Routes of Scent and Sickness: Spices Moving Bodies and Beliefs

Pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg traveled through networks that also carried sailors, merchants, microbes, languages, rituals, and stories. Looking beyond profit and conquest, this book follows the spice trade as a force of biological and cultural movement across the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and expanding European empires. It examines port cities, migration, shipboard life, disease exposure, culinary exchange, and the social meanings attached to rare goods. Readers discover how commerce connected distant communities while creating unequal risks and new cultural mixtures, leaving traces in food, medicine, settlement, and memory.