Return to text.
*54 Roughly speaking, pepper imports were a scant 1.2 million kilos in 1500, when Europe held some eighty million people; about 1.5 million in 1600, when the population had risen to one hundred million; and perhaps as much as 7 million in the 1670s, when the population was roughly the same. But this volume of pepper could not be sold, no matter how low the price went. In 1688, the Heren XVII estimated that the European demand was only 3.5 million kilograms. Fifty years later, European imports had dropped to just that number and stayed there until the early nineteenth century. Clove imports peaked in the 1620s at about 350,000 kilos, a number they would not recover until the mid-twentieth century.
Return to text.
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice Page 34
