Shaping Southeast Asian Taste: Curry as Historical Evidences of Muslim Trade Networks in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

Though most spices originated from and were mostly consumed nowadays in areas in the Indian Ocean, discussion about the history of spices always started with European exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. For these spiceproducing-and-consuming areas, such a Eurocentric view undermined their role in the spice route and gave them nothing but uneasy memory when remembering spice, because the majority of people there knew it only as a fortune looted by the Europeans. In these spice-producing areas, dishes similar to what modern society now identify as curry were found since the early modern period. By using historical methods and utilization of secondary sources like studies about the early modern economy and regional food history of Asia, this paper attempts to know more about the relationship between spices and people in the Indian Ocean, for I am sure that millennia aged contact between them must result from far more complex relation than just a relation between commodity and the people who cultivate and sell it. Scrutinizing curry resulted in a conclusion that spice masters of the Indian Ocean were neither spoiled cultivators nor lazy hosts. Curry was a happy memory of an era of economic boom, where people all over the Indian Ocean competitively took part in the expanding network of Muslim trade and profited greatly from the lucrative maritime spice trade.