Natural Products in World History

1. Lecture 2 – it is not money that makes the world go round.It is Natural Products!

2. You should be thinking about Natural Products when: • passing Starbucks • eating a curry • chewing a sweet • looking at an old Dutch painting • visiting Venice • studying the colonisation of North America • considering why English is spoken widely in India and is the language of business throughout much of the world • considering why the Dutch settled in South Africa • thinking about why the UK, the Netherlands, Porugal and Spain had colonies and territories throughout the world • drinking tea from a china cup • eating chocolate • considering the chaos in 19th century China • judging the illegal drug industry in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries • drinking a Coke • Studying at Yale • wondering why Bayer at one time sold heroin as an ordinary medicine over the counter • thinking about the spread of Islam why the Ottoman empire covered the areas it did

3. Learning outcomes • To show that trade in commodities that contain Natural Products have been very important in shaping world history • spices • tea • coffee • opium • coca • quinine • To suggest that you investigate how many large industries are still based on human desires to use Natural Products • pharmaceutical products • tobacco • illegal drugs • wines • vegetables and fruit • flowers

4. Spices - The Greeks and Romans • 50,000 BC Attractive flavours? • 2300 BC In one of the earliest written records, the Assyrians tell of their gods drinking sesame seed wine before they created the earth. • 1920 BC Biblical history tells of Joseph (he of the coat of many colours) being sold to a spice caravan by his brothers. • 1520 BC The book of Exodus in the Bible tells of Children of Israel fleeing Egypt, taking with them the "principal spices" • 1453 BC Greeks begin Olympic Games at which victors were awarded laurel (bay leaf) wreaths. • 992 BC Queen of Sheba visits Solomon with "camels that bear spices" as her principal gift. • 80 BC Alexandria, Egypt becomes greatest spice trading port of Eastern Mediterranean, with one of its entrances known as "Pepper Gate." • 50 BC Romans bring mustard seed to England. • 65 AD Funeral rites for Nero's wife, Poppaca, in Rome consumes year's supply of cinnamon. • 300 Probable date of oldest cookbook by Apicius; recipes richly spiced. • 410 Alaric the Visigoth demands 3000 pounds of pepper as ransom from Rome and two years later extracts 3000 pounds annual pepper tribute from the city.

5. Spice - The Arabic and Islamic Traders The Rise of Venice • 595 Mohammed weds wealthy spice-trading widow; his followers combine missionary work with spice-trading in East and build first spice monopoly. • 900 Venice rising as commercial power - much of it based on spices- beginning to bring Europe out of the Dark Ages. • 1179 Guild of Pepperers founded in London; France forms Corporation of Spicers. Pepperers to become Guild of Grossers in 14th Century. • 1298 Marco Polo returns from China; tells where spices grow and awakens western world's interest in trading direct with the Orient. • 1418 Portuguese Prince Henry establishes his navigation college to spur World-wide spice quest.

6. Spice - The Portuguese and Spanish Era • 1492 Columbus sails to seek more direct passage to Orient's spice riches, the start of European Age of Exploration. • 1493 Columbus discovers allspice in West Indies. • 1494 Columbus' physician, Chanea, describes Mexican capsicums (red peppers). • 1498 Vasco de Gama reaches Calicut, India, the spice center; pepper prices fall in Europe. • 1505 Portuguese discover Sri Lanka (Ceylon), cinnamon source. • 1511 Albuquerque seizes Malacca on Malay Peninsula, one of the most important spice ports. • 1519-1522 Magellan sails westward for Spain looking for new spice lands; surviving ship returns with enough spices to finance entire expedition. • 1529 Charles V of Spain cedes all rights Spain had claimed in Spice Islands to Portugal for 350,000 ducats. • 1563 Garcia da Orta writes "Colloquies on Drugs and Simples of India" the first scientific book on oriental spices published in the western world

7. Spice – the Dutch and English Expansion • 1580 Sir Francis Drake returns to London from round-the-world voyage that included visit to Spice Islands. • 1585 West Indies ship arrives in Europe with first cargo of Jamaica ginger- first oriental spice to be grown successfully in New World. • 1599 Van Neck establishes first Dutch trading posts in Banda, Amboina and Ternate, the "Spice Islands." • 1600 British East India Company founded. • 1609 Record 116,000 pounds of cloves reach England in one shipment. • 1640 Dutch seize Malacca and control of most spice production in the East. • 1672 Elihu Yale reaches India and starts spice business, which eventually provides the fortune with which he founded Yale University. • 1704 Europe first reads "Arabian Nights" and Sinbad's spice quest. • 1760 Large amounts of cloves and nutmegs burned at Amsterdam to keep up prices. • 1770 Governor Poivre of Mauritius steals cloves and nutmeg seeds from Dutch and starts new growing areas on his island, thus affecting the first breech in Holland's East Indies monopoly. • 1786 The English found Penang, later to become major eastern pepper port.

8. Following on from spices – the new high value Natural Product Tea • Camellia sinensis is indigenous to China and parts of India. It is a perennial bush that grows up to 10 m in the wild but is clipped in plantations to be manageable • The chemicals: • Phenylpropanoids • Xanthophyll pigments break down to give volatile terpenoid compounds which smell and taste pleasant • 1-4% caffeine • 0.05% theophylline and theobromine • History • Far East - a long history of tea drinking in China and the Far East • Europe began to drink tea in the 17th century. Trading with the Far East began to expand after the Portuguese, then Dutch and finally the British developed their spice businesses. The British presence in India and Sri Lanka was important in developing their tea industries. • The only significant producer of tea at that time was China. The 19th century link to opium

9. Following on from tea – the next high value Natural Product Coffee • Coffea arabica is a native of Ethiopia and it was grown in a few countries bordering the Red Sea and traded throughout the Arab world. The coffee plant is a perennial bush and the beans are harvested annually and processed (including roasting) before being ground to make coffee. • Chemicals • The main flavours are produced during the roasting process when many chemicals are broken down and released from the storage bodies in the cell. The oils and tannins give odour and flavour. • Caffeine, theobromine, theophylline • History • Coffee drinking has been known in the Middle East and further east from about 800 BC but it only became known in parts of Europe in the 16th century. By the 18th century the "colonial" traders (the same lot who were trading spices and tea - largely Portuguese, Dutch and UK) had taken seeds to other continents and tried to establish production. Thus the Portuguese established plantations in South America, the Dutch in the East Indies (Java .. now Indonesia) and the UK in Africa.

10. Coffee • Coffee is the second most valuable legally traded commodity after oil • 25 million people worldwide gain their living from coffee • Coffee is the biggest legally imported food import in the USA • 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day - 20% in the USA

11. Coca • The plant A small shrub, Erythroxylum, is native to the Andes regions (Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador). T. coca is Bolivian Coca and T. truxillense Peruvian Coca. The leaves of the plant are harvested up to 3 times a year. • The chemicals • The coca leaf contains 0.7-2.5% alkaloids. Cocaine is the chemical produced when one of the alkaloids, tropacocaine, is broken down. • History • Its role in ancient S American cultures - restricted to relatively few people and used to help cope with fatigue and life at high altitudes. • After the Spanish conquests, it was used more widely in order to get more out of slaves and workers in the metal mines. • 1855 German chemists produced the much more concentrated and powerful cocaine from the coca leaves and advocated its use as an anaesthetic. • Late 19th Century cocaine preparations were all over the place, including: Tonic wines, nose powders, suppositories, cigarettes, and of course the famous coca cola. Holmes’s 7% solution.

12. Coca • One of the most influential drinks that came from human interest in coca was Coco Cola. This was developed by a US pharmacist Dr John Pemberton. His first product was a rip-off a well known product in Europe, Dr Mariani's tonic wine (which was made by steeping coca leaves in red wine). However, when controls were being considered for alcoholic products in Atlanta, Dr Pemberton devised a non-alcoholic version - the birth of Coca Cola. In 1903 Coca Cola replaced coca extract with another natural product caffeine. • About 25% of the coca leaves that are harvested are consumed locally as an antifatigue agent by the workers. When the leaf is chewed the cocaine (the main alkaloid that is responsible for the main physiological effect) is released slowly into the blood. Each user may consume up to 50g leaf per day and that could give 350 mg cocaine to the user. Only about 1-2% of the coca grown is processed industrially to produce pharmaceutical products

13. Opium • The plant • Papaver somniferum is an annual that is easily grown in many parts of the world. • The chemicals • The crude preparation is air-dried sap from poppy capsules. The main physiologically active ingredients are alkaloids. The capsule contains 0.5% alkaloids but the dried opium latex can have up to 25%. At least 40 individual alkaloids are found in the opium but only 6 major ones. morphine 4-21% codeine 0.8-2.5% thebaine 4-8&.

14. Opium • The culture and trade • Known in Europe at least 4000 years ago and was noted by ancient Greek and Roman writers. Arab traders took to it to China in 7-8th century but there is evidence that they knew and used the plant before that time. • 1803, the German pharmacist F. W. Serturner isolated the principal alkaloid which he named morphium after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. The invention of the syringe and the discovery of other alkaloids of opium soon followed: codeine in 1832 and papaverine in 1848. • By the 1850s, the medicinal use was common in Europe. In the USA, opium preparations became widely available in the 19th C. Morphine was used extensively as a painkiller for wounded soldiers in the Civil War. The inevitable opium addiction was called “the army disease” or “soldier’s disease.” These abuse problems prompted a search for potent, but nonaddictive, painkillers. • In the 1870s, an acetyled version of morphine, supposedly nonaddictive was produced. Bayer was the first to produce it in large quantities under the brand name Heroin. Studies soon showed heroin to have narcotic and addictive properties far exceeding those of morphine.

15. Quinine • The plant • Quinine is extracted from the bark of "the fever bark tree" (Cinchona spp.) which is native to north west South America. • The chemical • Quinine is an alkaloid which occurs along with a number of other alkaloids (5-15% of the bark depending on cultivar). Quinine is typically 50-75% of the total of the four main alkaloids. • The culture and trade • The bark had been used for centuries by local people to treat fevers. • 1630 - Jesuits learned of this useful plant remedy. • 1637 - in Lima (now Peru), the wife of Viceregal, 4th Count Cinchon, suffers from malaria. In desperation a “native” remedy drived from the bark of the tree is used. She recovers. In her honour the tree family is named Cinchona. • 1650s “Jesuit’s bark” now used by the rich in Europe. Jesuits controlled the production back in S America. But they were into conservation - for every tree felled one was planted. • Dislike of Jesuits causes many Protestants to reject “the powder of the devil”. One such person was Oliver Cromwell who rejected this source of a helpful Natural Product and maybe that is why we still have a monarchy ....

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