![]() This turned into a wider pepper exploration and a 10-part podcast series, Taste of Place. I quite simply exist because of these global trade crossings.įrom this personal relationship, I began looking into the farming and use of Sarawak pepper five years ago, when I saw it on a menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant in London. As a mixed-race person from postcolonial places who has found a home in Britain, and whose family grew pepper in Borneo, my story feels entwined with the spice. With pepper, as it is for migrants, the answer to “where are you from?” is complex and varied, and involves many stories and histories including colonialism and violence it can tell us about hidden pasts and forgotten voices. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann has written: “Thus a beast was created whose only objective was money … pure capitalism unleashed for the first time in history.” In another passage, she writes: “It was a private empire of money, unburdened by conscience, rampaging across Asia, unfettered into the 1850s.” In a sense, those first pepper-filled ships marked a turning point, a period when the western world shifted, after which there was no going back.Įlizabeth I’s charter for the East India Company was for 15 years, but her heir, James I, extended it indefinitely with only one rule: the company had to turn a profit to keep the charter. The unknown “east” became known and ownable. Ultimately, the desire to own and amass riches from these spices and similar goods drove colonialism. The desire for spices such as pepper drove European expeditions eastwards, to cut out the middlemen who brought them overland.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |