Turn each card to read its ledger. Front: the plant, as botany knows it. Back: the price, as history records it.
Until the 1800s, every nutmeg on Earth grew on ten volcanic islands. In 1621 the Dutch East India Company killed, enslaved, or deported nearly the entire Bandanese population — some 15,000 people — to control it.
The spice that financed the age of European expansion. Portugal's cartaz system forced Indian Ocean traders to buy passes for seas they had sailed freely for two thousand years.
The VOC uprooted and burned every clove tree outside its control — a policy called extirpation. On Ternate, planting a clove without permission became a capital crime. One defiant tree, Afo, outlived the monopoly.
Dutch rule bound the Salāgama caste to peel cinnamon bark as forced tribute. Quotas rose generation after generation; failing them was punished. The island's name still sells the spice.
Cultivated by the Totonac, taken as Aztec tribute, then a Mexican monopoly for 300 years — until Edmond Albius, enslaved and twelve years old, invented hand-pollination on Réunion. The technique made fortunes. Not his.
Domesticated over 6,000 years ago, carried east by Portuguese ships within decades of Columbus. India, Thailand, Sichuan, and Korea rebuilt their cuisines around it — the one exchange the colonized world turned into its own.
The "queen of spices" grew wild in the Ghats until British planters enclosed the hills into estates, taxing and conscripting the forest communities who had always harvested it.
In 1995 a US patent was granted on turmeric's wound-healing use — knowledge millennia old. India's CSIR fought it with ancient Sanskrit texts and won: a landmark case against biopiracy.