People would kill for the spices in your kitchen, and they once did. What we view as commonplace seasonings like pepper and cinnamon were once the most luxurious items known to humans. For centuries, these spices were sought after by many civilizations. This quest for control of the Spice Trade brought the world together and also ripped it apart.

Join award-winning Cornell University History Professor Eric Tagliacozzo for this talk about humanity's millennials-long yearning for the spices of Asia. From the ancient world to Marco Polo to the spice clippers of the nineteenth century, he will explore how spices brought the world into a singular embrace and also made it unequal for the rest of time.

Professor Tagliacozzo is the Director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program at Cornell and Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP), as well as editor of the journal INDONESIA. In 2016, he won Cornell’s Russell Distinguished Teaching Award.

Cost: $30 with promo code CORNELL 

Registration: https://www.speakeasy.com/event/pepper-salt-empire-how-the-spice-trade-made-the-world-modern 

Questions: Elizabeth Slavitt eslavitt@speakeasy.com