Read The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism for Free Online Page B

foods turned into delicious repasts with the addition of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and especially pepper. With salt and sugar rare and expensive, most people had to content themselves with tasteless meals. The thrill of seasoning sent Dutch, French, and English trading companies throughout the Indies to establish trading outposts. Going by sea made it much easier to carry heavy cargo than overland.
    Since the time of the Roman Empire, Europeans had had some contact overland with the Orient, but famines and epidemics could wipe out commercial connections for decades. Arab traders were often successful in rupturing the European trade routes as well. It took experienced merchants like the Venetian family of Marco Polo to carry on this hazardous trade. The lateen-rigged ships and recently discovered sea routes gave Europeans a cheaper, safer way of establishing what turned out to be permanent contact by sea.
    Four years after Dias made his way to the Orient, Columbus’s pioneering route to the New World triggered another round of explorations. These voyages took Europeans to the islands and continents of the Western Hemisphere and to the discovery of just how large the globe really was. Educated people had long known that the earth was round, but they had no idea of its circumference. The conquests of Mexico and Peru gave Spaniards access to Aztec and Incan mines as well. Gold and silver extracted from these mines began pouring into Europe. Far more important, the ships crossing the Atlantic brought animals and plants that dramatically transformed the societies on both sides of the ocean. What has been called the Columbian exchange completed the biological and botanic homogeneity of our planet. 2
    Alas, germs lethal to the inhabitants of the New World were part of that exchange. The arrival of newcomers in the Western Hemisphere triggered an unintended holocaust, for the Europeans carried with them lethal microorganisms against which the native population had no protection. Exposed to these Old World diseases with no immunity, the entire population of Arawaks on San Domingo died within a generation. This deadly phenomenon repeated itself over and over again from the Arawaks in the sixteenth century to the Chamorros of the Marianas in the seventeenth century to the Aleuts in the Pribilof Islands in the eighteenth century—whenever New World people encountered Europeans for the first time.
    The many ships under the direction of merchants, pirates, and naval commanders breached forever the isolation of the peoples of North and South America while they awakened the curiosity of thousands of Europeans. Immediately dozens of engravings were printed to slake the curiosity of Europe’s small reading public. At first, old lithographs depicting the Garden of Eden were trotted out and reprinted, but gradually more accurate depictions of the people, animals, and plants encountered in the New World began to circulate. A whole new chapter in the history of curiosity began.
    The seaborne trade that followed the great discoveries of all-water routes to the East and West Indies fitted very well with traditional European society. The noble virtues of command, mastery, ardor, aggression, and military prowess were in full display and very effective in intimidating and subduing people who were similarly impressed by manly feats of valor. Like the Spanish exploits, those of the Portuguese appealed to the aristocratic spirit with its love of military escapades. Afonso de Albuquerque exemplified the noble Iberian adventurer. Connected to the Portuguese royal family by illegitimate descent, he began his career fighting Muslims in North Africa. At age fifty-three in 1506, he sailed a squadron of ships around the Cape of Good Hope, gaining permission to build forts by helping local rulers secure their power. In 1511, he conquered the great emporium of Malacca for the king of Portugal.
    In the rough-and-tumble of trade, conquest, and colonization,