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Spices drove nations to sail across vast oceans searching for new routes to the spice-rich Orient. Spices didn't just make merchants rich across the globe — it established vast empires, revealed entire continents to Europeans and tipped the balance of world power. If the modern age has a definitive beginning, it was sparked by the spice trade, some historians have argued.
Spices were an important component of ancient commerce well before the 15th-century, but were monopolized for centuries by Middle Eastern and North African middlemen who guarded the Asian provenance of their valuable sources closely and became fabulously wealthy for it. Back then, the colorful grains were used for flavoring food, but also for such tasks as making perfume, embalming the dead, preserving meat and sprucing up salve recipes in traditional medicine...excerpt courtesyof Live Science: http://www.livescience.com/7495-spice-trade-changed-world.html
Focus Question: How did the search for spices lead to global exploration?
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