To see accurate pricing, please choose your delivery country.
 
 
United States
£ GBP
All Shops

British Wildlife

8 issues per year 84 pages per issue Subscription only

British Wildlife is the leading natural history magazine in the UK, providing essential reading for both enthusiast and professional naturalists and wildlife conservationists. Published eight times a year, British Wildlife bridges the gap between popular writing and scientific literature through a combination of long-form articles, regular columns and reports, book reviews and letters.

Subscriptions from £33 per year

Conservation Land Management

4 issues per year 44 pages per issue Subscription only

Conservation Land Management (CLM) is a quarterly magazine that is widely regarded as essential reading for all who are involved in land management for nature conservation, across the British Isles. CLM includes long-form articles, events listings, publication reviews, new product information and updates, reports of conferences and letters.

Subscriptions from £26 per year
Academic & Professional Books  History & Other Humanities  Environmental History

Cumin, Camels, and Caravans A Spice Odyssey

By: Gary Paul Nabhan(Author)
332 pages, 10 b/w photos, 12 colour illustrations, 4 maps
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans
Click to have a closer look
Select version
  • Cumin, Camels, and Caravans ISBN: 9780520379244 Paperback Oct 2020 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 6 days
    £20.99
    #253130
  • Cumin, Camels, and Caravans ISBN: 9780520267206 Hardback Mar 2014 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 6 days
    £24.99
    #226110
Selected version: £20.99
About this book Contents Customer reviews Biography Related titles

About this book

Gary Paul Nabhan takes the reader on a vivid and far-ranging journey across time and space in this fascinating look at the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. Drawing on his own family's history as spice traders, as well as travel narratives, historical accounts, and his expertise as an ethnobotanist, Nabhan describes the critical roles that Semitic peoples and desert floras had in setting the stage for globalized spice trade.

Traveling along four prominent trade routes – the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real (for chiles and chocolate) – Nabhan follows the caravans of itinerant spice merchants from the frankincense-gathering grounds and ancient harbors of the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Zayton on the China Sea to Santa Fe in the southwest United States. His stories, recipes, and linguistic analyses of cultural diffusion routes reveal the extent to which aromatics such as cumin, cinnamon, saffron, and peppers became adopted worldwide as signature ingredients of diverse cuisines. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans demonstrates that two particular desert cultures often depicted in constant conflict – Arabs and Jews – have spent much of their history collaborating in the spice trade and suggests how a more virtuous multicultural globalized society may be achieved in the future.

Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Recipes
List of Spice Boxes

Introduction: The Origin of “Species”
1. Aromas Emanating from the Driest of Places
2. Caravans Leaving Arabia Felix
3. Uncovering Hidden Outposts in the Desert
4. Omanis Rocking the Cradle of Civilization
5. Mecca and the Migrations of Muslim and Jewish Traders
6. Merging the Spice Routes with the Silk Roads
7. The Flourishing of Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Iberia
8. The Crumbling of Convivencia and the Rise of Transnational Guilds
9. Building Bridges between Continents and Cultures
10. Navigating the Maritime Silk Roads from China to Africa
11. Vasco da Gama Mastering the Game of Globalization
12. Crossing the Drawbridge over the Eastern Ocean

Epilogue: Culinary Imperialism and Its Alternatives
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Gary Paul Nabhan is the W.K. Kellogg Endowed Chair for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of Arizona. He is the author of several award-winning books, including Where Our Food Comes From, Coming Home to Eat, Gathering the Desert, and Arab/American.

By: Gary Paul Nabhan(Author)
332 pages, 10 b/w photos, 12 colour illustrations, 4 maps
Media reviews

"Richly embroidered with detail, Cumin, Camels, and Caravans by scholar Gary Paul Nabhan is part history, part geography, part cookbook, and part travel memoir [...] Interspersed with recipes from various stops on historical spice routes, Nabhan discusses the botany, linguistic history, and trade history of each substance, but far from being dry accounts, they bring the wonder of many ingredients we now view as commonplace into focus; Nabhan's painstaking research has not eclipsed an evident natural knack for storytelling."
Saveur

"Heady historical and cultural study of ancient trade routes [...] Nabhan adds pungent pinches of botany and gastronomy."
Nature

"This book is a singular achievement [...] A most absorbing book and highly recommended."
Chicago Botanic Garden

"Gary Paul Nabhan weaves a fascinating story."
Santa Fe New Mexican/Pasatiempo

"Nabhan is the ideal travelling companion. With an ancestry that stretches back to the spice-trading Nabheni tribe of Oman, Nabhan is by profession an ethnobotanist and food writer with a clutch of culinary history books under his belt. And he wears his erudition lightly. Although the book is referenced like an academic tome, it reads like a detective story – albeit one with generous pinches of exotic smells and alluring flavours thrown in. Spiced locusts, anyone?"
History Today

"Cumin, Camels, and Caravans is epic in its scope, spanning continents and millennia and exploring how the emergence and development of the spice trade set in motion the process of globalization. Gary Nabhan is a master storyteller with a broad, multidisciplinary perspective. He provides vivid tales of historical figures and his own travels along the ancient spice routes, fascinating observations of cross-cultural linguistic and culinary parallels, and reflections on how the spice trade influenced his own family's migrations. Anyone interested in food and history will love this book."
– Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation

"Gary Nabhan's journeys along ancient trade routes of the Old and New World have resulted in a remarkable and evocative book. He has plenty to tell us about the real, distant origins of globalization and even more about the peoples who make their living from these rare, costly, heady, health-giving aromas. Nabhan knows this trade intimately, and he brings it to life: I could smell the incense, I could taste the chocolate."
– Andrew Dalby, author of Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices

"On the face of it, in this travel memoir braided with history, Nabhan seems focused on the spice trade, but in fact he's looking at the origins of globalization: a fascinating read."
– Tamim Ansary, author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

"As a chef, I take pride in my spice cabinet. Those spices enable me to travel the world via recipes. So I was fascinated by Gary Nabhan's Cumin, Camels, and Caravans, which traces his family's history and that of the complex trade and dissemination of spices ad aromatics over the centuries. I am grateful for those ancient caravans that traveled over land and sea."
– Joyce Goldstein, chef, culinary expert, and author of numerous books, including Inside the California Food Revolution and The Mediterranean Kitchen

"An intensely personal and fascinating retelling of the spice trade from the Arab point of view that bubbles over with infectious enthusiasm."
– Michael Krondl, food writer, culinary historian, and author of several books, including The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

Current promotions
New and Forthcoming BooksNHBS Moth TrapBritish Wildlife MagazineBuyers Guides