The Gold of the Bandas: The History of the Nutmeg

The Gold of the Bandas: The History of the Nutmeg PDF Author: Horst H. Geerken
Publisher: Books on Demand
ISBN: 9783753421520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
For a long time, the Banda Islands were the only place on earth where the nutmeg would grow. The spice was transported along the arduous Silk Road to Europe, growing ever dearer as it travelled, and when the nutmeg was also touted as a panacea against the plague it became for a while more valuable than gold. Some of the European powers began a race to find the Spice Islands. They wanted a share in the lucrative trade. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach the Spice Islands, followed by the Spanish and the English. The last to arrive were the Dutch, and their arrival triggered conquest, wars and ruthless murder. While the Portuguese, Spanish and English simply wanted to trade with the Bandanese, the Dutch aimed to take possession of the islands. Out of sheer avarice they committed the first genocide in modern history there. Today the Bandas are inhabited almost entirely by the descendants of the slaves brought to the islands by the Dutch. The book contains many exciting and largely unknown stories about this tiny archipelago, for example, that one of the islands was once exchanged for Manhattan, or that properties on the island of Banda Neira were once the most expensive real estate in the world. This fascinating book documents the history of the Banda Islands and the colonisation of Indonesia. It describes world-shattering events and shows how a little nut altered the course of world history.

Bioethics of Displacement and Its Implications

Bioethics of Displacement and Its Implications PDF Author: Rodríguez, Manuel Lozano
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1668448092
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
Bioethics aims to provide a framework for making informed and ethical decisions in the face of complex and often controversial issues. It is concerned with issues such as informed consent, autonomy, justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, and respect for persons and seeks to balance the interests of individuals, communities, and society. Defining the bioethics of displacement presents a challenge; despite bioethicists’ efforts to raise multidisciplinarity, the truth is that narrow medical bioethics focused on health is currently mainstream. Bioethics of Displacement and Its Implications defines the bioethics of displacement, explains why it is necessary, and sets the basic curricula on the bioethics of displacement. This book puts displacement in context through historical reflections and stresses how psychological inflexibility and the politics of pain work are reflected in the context of bioethics both in the nature of the research and in bioethics as a force of displacement and the challenges in the bioethical discourse. Finally, the book frames the bioethics of displacement (Bodi) in the modern bioethics discourse and how it can become a game changer. This work focuses on bioethics, confinement, displacement, global public health, and politics. This premier reference source is an essential resource for medical professionals, pharmacists, hospital administrators, government officials, students and faculty of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

The Nutmeg's Curse

The Nutmeg's Curse PDF Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226823954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

Nathaniel's Nutmeg

Nathaniel's Nutmeg PDF Author: Giles Milton
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466873477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
A true tale of high adventure in the South Seas. The tiny island of Run is an insignificant speck in the Indonesian archipelago. Just two miles long and half a mile wide, it is remote, tranquil, and, these days, largely ignored. Yet 370 years ago, Run's harvest of nutmeg (a pound of which yielded a 3,200 percent profit by the time it arrived in England) turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and the British Crown. The outcome of the fighting was one of the most spectacular deals in history: Britain ceded Run to Holland but in return was given Manhattan. This led not only to the birth of New York but also to the beginning of the British Empire. Such a deal was due to the persistence of one man. Nathaniel Courthope and his small band of adventurers were sent to Run in October 1616, and for four years held off the massive Dutch navy. Nathaniel's Nutmeg centers on the remarkable showdown between Courthope and the Dutch Governor General Jan Coen, and the brutal fate of the mariners racing to Run--and the other corners of the globe--to reap the huge profits of the spice trade. Written with the flair of a historical sea novel but based on rigorous research, Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg is a brilliant adventure story by Giles Milton, a writer who has been hailed as the "new Bruce Chatwin" (Mail on Sunday).

Spice

Spice PDF Author: Jack Turner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307491226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
In this brilliant, engrossing work, Jack Turner explores an era—from ancient times through the Renaissance—when what we now consider common condiments were valued in gold and blood. Spices made sour medieval wines palatable, camouflaged the smell of corpses, and served as wedding night aphrodisiacs. Indispensible for cooking, medicine, worship, and the arts of love, they were thought to have magical properties and were so valuable that they were often kept under lock and key. For some, spices represented Paradise, for others, the road to perdition, but they were potent symbols of wealth and power, and the wish to possess them drove explorers to circumnavigate the globe—and even to savagery. Following spices across continents and through literature and mythology, Spice is a beguiling narrative about the surprisingly vast influence spices have had on human desire. Includes eight pages of color photographs. One of the Best Books of the Year: Discover Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle

Merchant Kings

Merchant Kings PDF Author: Stephen R. Bown
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429927356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records. Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.

The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods

The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods PDF Author: Michael T. Murray
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439103445
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 912

Book Description
From the bestselling authors of The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, the most comprehensive and practical guide available to the nutritional benefits and medicinal properties of virtually everything edible As countless studies have affirmed, diet plays a major role in both provoking and preventing a wide range of diseases. But just what is a healthy diet? What does the body need to stay strong and get well? In The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods, Michael T. Murray, N.D., and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D., two of the world¹s foremost authorities on nutrition and wellness, draw on an abundant harvest of research to present the best guide available to healthy eating. Make healthy eating a lifetime habit. Let The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods teach you how to: design a safe diet use foods to stimulate the body¹s natural ability to rejuvenate and heal discover the role that fiber, enzymes, fatty acids, and other dietary components have in helping us live healthfully understand which food prescriptions will help you safely treat more than 70 specific ailments, including acne, Alzheimer¹s disease, immune system depression, insomnia, migraine headaches, PMS, and rheumatoid arthritis prepare foods safely in order to prevent illness and maximize health benefits select, store, and prepare all kinds of healthful foods Providing the best natural remedies for everyday aches and pains, as well as potent protection against serious diseases, The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods is a required daily health reference.

A Complete System of Modern Geography; or, the Natural and political history of the present state of the world. Illustrated with maps and engravings, etc

A Complete System of Modern Geography; or, the Natural and political history of the present state of the world. Illustrated with maps and engravings, etc PDF Author: Francis ENNIS
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1172

Book Description


Spice

Spice PDF Author: Roger Crowley
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300277210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
The story of the sixteenth-century’s epic contest for the spice trade, which propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portuguese finally reached the spice islands of the Moluccas in 1511, they set in motion a fierce competition for control. Roger Crowley shows how this struggle shaped the modern world. From 1511 to 1571, European powers linked up the oceans, established vast maritime empires, and gave birth to global trade, all in the attempt to control the supply of spices. Taking us on voyages from the dockyards of Seville to the vastness of the Pacific, the volcanic Spice Islands of Indonesia, the Arctic Circle, and the coasts of China, this is a narrative history rich in vivid eyewitness accounts of the adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters—and remade the world economy for centuries to follow.

The New Yorker

The New Yorker PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 824

Book Description