The Company That Ate a Country

The Forgotten Gods — A Four-Part History · Part 3 of 4 · by Lovepreet Singh

To understand why Europeans came to India, you have to understand pepper. Black pepper — the spice you grind on your food — was the most valuable trade commodity in the world for about 2,000 years. (A "commodity" simply means a good that is bought and sold in

In this part

• The Sea Route: Portuguese, Dutch, French, and the Race for Spice
• The Company: How a Trading Office Became a Government
• The Great Drain: How Britain Got Rich by Making India Poor
• The Famines: Forty Million Dead
• Why Christianity Mostly Failed in India
• 1857 and the Long Awakening
• The Freedom Movement and the Cost of Partition

1 The Sea Route: Portuguese, Dutch, French, and the Race for Spice To understand why Europeans came to India, you have to understand pepper. Black pepper — the spice you grind on your food — was the most valuable trade commodity in the world for about 2,000 years. (A "commodity" simply means a good that is bought and sold in large amounts.) It grew only in a small region of south India and parts of Southeast Asia. Europe wanted it badly. The wealthy paid huge prices for it. Whole fortunes were made trading in it. For centuries, this trade was controlled by Arab and Persian merchants who shipped Indian goods to Egypt, where Italian middlemen from Venice and Genoa picked them up and sold them in Europe at enormous markups. Everyone in this chain got rich. The Indians who grew the pepper, the Arabs who shipped it, the Egyptians who handled it, the Italians who sold it in Europe. The only pe…

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