Roger Crowley

As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions but far more wide-ranging, the dynamic burst of Portuguese voyaging at the start of the sixteenth century is one of the tipping points of world history : the moment that the world went global. Within a short time span a tiny country, whose population did not exceed a million, created a maritime empire that stretched from Brazil to Nagasaki. Conquerors tells the almost forgotten story of how...

"The story of the sixteenth-century's epic contest for the spice trade, which propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific. Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the...