Co-hosted by Royal Asiatic Society, Beijing (RASBJ), Yale Club of Beijing, and Yale Center Beijing. This talk is part of the Yale University Press-Yale Center Beijing "Find Your Next Great Read" Series and the 'For Humanity' Lecture Series.

Event Time

Thursday, October 9, 2025
8:00 pm-9:00 pm | China Standard Time (CST)

Thursday, October 9, 2025
1:00 pm-2:00 pm | British Summer Time (BST)

Participation Format 

Registration is required to receive the ZOOM access link, which will be sent shortly to your registered email or phone number. Please enter the Zoom room 15 minutes before the starting time. Once the Zoom room reaches full capacity, latecomers will not be able to join the event. 

Registration and Fees

Registration
Please click “HERE” further below to register. Please send an email to yalecenterbeijing@yale.edu if there are any problems. 

Ticket: Free.

Participants who have paid in advance for the 'For Humanity' Lecture Series and members of RASBJ will receive a PDF copy of the book's Introduction and Chapter One.

The language of the event will be English. 

The Event

Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source, setting in motion a fierce competition for control. From 1511 to 1571, European powers linked up the oceans, established vast maritime empires, and gave birth to global trade, all in the attempt to control the supply of spices.

On October 9, British historian Roger Crowley will present an online talk on his book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2024). Drawing on vivid eyewitness accounts of adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters, he will show how this struggle shaped the modern world and remade the world economy for centuries to follow.

The Speaker

Roger Crowley
Author and Historian

Roger Crowley is a British historian and a graduate of Cambridge University. He is the author of six best-selling books on maritime and global history—including 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, Empires of the Sea, and City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas—which have been translated into many languages.