Book: Pepper - A History of the World's Most Influential Spice

Yesterday I ordered the above book.  When I was in Amsterdam, the history of the city was laid out in the Amsterdam Museum and one of the main themes was that the port city of Amsterdam was founded as a central distribution channel for the worldwide trade in pepper.  Back in the days before refrigeration, salt was valued as a meat preservative and pepper was valued to kill the taste of half-rotted meat.  Over the millennia pepper has been central to the economies of almost all early civilizations.  It was the first product with a world-wide market and in fact the demand was so great it more-or-less created global marketing.

Anyway, I was thinking about this when I refilled my pepper-grinder this week, and decided to read up.

Hmmm, 4-1/2 years later this book sits on my "to read" shelf. Time to give it another whirl.

I'm desperate for anything not political.

Read about 40% of it. Pepper trade was the first global commerce, the Dutch and English competed for dominance in the market, many sailors died, many Sumatran rulers were cheated by the Europeans.

Ho hum.

Eventually so much pepper was imported that it no longer was used as a unit of currency and became just another spice. I think this is where I came in.