THE HISTORY OF CLOVES
- May 31
- 9 min read
The Little Bud That Changed the World
Take a moment to carefully examine the clove in your hand.
You might add it to your salep soon, or it might simmer at the bottom of a Glühwein, steep in a Masala Chai, or be sprinkled on top of an aşure (Turkish dessert). It's just one of the dozens of spices in your kitchen. Ordinary, inexpensive, everywhere.
Yet this bud has been a part of human life for at least two thousand years — and for almost all of that time it was far from "ordinary." Oceans were crossed for it, navies were built, empires were fought over it. Companies more powerful than states were founded for it, islands were drenched in blood for it. One of the world's first global trade networks was built, in part, around it.
So that humble clove at the bottom of a cup of chai is actually a central figure in one of the bloodiest and most ambitious trade stories in human history.
Let's start with the name.
If you want to understand the story of something, first look at its name. But sometimes the name tells you not the story, but how people have tried to make sense of it.
In English, cloves are called clove — from the Latin word clavus , meaning "nail," via the French clou . This is because the dried bud does indeed resemble a small nail: rounded at the top, thin and pointed at the stem. The Chinese must have noticed the same thing, calling this spice 丁香 ( dīng xiāng ): "nail scent." Two civilizations from two different ends of the spectrum looked at the same bud and thought the same thing.
Our word "carnation," however, comes from a completely different, more obscure path. Its origin is the Greek word karyóphyllon ; a direct translation of "walnut leaf" ( káryon "walnut" + phýllon "leaf"). Sounds nice, doesn't it? The only problem is: carnations have no apparent connection to either walnuts or leaves. So why "walnut leaf"?
The truth is, we don't know for sure — but the strongest possibility is that the name was probably never a true recipe . For the Greeks, cloves were an imported spice from the East, one that didn't even have a name in their own language. Most likely, they heard a foreign, unfamiliar name and fitted it onto two familiar Greek words that sounded "right": nut and leaf. In other words, they gave meaning to a sound they couldn't make sense of. In linguistics, this is called "folk etymology"; the English did the same thing, dissecting the Greek word asparagus into "sparrowgrass." The name of cloves is probably a charming accident of such a misunderstanding.
The only place where this word's "walnut leaf" logic truly holds true isn't your plate, but your vase: the carnation in your garden gets its name from this spice. Because their scents are so similar, people named the flower after the spice — and this time the connection is through scent, quite solid. So, of the two distinct "carnations" in Turkish, one sits on your plate, the other in your vase; and the second owes its name entirely to the scent of the first.
Calling a bud a "nail" in one place and a "walnut leaf" in another, then associating a flower with its scent... For those who love how names travel and change shape along the way, the carnation is interesting from its very first syllable.
It grew on only a few islands in the world.
The clove tree ( Syzygium aromaticum ) has historically grown in just one tiny corner of the world: the Maluku Archipelago in eastern Indonesia — a place known for centuries as the “Spice Islands.”
This is a world not easily found on a map. Over a thousand islands scattered in the Banda Sea, almost entirely water; a volcanic archipelago covered in mountains and forests, with approximately ninety percent of its surface area being sea. It sits on one of the most active fault lines on Earth, at a point where continental and tectonic plates collide; earthquakes and volcanoes are the daily language here. And here, carnations grow only on these few rugged, volcanic islands, and nowhere else in the world.
This geographical coincidence made the carnation an extraordinarily strategic product. So much so that when the Netherlands seized these islands centuries later, some historians consider it the most valuable piece of land in the world.
Consider this: today, coffee is grown in dozens of countries, from Brazil to Vietnam, and tea from India to Kenya. Cloves, however, were confined to just a handful of islands for thousands of years. Demand came from all over the world; supply from a single archipelago. In economic terms: a perfect monopoly. And monopolies make those who control them rich, and those who don't, warring.
A two-thousand-year-old bud
The carnation's journey through human history goes back at least two thousand years to China.
Legend says that during the Han Dynasty — roughly between 206 BC and 220 AD — court officials would chew cloves to freshen their breath before appearing before the emperor. One of the most elegant oral hygiene rituals known in history.
Here's a small but delightful footnote: serious historians still debate whether the "chicken tongue spice" ( jishexiang ) mentioned in the records of that period was actually cloves or something else entirely. Some texts say that what was described looked more like a "herb flower" than a tree bud. So perhaps, in this famous historical anecdote, the breaths that appeared before the emperor were refreshed not with cloves, but with another scent altogether.
One thing is certain about the story: cloves didn't grow in China. They came from islands thousands of kilometers away. So even two thousand years ago, this bud was a luxury commodity that carried the weight of international trade.
The Romans also used cloves as medicine, perfume, and culinary flavoring — but most never knew exactly where they came from. Cloves originated in the Spice Islands, crossed the Indian Ocean, stopped at Indian ports, fell into the hands of Arab traders, and from there reached Europe. Long before modern states existed, a single spice had linked civilizations that had never met each other in an invisible chain.
The Price of a Pinch of Cloves - The Most Expensive Nail in History
By the Middle Ages, cloves were more than just a flavor for Europe. They were simultaneously a symbol of wealth, a medicine, a preservative, a perfume, and a diplomatic gift.
So how expensive was it? The figures are hard to believe today. In 15th-century England, half a kilo of cloves cost a skilled craftsman almost five days' wages. A small bag of spices could buy an entire flock of sheep or cattle. Spices were not just a language of the table; they were a language of wealth.
We can still see the power of cloves in the kitchens of that era today. The famous spice blends of medieval Europe — the strong and pungent poudre forte , the sweet poudre douce — were built around cloves. These were not just recipes, but a status symbol: those who could access these spices were not ordinary people.
The key point: why did they set sail across the ocean?
But there was one issue that bothered Europe: they couldn't get direct access to the carnation.
The journey of a clove bud from the Spice Islands to a European table was a long chain passing through dozens of hands — and each hand received its share. First, Arab and Muslim merchants transported the spices across the Indian Ocean to the ports of the East. From there, the goods reached those critical crossroads where East and West met — and as the Ottoman Empire gained control of Egypt, the Red Sea routes, and the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean, this gateway was largely in Ottoman hands. Finally, Venetian merchants stepped in, buying the goods from there and distributing them throughout Europe at high prices.
So when a European bought a clove, they were paying not only for a rare spice, but also for that long chain of intermediaries. And the most profitable links in that chain were entirely outside of Europe.
This was the most powerful impetus behind the Age of Geographical Discoveries: not simply “new lands” as is often thought, but the ambition to bypass the intermediary chain entirely and reach the source directly. Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of Africa and arrival in India in 1498 was the culmination of this very dream—to bypass everyone in between and reach the spice’s true source. A single bud redrew the map of an entire era.
The most ruthless business plan in history: VOC
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to open this sea route; their ship was also the first European to anchor in the Spice Islands in 1512. Then the Spanish, followed by the English, claimed the region. But it was the Dutch who truly changed the story.
Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was a behemoth that many historians today call “the world’s first true multinational corporation.” It was no ordinary trading organization: it had its own army, its own navy; it could wage war, sign treaties, and collect taxes. It was more like an overseas state than a corporation. By 1669, the VOC was the wealthiest company in the world: it owned over a hundred large merchant ships, dozens of warships, and forts stretching from Asia to Africa.
What drove this enormous machine was cloves and their spice relatives. The VOC could buy spices in Asia and sell them in Europe for 14-17 times the price. And there was only one way to maintain this profit margin: an absolute monopoly.
To achieve this, the company resorted to methods diametrically opposed to the product's sweet aroma. They systematically uprooted and burned clove and nutmeg trees growing on islands outside of Maluku; deliberately restricted supply to keep prices high; and violently suppressed illicit production. When faced with resistance, they resorted to massacres—a large portion of the indigenous population in the Banda Islands was killed or enslaved. The fragrant spice in a wealthy Londoner's pocket often smelled of blood and ashes.
This is the first draft, written in blood and fire four centuries ago, of the cold equation taught today in commodity markets: "If supply decreases, prices rise." If you want to understand how valuable a carnation is, read not about its price, but about what people risked for it.
And then there's the legend of Tower Bridge.
The wealth generated by spices was so great that legends even began to circulate around it. One of the best known is that London's iconic Tower Bridge was supposedly built with taxes collected from the spice trade.
It sounds nice, but it's not true. Tower Bridge was completed in 1894, and its cost of approximately £1.2 million wasn't covered by spice taxes; it came from London's century-old bridge foundation, Bridge House Estates — a fund sustained for centuries by bridge tolls, rents, and donations, a taxpayer-free burden. So, the bridge wasn't built with spice money.
But it would be unfair to dismiss the legend entirely. Because the immense wealth of London that made that bridge possible—its ports, banks, and trading empire—was built upon centuries of accumulated spice, tea, textile, and colonial trade. Tower Bridge wasn't built directly on clove taxes; but at the heart of that magnificent economic machine that built it were the wheels once turned by spices like cloves.
So why was it so valuable?
The value of cloves didn't just come from their rarity. They were also a surprisingly versatile product. They soothed toothaches, delayed food spoilage in a world without refrigerators, were used in perfumes, and a pinch added depth to food. A single spice that traversed the pharmacy, the kitchen, and the perfumery.
The secret behind this is a molecule called eugenol , the main component of clove oil. Eugenol gives it that intense, warm scent and also leaves a mild numbing effect on the tongue — so effective that it is still used in dentistry today. So, your grandmother's habit of pressing cloves to a toothache wasn't just a baseless belief; it was a piece of chemical knowledge distilled over centuries.
And finally, it returns to the cup.
So how did this much-anticipated monopoly collapse? The answer, like its beginning, is almost novel: In the 18th century, a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre —whose surname, ironically, means "pepper"—managed to smuggle clove and nutmeg seedlings out of the islands. These seedlings took root in new lands such as Zanzibar and Madagascar. The monopoly was broken, prices fell; cloves gradually ceased to be the treasure of a handful of islands and became a common spice of the world.
Today, cloves grow in many tropical regions. Half a kilo of cloves, once worth five days' wages, now costs a few pennies at the market. No one is building a navy for them anymore.
But its function remains the same on your plate and in your cup. That eugenol effect—that slight warmth and numbness on the tongue—makes cloves the secret architect of beverages. It bridges the gap between sweet and salty, adding depth and a sense of "winter" to a blend. The answer to why cloves are in salep, mulled wine, chai, and aşure lies here: it's the spice that brings together scattered notes into a single warm accord.
When you brew a Masala Chai, boil a Glühwein, or spread a medieval poudre forte on meat, you're actually bringing a little piece of history into your kitchen. That bud, once fought over by empires, now simply makes your cup smell a little nicer.
Perhaps that's why seeing cloves as merely a spice is incomplete. Because they are the protagonists of one of humanity's first global stories — and that story is retelling itself with every warm sip.
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