The romance of trade and fuzzy slippers
Commerce used to be more fashionable. The French historian Fernand Braudel writes that in the 1630s “ten ships a year from the Indian ocean, from Calicut, Surat, or Msulipatam, and the odd Portugese ship out of Goa were still arriving in Mocha with cargoes of pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves“. He quotes a French trader [...]