this claim hard to believe and tried to look up the reference in the bibliography. When I got to the bibliography it was just a couple of pages of notes for the entire book. None of the references corresponded to pages in the text, not even to chapters, but rather only to Parts I, II & III. In the bibliography the author says things like, "So and so's book is very informative on 17th Century English commerce." That just won't do - even for popular history. The sloppy documentation just made the many distracting bursts of baroque verbiage unbearable. I made it through the first 100 pages, then couldn't stand it any longer. In sum, I feel for this author. A good editor could have corrected many of these problems before the book went into print.

Hellish Journeys to Paradise:
"In The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade" American writer Charles Corn dishes up a pungent tale of the West's involvement in the eastern spice trade. Although the use of these condiments can be traced back to antiquity, the history of the origins of its commerce is sketchy at best. Until the arrival of the European explorers on the coast of East Indies, the trade had been firmly in the hands of Indian nakhodas and the real-life alter ego's of Sindbad the Sailor for centuries. Hardly any accounts of their exploits survive, at least not in any language accessible to the author. In the wake of their victory over the last Muslim vestiges on the Iberian Peninsula, Portuguese navigators set out to find their own way to the riches of the orient. By obtaining them at their source they would ensure that the dazzling profits to be made in this business would solely be theirs. In this first part of his historical account, Corn introduces a number of colorful characters: swaggering adventurers of a type later immortalized by Joseph Conrad in "Lord Jim", as well as zealots like the warrior-priest Francis Xavier, whose proselytizing efforts took him all over Asia. Thus we are presented with an animated image of early European colonialism, an era in which the protagonists served both treasury and the cross. Much gloomier is the picture painted of the next phase of European exploits. In an attempt to obtain a unchallenged monopoly over the trade in both pepper and the 'holy trinity of spices': clove, nutmeg and mace, the merchants of the Dutch Republic have no qualms about exterminating the native population of the isles or subjecting their competitors to unspeakable cruelty. The figure of Jan Pietersz. Coen, a dour accountant turned Governor General, looms large over this episode, serving as the archetype of the unscrupulous East India Company official. Unfeeling and clinical, he sees terror as a tool to reach his objective: total Dutch control over all trade in the Far East. With surgical precision he executes his plans. His letters to the company directors back home in the Netherlands read like present-day management reports, in which the firing of thousands of workers and the muscling-out of competitors of a market are rendered in the same benign prose. While he retains a certain sympathy for Portuguese and English, the Dutch - to Corn - are insensitive, greedy, amoral, in short: plain evil. But it must be said: Corn spins a magnificent yarn. It is unfortunate that, towards the end of the third part of the book - dedicated to the American participation in the global spice trade, he derails into a moralistic tale, in which the New England merchants and skippers from Salem, Massachusetts, are cast in the unlikely role of 'Hollywood' white knights. Here Corn puts his credibility as a competent historian in jeopardy. While one of the contemporary actors in the episode displays a willingness to accept that not all of his fellow countrymen were of unblemished repute, Corn wants nothing of that. So when, after his ship has been hijacked by the Malays, Captain Charles Endicott surmises that this may be the result of the practices of certain dishonest American traders, Corn rejects this out of hand as he writes: 'this speculation on Endicott's part is unconvincing. A more likely explanation is that three centuries of infidel European colonization in the Indies - the successive waves of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English - had bred a profound distrust of Christian Europeans on the part of Muslim Malays in a part of the world where word spread across the waters with the wind \o...\c The straight-talking, square-dealing sons of Salem had not earned the natives' contempt 250 years later, they merely inherited it from their predecessors." At first it seems that Corn has fallen victim to the kind of naivité or innocence he wants to celebrate in his heroes. But as he elaborates further on the episode and the ensuing punitive campaign organized by the US navy, one can not dispel the thoght that the author is actually employing the incident as the paradigm for future American interventions elsewhere in the world: protecting American interests overseas is (always) done for morally sound reasons. In underlying message seems to be that in its current, self-appointed role as the world's policeman, the US is confronted with the consequences of wrongs committed by others. And so a well-told 'tale of sea' suddenly appears to get political undertones. What a pity.

He who is Lord of Malacca has Venice by the Throat:
Thus goes the old saying which aptly summarised the politics and economics of the renaissance spice trade. Charles Corn's splendid narrative of the spice trade seeks to explain the forces which inspired Western Europeans to commit acts of bravery and madness in pursuit of nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and pepper. Provided you didn't get yourself either killed by the weird island Sultans of the various East Indies, or robbed by a rival merchant fleet, the spice trade offered profits well in excess of 1000%. The spice trade started with Portugal's efforts to win control of Malacca (in modern Malaysia); it continued with the establishment of the two rival East India Companies (Dutch and English respectively), who fought control of the Banda island group. (At that time, Banda had the world's monopoly on nutmeg, the King of Spices.) Corn has visited the Banda group (modern Indonesia) and as a result, his descriptions of these once-prized possessions has a sure sense of place. Also enjoyable are the later chapters dealing with the American intrusion into the spice trade, which, as Corn notes, was closely linked to the American slave trade. "Scents of Eden" complements another recent tale of pirate-capitalism, "The Power of Gold."

Fills in knowledge gap:
Nice, interesting historical read. This book filled in a lot of gaps in my historical knowledge. The book is a nicely interwoven tale of various personas involved in the spice trade as well as the macro-history of this trade. My only complaint is that at times the book would give overly-flowery descriptions within the historical context. I understand that this is done to make the book more readable, it just over does it at times. Or it could be that I'm being overly-critical because I read Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel right before reading this (Diamond's book does an absolutely perfect job of walking the line between readability and scientific rigor).