The political considerations of the pepper trade

By the middle of the seventeenth century the supremacy of pepper in Europe's trade with Asia was no longer unchallengeable; but this became evident only in retrospect. Pepper was still the most important single commodity imported by the Dutch East India Company. During the triennial period 1648–50, the invoice value of pepper in the V.O.C.'s total trade with Holland was 50.34 per cent and at the Amsterdam sales in the same years it yielded 32.89 per cent of the total sales revenue. For the English Company comparable figures are not available until 1664 when pepper accounted for 13.2 per cent of the returning cargoes from the Indies. In the 1670s its proportion in the Company's Asian trade were not far short of the Dutch figures, though in absolute terms English imports were generally of lesser magnitude. The greater share of the pepper trade which the English East India Company's powerful competitors in the Netherlands managed to reserve for themselves explains at once the profound fears entertained by the Court of Committees towards Dutch intentions and the enormous commercial appeal of pepper on the minds of contemporary merchants. By the third quarter of the seventeenth century it must have become clear to all those who were concerned with the East India trade that there were other and more valuable Asian commodities which could be brought to a profitable market in Europe. But few of them would have been prepared to concede that the national stake in the European pepper trade should be relinquished in favour of rival foreign countries.