Rating: 
Summary: If hisrory was only taught this way.....
Review: I had just finished reading "In the Heart of the Sea-the Sinking of the Whale Ship Essex" and had enjoyed it so much that I was in the mood for another seafaring adventure. "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" was just as wonderful! If history was taught like this in our schools we would probably have more students reading and fewer bored to tears over their homework. How is the history of Manhattan, and subsequently the U.S., connected to the fate of a little speck of an island not even found on some maps? And what bravery and courage it took from the explorers (not to mention the greed of the merchants) to bring all the strands of this history together? This book tells a fascinating story and also a very human story. Along the way you get quite a bit of good old fashioned history. Enjoy a good yarn!
Rating: 
Summary: Nathaniel's Nutmeg
Review: I bought this book on a whim. It caught my interest in the bookshop because my wife is from Indonesia and I wanted to find out whether some of the terrible things she has told me the Dutch did in her country were true (I was to find out they were even worse than I expected). I also have an interest in British colonial history.Much to my pleasant surprise I found this was a book I just couldn't put down. It was riveting! I suppose one could categorize this book as "popular history" because it reads much like a novel with many colorful characters and intriguing events that make up the early history of the English and Dutch East India companies, although its primary focus is on the former. I found the author's writing style to be very engrossing and easy to read, unlike many histories. I became quite caught up in the excitement and horror of events, as described by Mr. Milton, but I had to keep reminding myself that the author is an Englishman. The obvious partisanship of the author was probably one of the weak points of the book: he made much reference to the crimes committed by the Dutch in the East Indies but, no doubt, the English traders had their fair share of rogues who committed other crimes - especially during the first half century of the English East India Company. It would be interesting to read a book on the same subject written by a Dutchman and compare and contrast! However, to his credit, the author quite successfully shows how disorganized and irresponsible the directors of the East India Company could be, especially in regard to their choice of men to lead expeditions to the East. Many of the voyages the early traders made to the Indies were unsuccessful and resulted in the frequent loss of ships and men. Also, Milton shows that during the first 50 years of the company's operations, the traders and "factors" - company employees who had been given the task of developing trade at various (often remote) trading posts - tended to operate as individuals rather than team players so-to-speak, often with unpredictable and sometimes disastrous results to the detriment of the company. One other point against the book is that the main subject of the book - referred to in the subtitle, the man who "changed the course of history" - does not have his story told until Chapter 10, near the end of the book. Every time I was introduced to a new character I asked myself whether he was going to be the one. Though, I suppose this is one way to keep the reader interested in events, and to keep reading. However, despite these small drawbacks, I found this book to be thoroughly enjoyable and would whole heartedly recommend it to anyone interested in the early years of the English East India Company, the beginnings of British colonialism, and the spice trade. Oh, and by the way it also shows how New York and the East Indies were connected in terms of their founding. This book covers a lot of events in a relatively small number of pages but always manages to be interesting and enlightening. I am looking forward to reading Mr. Milton's next book, which should throw more light on early English colonialism in America.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting historical account
Review: This is an account of the rise of the English and Dutch East India Companies in the 17th century. They originally supplanted Portugal, and at one time the countries were even allies, but they came into open conflict over the rights to the lucrative spice trade, at one time dominated by Venice. It perhaps illustrates how a small area can blaze into importance for a brief period of history. Today it is Kuwait and oil; 400 years ago it was the Banda Islands and nutmeg, an area that has become so insignificant today most people could not find it on a map (the author includes helpful maps). In 1600, immense profits could be made from spices. A cited example was a cargo of cloves purchased in the East Indies for £3,000 and sold in London (circa 1605) for £36,000, at a time when a working man might be paid £12 per year. Nutmeg, highly valued at that time, cost virtually nothing in the Banda Islands, the only place where the trees could be found, and reached a value of £500 per ton in London. This is equivalent to a working man paying a week's wages for a pound of spice. The extent of the profit is illustrated in the book - the Dutch traded Manhattan Island, then the gateway to the Hudson River fur trade, for a clear title to Run Island, the most insignificant of the Banda Islands. The profits were retained by the merchants who financed the ships. Very little went to the merchant seamen who risked their lives, it not being uncommon for 50 percent to die from disease during a voyage. The title of the book is misleading as it covers much more than the nutmeg trade. However, there is a focus on the Dutch attempt to completely control the Banda Islands as well as the rest of the Spice Islands. The book also describes the attempts to find a Northeast or Northwest Passage through the Arctic, the earliest attempt to set up an English trading post in India (opposed by the Portuguese), and other contacts between Europe and the East Indies. The book seems a little disorganized, with events out of chronological order and the accounts of Arctic expeditions and such stuck in here and there, but overall is a good historical account. The self interest of various individuals, the lack of control over people far from home and their governments, the attitudes and actions of people who found themselves with absolute power and became petty dictators, and the massacres and acts of piracy are well documented.
Rating:
Summary: The shameful history of our modern world
Review: What a catelog of infamy is the history of English and Dutch mercantile involvement in the East Indies! The moments of first contact between modern Western European and other world cultures are among the most fascinating episodes in all history and several appear in this book. Here is history as personality rather than process and for this reader this made a complex subject very approachable. The book draws heavily from first hand accounts which gives a lot of immediacy but as these are almost exclusively European the story of the indiginous peoples does become somewhat marginalised. With this caveat I would recommend this book as a good general read that gave me a lot of entertainment.
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Summary: The domino effect of conflict
Review: If the content of this book was not based primarily in historic documents, the reader would be aghast by the inhumane treatment and the rape of the lands all in search for spices. In addition, though, it appears that this same search drove governments and merchants to fund massive missions to discover quicker and safer ways to the Spice Islands. It is well speculated that "nutmeg" defined then world powers, the Britain rule in India, major "new world" discoveries, safer modes and methods of travel, and the creation of New York City as it evolved from New Netherlands City. A great read causing both sorrowful and ironic non-fiction reflection
Rating: 
Summary: Too much history
Review: Very nice compendium of the English point of view about the birth of spice trading. I found it fascinating, but too many phrases from original documents make it a bit too boring, though vivid. I expected some more maps, or even pictures.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating but flawed...
Review: An excellently produced book about the Spice Trade, it nevertheless fails to live up to its title. Nathaniel Courthope doesn't really enter into the action until 3/4 of the way through the book and when he does, defending the tiny island of Run against those nasty Dutch, he's made out to be some sort of hero by the author (who seems to be ashamed that no monuments have been erected for this virtually unkown person). What is conveniently forgotten is the fact that Courthope was a PAID employee of an English Trading Company, and stood to gain financially if the island of Run remained in English hands. That's heroic? Furthermore, this book is a very one sided view of the Spice Trade, giving scant attention to what the natives of all these little spice producing islands thought about this European invasion.
Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Story of Man's Inhumanity
Review: This is a very good book that is also a surprisingly fast read. The author tells a fascinating story about the importance of the spice trade in the history of the world and about the inhumanity which characterized the Europeans' pursuit of the huge profits spices brought. Two points: (1) The book might have been improved, I thought, by the inclusion of a chronological outline: without writing one out myself while reading, I sometimes found it difficult to remember which expedition was under discussion, especially since expeditions to the East sometimes overlapped. (2) The title of the book suggests that the story will center around Nathaniel Courthope's doings in the East, but in fact the story the author tells is much broader in scope. For that reason I thought the name *Nathaniel's Nutmeg* misleading. In addition to Dava Sobel's *Longitude,* which another reviewer mentioned, readers may also find interesting Tom Standage's *The Victorian Internet* and *The Professor and the Madman,* by Simon Winchester.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: When I was a lad at school, History was as dry as the paper it was written on - memorising numbers and names for no reason that I could discern. The books gave no insight, the teachers did their best, but it had no bearing on 'today'. This book is full of dates and names (the lifeblood of History), but every page is alive with the souls of those people who made History. Ostensibly the story of Nathaniel Courthope & nutmeg, we are halfway through the book before we meet him, all the previous pages are background build-up, in graphic detail, of what made the spice islands and in particular Run, such a focus of attention for the whole world. We are taken on a whirlwind journey across the centuries and round the globe, each chapter heralding the next with a snippet of information, like dangling bait, so one is eagerly waiting for the next chapter to unfold. This is not just a compilation of events and dates, the meticulous background research that went into this must have taken years; Giles Milton has studied every scrap of available material, in umpteen languges, specifically to flesh out the bones of what could have been another dusty tome. The heroes and villains of the piece are REAL people in this book, people you want to meet (or avoid!) and they are brought to life by the fluid style of Mr. Milton's prose - it drags you along with it, urging you to read faster and faster, ultimately having to stop for lack of mental breath - then off into the fray again. I cannot praise this too highly - a revelation for those who thought that history is bunk!
Rating:
Summary: NAthaniels Nutmag
Review: I enjoy this type of background history about individuals and unknown facts about how people find a wat to solve problems as was explained in this book.
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