Pepper : a history of the world's most influential spice /

Shaffer's book is less comprehensive food history than a chronicle of pepper's centuries as valued commodity from imperial Rome to present day. Its trade began in the classical era, continued through the Middle Ages, and exploded during the era of European imperialistic exploration and nationalist rivalry. Players included Asian, British, Iberian, and Continental crown and capital powers. The game ensnared proto-entrepreneurial and corporate-raider types such as explorer Vasco da Gama and colonial operator Sir Stamford Raffles. Erstwhile private agencies and startups like the Jesuits and the U.S. even got sucked into the business. Shaffer makes well-intentioned use of the records of the story's many colorful figures, including future saints, obscure seamen, and gender-bending stowaways, and at the center is the epic competition between two monolithic archrivals, the British and Dutch East India Companies. From humble beginnings, through expansion and market dominance, and into eventual decline, their fiercely capitalistic, sometimes violent competition provides the book's primary focus. A historian's more than a gastronome's book, its circling initially seems apropos, but becomes repetitious despite the decor of sidebars and maps. The result is a well-documented if scattered companion to Mark Kurlansky's Salt. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Science writer and former business reporter Shaffer traces the action-packed, often bloody trail of black pepper from its uses in ancient times as a cure-all to the intense rivalries among the Portuguese, Dutch and English to control the pepper trade in Indonesia to the rise of 19th-century American pepper merchants. This is not so much a culinary history as it is a compelling account of commerce and power that laid the groundwork for empire building. Common on every household table today, pepper was more valuable than gold or silver in the Middle Ages. Europeans loved it, but only the wealthy could afford the pungent seasoning. It wasn't until the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 that a sea route to India and China opened up the pepper trade to Europeans, leading to what Shaffer describes as the "pernicious twined branches, colonialism and imperialism," perpetuated by the English and Dutch East India companies. Using first-person accounts from journals and ships' logs, Shaffer crafts a textured story of exploration, danger, wealth and greed. Readers will find adventures on the high seas, pirates, ambitious Jesuits, sultans living in opulence and the plunder of what was once considered a "Garden of Eden." Like all good stories, Shaffer's has its honorable and dishonorable characters, including the English pirate William Dampier, who couldn't stomach the cruel treatment of the "Malayans" by the British; Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the "brutal governor-general" of the Dutch trading company; and the English traveler Peter Mundy, whose journals and drawings captured the people and exotic beauty of Sumatra. The author also discusses the botanical and medicinal characteristics of the pepper plant. The included maps are most welcome, but some readers may also want a current world map at hand for reference. A vividly told story of a common spice's uncommon history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.