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Caribbean ginger and Atlantic trade, 1570–1648*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

Bethany Aram
Bethany Aram*
Affiliation:
Universidad Pablo de Olavide of Seville, Ctra. de Utrera, km. 1 41013 Seville, Spain E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Ginger smuggled out of Asia flourished on the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The oriental root, whose migration and transplantation Spanish sovereigns sought to stimulate, enjoyed more of a market in England and the Low Countries than in Castile. A differentiated demand for ginger in northern and southern Europe, documented in archival and literary sources, reflected the principles of humoral medicine and influenced trade. Ginger’s poor adaptation to the Spanish fleet system, exacerbated by armed conflicts, including the revolt of the Low Countries (1568–1648) and the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), fomented rather than inhibited a continuum of prohibited practices from privateering to contraband, with English and Dutch merchant-privateers in the ‘Spanish’ Caribbean interested in ginger, sugar, and hides, among other commodities.

Keywords

corsairs and privateersearly modern CaribbeanEnglish empiregingerinter-imperial tradeSpanish empire
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 410 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

The research for this article has been financed by the Junta de Andalucía P09-HUM 5330, ‘New Atlantic products, science, war, economy and consumption in the Old Regime’, directed by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, as well as the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Ramón y Cajal programme, RYC-2012-10358. Previous versions were presented at the ‘Global commodities: the material culture of early modern connections, 1400–1800’ conference, at the University of Warwick on 12 December 2012, in the III Seminario poder y conflictividad en América Latina at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide of Seville on 9 January 2014, and at the Cambridge Seminar in Early Modern History on 18 February 2015. The author is grateful to José Luis Belmonte Postigo, Melissa T. Calaresu, Rebecca Earle, Luca Molà, Igor Pérez Tostado, and Joan Pau Rubies Mirabet for comments on these occasions, as well as to Marina Alfonso Mola, Ivan Day, Antonio Gutiérrez Escudero, Stefan Halikowski-Smith, Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, and the reviewers and editors of the Journal of Global History, for further suggestions, which have been incorporated to the best of the author’s ability.

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91 AGI, Escribania 1021a, ‘Memoria de las cosas que venían en el navio nombrado nuestra Señora del Socorro’, 4 October 1619.

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