Business-in-Thailand - Information on doing business in Thailand

I want my money back   February 21, 2008

Bad Writing and Worse Editing Spoiled the Story   February 22, 2007

Fills in knowledge gap   October 7, 2003

My only complaint is that at times the book would give overly-flowery descriptions within the historical context. I understand that this is done to make the book more readable, it just over does it at times. Or it could be that I'm being overly-critical because I read Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel right before reading this (Diamond's book does an absolutely perfect job of walking the line between readability and scientific rigor).


An Inconsistent History of the Spice Trade   September 3, 2002
  16 out of 17 found this review helpful

Charles Corn's "The Scents of Eden" seeks to document the history of the spice trade, focusing on the control of a few key islands in the East Indies where the historically most valuable spices (notably cloves and nutmeg) originated. Corn's effort is a little spotty: I found him both interesting and readable in some places, and neither in many other places.

I think about 60% of this book presents interesting and relevant material, but the remaining 40% felt like filler to me. The portions of the book where Corn discusses the key spice-producing islands, their discovery and the imperialistic practices that controlled them, were generally very interesting, and read quickly and with satisfaction. Moreover, I found Corn's writing style generally pleasant to read, and appropriate (or at least acceptable) for "popular" history. The early chapters were among the better ones.

However, Corn doesn't seem to have enough material to make all 319 pages interesting, or perhaps the topic just isn't robust enough for that much book. Either way, I found many chapters off topic, and felt like I was suffering through a droning lecture. For example, Corn provides long descriptions of Amsterdam, London and Salem, none of which seemed more than peripherally relevant to me. More irritating was a rather gratuitous description of Dutch atrocities to both native inhabitants and other pesky Europeans (most notably, the English). While these seemed well documented (among the best documented material Corn presents), I thought he'd made his point adequately in earlier discussions of the topic, and this elaboration didn't seem to add anything to the book.

For my money, "The Scents of Eden" isn't polished enough to make for a serious academic work, and isn't interesting or consistent enough to be top shelf "popular" history. While it had its moments, I found myself struggling through mediocre material in the later parts. And the abundance of chapters that I found off-topic made me question the significance of the entire subject. If you're considering reading this, you may enjoy the book somewhat, but I'd recommend something by Tuchman or Gleeson well ahead of this book.


He who is Lord of Malacca has Venice by the Throat   October 4, 2001
  5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Thus goes the old saying which aptly summarised the politics and economics of the renaissance spice trade. Charles Corn's splendid narrative of the spice trade seeks to explain the forces which inspired Western Europeans to commit acts of bravery and madness in pursuit of nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and pepper. Provided you didn't get yourself either killed by the weird island Sultans of the various East Indies, or robbed by a rival merchant fleet, the spice trade offered profits well in excess of 1000%. The spice trade started with Portugal's efforts to win control of Malacca (in modern Malaysia); it continued with the establishment of the two rival East India Companies (Dutch and English respectively), who fought control of the Banda island group. (At that time, Banda had the world's monopoly on nutmeg, the King of Spices.) Corn has visited the Banda group (modern Indonesia) and as a result, his descriptions of these once-prized possessions has a sure sense of place. Also enjoyable are the later chapters dealing with the American intrusion into the spice trade, which, as Corn notes, was closely linked to the American slave trade. "Scents of Eden" complements another recent tale of pirate-capitalism, "The Power of Gold."