Head over to the kitchen and take a peek inside your spice cabinet. Look over the labels: pepper, salt, cloves, cinnamon, chocolate, chili flakes, nutmeg, saffron. Whereas today we can buy these products at any grocery store, several hundred years ago almost all of them were worth going to war for. The spices of the Indies, or rather the desire of Europeans to find them at lower prices than they could get from Muslim merchants, helped drive Christopher Columbus to propose a westward route to India. Instead, he landed on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, where he and his men were so cruel in collecting gold from the indigenous Taíno people that he was brought back to Europe in chains. In Asia, the land he believed he'd reached, the 16th century began as a new theater for long-running wars involving the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French. These conflicts depopulated entire islands; led to the downfall of many indigenous states; introduced new diseases in both hemispheres; deepened and/or created religious divisions; and contributed to the enslavement of millions of Africans and Asians throughout the world.
While the spice trade was not the only factor in the rise of European colonialism, it was one of the most tangible. Colonialism is not just a modern or a European behavior. Episodes of expansion, invasion, and assimilation have likely been a constant for as long as humans have been humans. Though the conditions and consequences of colonialism are not always easy to predict, we can still make a few general assumptions and statements. First, one of the main goals is often economic domination of the colonized people. Second, interactions between the colonized and colonizers tend to begin small, with influence spreading outward from places like farming settlements, trade ports, or special regions set aside for foreigners. Third, these interactions lead to negotiations between the colonizers (who may need to grow accustomed to a new environment, food, languages, religious practices, etc) and the colonized (whose precolonial institutions may be threatened by new technologies, forms of government, and shifting modes of production).
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
For Western European colonists, one result of these new relationships was a desire to categorize what they were seeing abroad. The Spanish "discovery" of the Americas led to religious councils meant to determine where indigenous people fit into Catholic cosmology, or if they were even human. Explorers and naturalists did similar work when they catalogued not just new plants and animals, but also different groups of people that they divided (often arbitrarily) into distinct races, religions, and geographic regions. We still struggle with many of the consequences of this division today. Maybe most interesting for fantasy authors is the obsession with magic that appears in many colonial records, like those from Spanish priests in Mexico and the Philippines, English missionaries in Africa, or Dutch officials in Indonesia.
