The aspect of everyday life affected the most by trade since globalization.
The nature of food, as an absolute necessity for the survival of humans, gives it a unique role in world economics and trading patterns. The ability of a people to produce, acquire, or steal foodstuffs in quantities large enough to sustain popu lation levels has been the measuring rod of the continuation or decline of a society. Throughout history and geography, how a society feeds itself has been as manifestly varied as the societies themselves. Yet, this process of securing sufficient amounts of food invariably involved and continues to involve trading and commerce with other societies. From nearby neighbors to cultures around the world, people and nations have continually sought out new, often exotic, food resources. To this end, nations have engaged in some of the most cruel and inhumane behaviors such as fighting wars and enslaving other human beings. Conversely, the desire to feed their people had led nations to make scientific discoveries, not only in agriculture, but also in navigation, medicine, and nutrition. The history of food and trade is the story of humanity’s initial struggle for survival. Food is the most basic of human necessities. Little else can develop if that need is not satisfied.
The history of food and trade began in Sumer, the earliest known locus of civilization, in approximately 3800 B.C.E. The Sumerians resided in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in modern-day Iraq. The Sumerians were the first to develop a system of writing, known as cunei-form. Writing was developed not for literary or religious purposes but to keep track of business transactions, to write down laws, tax records, and contracts.
The transactions of food and livestock merchants were of prime importance. The typical food items known to the Sumerians were barley cakes, onions, beans, barley ale, barley, wheat, millet, lentils, garlic, cucumbers, mustard and lettuce greens, pork, and mutton or lamb. Particularly common were the many fish vendors who sold not only fresh fish from the rivers and sea but fried fish (foreshadowing the famous English fish and chips).
The brewing of ale and the baking of bread seem to have appeared simultaneously in Sumer, although it may be that bread was made as a byproduct of beer or ale. There were eight types of barley ale, eight types of wheat ale, and three types of mixed grain ale. Ale was so prominent that not only did approximately 40 percent of the barley harvested go to the brewing of ales, but ale was also valuable enough to be used as currency. In fact, the use of alcohol as currency was common in many cultures, particularly in a barter economy. Rum was a common currency in colonial American society, as well as whiskey among many rural farmers, which ultimately resulted in the famous Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania.
Throughout the history of the ancient Near East, societies that could produce surplus foodstuffs were in stronger bargaining positions than societies that could not. For example, King Solomon, the most renowned king of the Hebrews, who ruled from 970 to 935 B.C.E., was able to establish vast trading networks from distant lands like Egypt, North Africa, and Yemen because his kindgom had large food surpluses. Of particular importance to Solomon was the trading relationship with the Phoenicians, who inhabited present-day Lebanon. The Phoenicians were the master seafaring peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, who colonized and explored along the North African coast and as far away as Cornwall in Britain. Yet, because the Phoenicians lived mostly along the coast, they could not produce enough food to feed their people, so they were forced to trade. Solomon traded grains like wheat, along with olive oil, in exchange for the famous cedar trees of Lebanon as well as bronze and iron tools and weapons.
Solomon and the Phoenicians demonstrate that despite advances in technology and exploration, societies that cannot produce enough food have to trade with those societies that can. Similarly, those societies or lands that can produce food are also subject to invasion and conquest by those societies that have superior technology and weapons.
The Greeks were perhaps the most influential society of the ancient world. The introduction of coined currency dramatically altered how all levels of business were conducted. Peasant farmers, who previously had taken out loans in the form of sacks of seed grain, were now forced to borrow money to buy seed grain. When peasants borrowed money to buy seed, they did so at the time of greatest scarcity, the planting season, when prices were at their peak because of low supply. When these same peasants repaid their loans, they sold their grain at harvest when prices were at their lowest because of low demand. This introduction of minted currency had a psychological as well as economic effect on society. Coined currency changed everything. In many respects, it standardized and systematized a previously chaotic system of exchange, but those people, particularly peasants, who were caught in the transition, often suffered terribly.
In the sixth century B.C.E., Solon, an Athenian oligarch, banned the export of all agricultural products except for olive oil. The result was to drive commercial farmers into focusing on olive oil production at the cost of neglecting other vital agricultural products. Athens became a leading producer and exporter of olive oil in the Mediterranean. At the same time, Athens and the surrounding Greek countryside was denuded of all trees and plants except for the olive tree. Also, Greece became heavily dependent on other people for its food supply because of the focus on a single crop. Over the next few centuries, olive oil as a primary commodity was slowly replaced by wine. Greece became a leading center of wine making in the Mediterranean from the fifth century to the first century B.C.E.
Eventually, however, Italian or Roman wine began to dominate the Mediterranean, replacing the previously superior Greek wine, a phenomenon that mirrored the supplanting of Greek culture generally. By the first century B.C.E., the Romans produced over 1,600 gallons of wine per acre. The Greeks were simply unable to compete with that level of efficiency. As shown throughout history, those societies or nations that can produce food more efficiently will dominate and even control the vast majority of an economy.
The Romans were also one of the first people to implement food-related government assistance, known as the annona. The Roman government offset the cost of food distribution, particularly bread, to alleviate poverty and to prevent famine. It included the distribution of free bread and the purchasing of grain from public granaries at below market value. The growing numbers of people taking advantage of the annona concerned the Roman government such that by the time of Julius Caesar’s reign, the numbers had increased so dramatically that Caesar was proud that he was able to reduce the number to a mere 150,000 persons. The overall effect was a tremendous drain on the Roman treasury. By the time of Augustus Caesar, 14 million bushels of wheat were required to feed the people for one year.
Of particular importance to the history of food and trade was the spice trade of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, the Romans were no strangers to the exotic and enticing delicacies of the Far East. Of the eighty-six classifications of imported agricultural goods to the Mediterranean from Asia and East Africa, forty-four were spices. Rome imported huge quantities of spices, particularly cinnamon. Arab merchants of the Middle East were the facilitators of trade between Rome and Asia until the end of the second century C.E. To protect this monopoly on the spice trade, Arabs spread legends and mythical stories about the origins and locations of the valuable spices to frighten would-be adventurers and merchants from Rome. Whether this worked or not, these legends would filter back to the rest of Europe and become part of the mythology about the Far East.
This trade with China, or Cathay, as it was known, was only possible once the Han emperors were able to establish peace among warring nomads in central Asia in the first century C.E. Once peace was established, the famous overland trading route known as the Silk Road could be opened. By the second century C.E., the Romans were trading with China at such an unfavorable rate that Pliny estimated that Rome was losing approximately $35 to $40 million in today’s money per year. This unfavorable balance of trade caused inflation in the Roman empire to skyrocket. A measure of wheat in the first century cost an estimated 6 drachmae, but by the fourth century, the price of that same measure of wheat had risen to 2 million drachmae. The result, in many parts of the Roman empire, was a return to a barter economy. It is important to realize that an unfavorable balance of trade, particularly of food items, can directly contribute to the fall of an empire. Rome’s collapse was because of economic crisis as much as from barbarian invaders from the north.
Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East all conducted vast and extensive trading relationships of food items that never involved Rome or Europe at all. The impact of the European involvement in the spice trade in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was minimal at best to the local markets and economy. It would not be until the Portuguese and the Dutch took control of the spice trade through military force and violence that the Europeans had any significant impact on the spice trade.
India and China imported cumin from Arabia and nutmeg, mace, and cloves from the Spice Islands off the coast of Southeast Asia. Indian styles of food are so diverse that to speak of an “Indian cuisine” would be like speaking about a “European cuisine.” India exported pepper, cardamom, and ginger, yet it would not be until chilies from the New World were discovered and brought to India that the famous “hot” curries would be created. China, during the Han period (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) increased the consumption of tea such that it became a taxable food item. During this same period, China imported pomegranates, sesame, caraway, and coriander.
The Arabs of the Middle East constantly struggled against the Byzantine empire. After the fall of Rome in 476, the Roman empire was divided into two empires, west and east. Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, became the capital city of the eastern empire, known as Byzantium. The Byzantine empire would last for a thousand years, until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought about by the Ottoman Turks. During this period, the Byzantines and the Arabs were engaged in constant conflict, each vying for control of the eastern Mediterranean. With the rise and spread of Islam, the Arabs conquered North Africa and thus gained control of Egyptian wheat production. As a result, the Byzantines were forced to find wheat elsewhere. They turned north toward the Balkans and ultimately to southern Russia. Therefore, the conflict between the Arabs and the Byzantines acted as a catalyst for wheat production and economic growth in northern territories.
Europe developed and implemented technological advances in farming and food production that could be considered agricultural revolutions several times throughout the late medieval and early modern periods. Europe from about 1000 to 1492 (the eve of the discovery of or contact with the New World) experienced population growth because of new agricultural technology and practices. The scratch plow, which was basically a single piece of wood or metal that was dragged through the ground behind oxen to create furrows in the soil, had been around since the time of the Sumerians. This was replaced by the mold-board plow, which consisted of three parts that cut deep into the soil both vertically and horizontally. This new plow made it possible to clear and cultivate larger extents of land. Yet, like most technology, the new plow had social consequences. These new plows were expensive to maintain, and it took six to eight oxen to pull them. Therefore, farmers had to work together and formed cooperatives in which plows and oxen were shared. The result was a strengthening of communal bonds and lands, the benchmark of medieval peasant society.
Other farming techniques were the implementation of crop rotation, in which fields were planted with different crops from year to year to prevent soil deterioration. The two-field system of the Roman empire was replaced with the three-field system. This meant that fields that normally would lie fallow for one out of two years were now productive two out of three years. Not only did farmers produce more food, but it was also more nutritious. The result was an increase in population throughout much of Europe.
In the twelfth century, German grain merchants organized to form the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League acted as grain broker, dealing especially in wheat. It bought up the entire surplus in times of plenty and distributed the surplus in times of famine. This process created a stable market for grain and bread prices. Yet, the league was so successful at managing the grain trade, particularly the huge grain harvests from the Baltic region, that many grain farmers in other parts of Europe found it hard to compete and eventually turned to other occupations like wine making and cattle or sheep herding.
With a return to a monetary economy in much of Europe, vendors of ready-cooked food, particularly meat and fish, a practice that dates back to the Sumerians, began to thrive in many towns and cities. Yet, the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries brought Europe back into contact with that most alluring of exotic foods: spices of the East. In the later Middle Ages, spices were so valuable that, like alcohol, they were used as currency. A pound of pepper was equal to two or three weeks’ labor of fieldwork. Venice controlled the flow of spices from the East to the rest of Europe.
The quest for spices would ultimately be one of the most influential and world-changing events in human history. Europeans desired spices such as pepper, cinnamon, mace, cloves, and many others from the Spice Islands, Southeast Asia, and India. Some spices were used as food preservatives and were therefore sought after. It is a common though incorrect myth that spices were desired to mask the rancid and rotten odors and tastes of European foods, particularly meat products. Spices were a luxury item that enhanced and changed the local fare. Those people that could afford them demonstrated their wealth and status through the consumption of spices. It was the elite status of Eastern spices that motivated Europeans such as the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the English to venture out into the Atlantic Ocean. Staple foods are rarely a catalyst for long-distance trade because most societies produce their own. Fortunes were made and lost over spices. Wars were fought to secure the spice trade. And ultimately, the New World was discovered as a result of trying to find a quick and easy route to Asia and the Spice Islands.
Because the Venetians controlled the Mediterranean access to the overland trade routes to Asia, other European nations decided to go by sea to the Spice Islands and thereby cut out the middleman. This desire to sidestep the Venetian monopoly led to new discoveries and inventions in navigation and ship design. The old medieval cogs were not able to venture out into the deep ocean. New technologies had to be developed and implemented if transoceanic voyages were to become a reality.
The Portuguese were the first to begin exploration under Prince Henry the Navigator, who founded navigational schools. Portuguese navigators began charting the west coast of Africa in the late fifteenth century. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Soon after, the Portuguese reached India and then Southeast Asia and the much sought-after Spice Islands of Ternate and Tidore. The Portuguese established their first trading post in 1511 in present-day Indonesia. Yet, the Portuguese empire was never more than a string of trading centers scattered throughout the world. Portugal was a small nation with few people. Ultimately, the Portuguese were defeated by the Dutch in the sixteenth century and their control of the Spice Islands transferred to the Dutch. Yet, the Portuguese maintained a strong presence in parts of India and significantly in Brazil.
Of the important spices that Europeans sought, pepper comprised nearly 70 percent of the total spice trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pepper was commonly available because it was grown in a variety of countries; cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace were only grown in certain places so they were more limited in supply and more valued than pepper—literally worth their weight in gold.
Real change in world trade did not occur until the Portuguese, and then later the Dutch began to take over areas of spice production by force. Through military intervention, rather than trade and competition, the West dominated the spice trade and profits that had filled Eastern coffers now went to the investors in the Dutch East India Company. However, production of spices was never replicated with much success. The “spice islands” and “pepper coasts” remained locally or regionally specific. Efforts to transplant spices to other parts of the world never amounted to much. What is significant about the spice trade is that it was demonstrative of an emerging trend in world history. Power and wealth, and thus influence, were shifting from the East to the West.
While the Portuguese had concentrated on the eastern route to the Spice Islands, the Spanish took an alternate route. Under the Spanish flag of Isabella and Ferdinand, a Genoese navigator believed he could get to the East by sailing west. Ultimately, Christopher Columbus, in 1492, landed somewhere in the Bahamas and the subsequent result would change the world forever. While the Spanish did not find great spices in the New World, the impact and significance of what they did find was staggering. The interaction and exchange of New World foods and Old World foods (as well as diseases) is known as the Columbian exchange.
The list of new food products from the Americas is often overwhelming and surprising. Many commonly recognized European foods and cuisines are in fact American in origin. The Irish owe a debt of gratitude to the Incas for the cultivation of the potato. Italian cooking would not be what it is today without the tomato. The “hot” curry dishes of Indian cuisine come from chilies from the Americas, and the peanut made famous in Chinese food is also an American food product. Other New World food items are maize or corn, squash, beans, manioc, sweet potatoes, and avocados.
Maize comes from the Taino word mahiz. Maize was known as Indian corn, but to the English, corn was a generic term for any grain. The English Corn Laws do not apply specifically to corn but to grain in general. The Portuguese took corn to Africa, where it became a hugely successful staple crop. In fact, corn was so successful that its cultivation led to an increase in West African populations. The tragedy is that the increase in population among West Africans provided a supply of slaves who were then transported to work in Brazilian sugar plantations.
The potato was a product of the Andean region. Dried and preserved, it was commonly known as chuñu. Spanish investors in the silver and gold mines bought huge quantities of chuñu to feed the mineworkers in places like Potosí. It thus became the main source of nourishment for those forced to work in the mines. The potato was well received in Italy, Spain, England, and Ireland. The potato, besides providing essential nutrition, was an amazingly resilient food. Unlike grains and cereals that grew above ground, the potato was well protected from marching or fighting armies that trampled wheat fields under foot. Yet, in much of central and eastern Europe, the potato would not be popular for nearly 200 years. In 1774, Frederick the Great, in an attempt to alleviate famine and hunger, sent wagonloads of potatoes to peasants, who only ate them at gunpoint.
Bananas are an Old World food item, but they would see their greatest success in the New World. Many Caribbean and Central American economies are based solely on the banana industry, giving rise to the term “Banana Republics.” Bananas are the most consumed fruit in the United States and the second most consumed fruit in the world, after grapes, although much of the grape consumption is in the form of wine.
Yet, the most significant Old World food commodity brought to the New World was sugar. Originally considered a spice, sugar was the only condiment that could be produced in the Mediterranean and Atlantic world that could rival the spice trade of the East. Sugar production, from cane rather than sugar beets, began in the twelfth century by Venetian merchants in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the fifteenth century, sugar production became an extremely profitable business endeavor on the recently colonized islands of the eastern Atlantic, namely Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands.
Intricately connected to the production of sugar was slave labor. In Brazil, the Portuguese focused on sugar plantations. As part of the Columbian exchange, Europeans brought many diseases with them against which Native Americans had no immunity. The result was the death of perhaps millions of indigenous peoples. With the decline in native populations, the Portuguese turned to Africa for slave labor. Pope Nicholas V not only endorsed this, but also commanded the Portuguese to “attack, subject and reduce to perpetual slavery the Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ southward from Capes Badajir and Non, including all the coast of Guinea.” Along with this, merchants and rulers along the African Gold Coast were willing and happy to trade African people that they did not want for commodities such as textiles, firearms, and alcohol.
Brazil and many West Indian islands focused so intently on a single cash crop—sugar—that they neglected to grow other food items that were necessities of life. As a result, these countries had to import almost all their food. For example, in 1783 Jamaica imported from England 16,576 tons of salt pork and beef, 5,188 flitches of bacon, and 2,559 tons of tripe. Brazil was dependent on dried cod from New England to feed its slaves. This set up the commonly known triangle trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. New England, that great champion of liberty, had been critical of the institution of slavery. Yet, New England merchants and society were ever increasing their profit margins by selling cheap cod to Caribbean and Brazilian planters to feed their slaves. By the early 1700s, Boston alone was sending 300 ships a year to the West Indies.
Sugar became so economically important because of its high demand that in the 1670s the Dutch yielded New York to England in return for the sugar plantations of Surinam and after defeat in the French and Indian War, the French agreed to relinquish all of Canada to focus on sugar production of Guadeloupe.
Sugar became even more highly sought after with the introduction of coffee, tea, and chocolate. Coffee had originated in Ethiopia, tea in China, and chocolate in the Americas. All three were consumed as hot drinks and as their popularity increased, so, too, did the demand for sugar to sweeten them. Today, sugar is the world’s most-consumed food product with the English accounting for 86 pounds of sugar per person a year, while Americans consume 120 pounds of sugar per person per year.
Salt, like sugar, was another important food item. The word “salary” is from the Latin for salt rations. Salt is essential for life. It was and still is used as a preservative and must be imported if population use exceeds local supply. Salt is one of the world’s oldest items of bulk trade. It was so important to French society that a lucrative salt tax, the gabelle, was created to generate revenue. Because of an increase in population in northern Europe in the sixteenth century, a crisis arose because of low salt supplies in food production. The desire for salt was a principal reason for the creation of the Dutch West India Company in 1621. The Dutch needed access to salt reserves that Spain controlled. As with many other food items, the quest for salt would be a catalyst for war be tween Spain and the Netherlands in the Caribbean. Salt was essential to the salt herring and salted butter and cheese industry of the Netherlands. After two decades of fighting, a rapprochement between Spain and the Netherlands was reached in 1648.
The rise of scientific agriculture and the Industrial Revolution dramatically changed the quantity and quality of food and the techniques of food production. The early modern period saw an agricultural revolution that eclipsed previous advances in agriculture. This process began in the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands), as well as in England. The prime motivator was a scarcity of land. In light of the limited amount of available land and the ever-increasing populations, efficiency was of utmost importance. The Dutch developed a seven-course crop rotation system, but this proved to be too complex for the rest of Europe, where land was not as scarce. In most of western Europe, a four-crop rotation system was implemented: (1) wheat and barley for human consumption, (2) clover and soybeans to fertilize and revive the soil, (3) turnips for the green tops (onions), which killed weeds by depriving them of sunlight and which provided roots for animal feed (4).
Jethro Tull’s seed-planting drill (1782) eliminated waste in planting and created higher yields during harvesting because of the uniform spread of seeds. In addition, there were vast improvements made in the casting of iron, allowing for mass production that made farm tools more widely available and less expensive than goods made by the local blacksmith.
The dependence on a single food crop created a demographic and human holocaust during the Irish Potato Famine of 1846–1848. The potato, which proved to be so valuable in supplying the nutritional requirements of the vast majority of the Irish population, ironically dealt a devastating and deadly hand to over 1 million Irish when it succumbed to a fungus that made it inedible. Another million Irish left to seek better fortunes in England and primarily in the United States. The British government, guilty of acting too late, repealed a high tariff on grains to Ireland. While this was seen as an attempt to alleviate the famine in Ireland, it ultimately created a precedent for free trade that would have serious consequences later in the nineteenth century.
The Industrial Revolution affected every aspect of life in nations directly involved, especially those in Europe and North America, but the changes that occurred in those places would influence the course of world history. Discoveries and the development of new technologies often have unintended effects on many different and unrelated industries. The growth of the railroad was perhaps the most influential development of the Industrial Revolution. The railroad transformed the food industry in terms of the quality and quantity of food production. Cattle no longer had to be herded into towns and cities, which produced lanky and tough meat. Cattle could be slaughtered and butchered, and then shipped in refrigerated railcars directly to the cities. Milk from cows kept under controlled conditions could also be transported in refrigerated cars. Before the advent of the railroad, people got milk from cows that were kept in unsanitary local milking sheds.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrial nations understood that they had to provide larger quantities of food at lower prices to satisfy the growing numbers of factory workers. Railroads were able to link farms and plantations, not only to cities, but also to seaports from which food products could be transported around the world. Tea from India and wheat from the United States could be shipped by rail to ports and then transported across the ocean to Europe more economically than European nations could produce these goods locally.
U.S. wheat production in the second half of the nineteenth century became so productive and efficient that it dominated and replaced traditional local sources of European wheat. America had always been labor poor and land rich. This motivated Americans to create and develop labor-saving technologies, especially in the nineteenth century. These technologies included the McCormick reaper (1834), the Pitts mechanical thresher (1837), the Marsh harvester (1858), and the Appleby binder and knotter for sheaves of grain (1878). These developments in horse-drawn machinery led to an increase in draft horses in America from 6.2 million in 1860 to 15.5 million horses by 1900. The lasting effect of American wheat production on Europe’s economy was twofold. It provided a cheap source of grain, and thus bread, to urban factory workers, while at the same time it had a devastating effect on those European farmers who could not compete. Some, like many Norwegian farmers, migrated to America, while other nations like Denmark were forced to develop other food industries such as bacon for English consumers. Other technological developments that dramatically increased the food supply were canning, freezing, and refrigeration.
If the nineteenth century saw vast quantitative improvements in increasing food supply, then the opposite can be said of the qualitative changes. The nutritional value of much of the food supply had declined because of efficient mass processing and preservation techniques. While Gail Borden’s patent on sweetened condensed milk created huge profits in the 1850s, this type of milk was made from skim milk, not whole milk, which lacked fats and vitamin A and D (vitamins were unknown at the time). The result was an increase in the cases of rickets and other malnutrition-related diseases in infants.
The same nutritional deficiencies occurred in the mass production of flour. New roller mills made of iron and then porcelain did such a magnificent job of processing wheat that they separated the nutritionally valuable endosperm from the husk. While this improved the color of flour to a marketable white (previously flour was a dull yellow) and increased the shelf life, the result was bread that had few nutrients. The very people who needed cheap nutrition the most, the working poor, were being deprived of any nutrients in the bread they were eating.
These types of problems were highly scrutinized in the early twentieth century. In England in 1917 and 1918, 41 percent of the 2.5 million young men who were supposedly in the prime of their lives were deemed unfit for military service due to malnutrition. This kind of scrutiny led to the development of and advancements in the field of nutrition and diet. In the late twentieth century, agribusiness, implementing and developing patents related to genetic engineering of foods, would see profits of $50 billion to $100 billion per year.
Mike Downs
See also: Discovery and Exploration; Grain; Roman Empire.
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