Giles Milton

Why do we want this worthless piece of real estate, you know, on a swampy island on the Atlantic seaboard of North America?

But actually, of course, of course, the British get the last laugh on this.

Because for a number of factors, but not least, as Willie hinted at, the price of spices has decreased enormously.

So nutmeg is not worth anything like it was before.

And the English rather cleverly have taken seedlings

from the Bandar Islands and they've transplanted them to India and also to the West Indies.

Now, we mentioned right at the beginning that nutmeg is a very, very difficult crop, a tree to grow, but they've taken seedlings encased in earth from the Bandar Islands and managed to propagate them.

And this is why, in fact, most of the nutmeg you find today, rumoured to be one of the key ingredients in Coca-Cola, it now comes largely, largely from the West Indies, yeah.

I mean, happily, it went mad globally.

It was a fantastic success at the time.

One I wasn't expecting at all.

I think even my publishers were completely taken by surprise that this eccentric story about nutmegs should take off.

A brilliant forward by somebody called William Dalrymple.

Well, I think the reason why it remains relevant, because on the one hand, it's a rather quaint, if rather violent story from the 1600s.

But really underlying all this, this is a story of corporate power.

It's a story of monopolies.

It's a story of a corporation like Google with an army behind it enforcing its will.

And it's also a story about who pays the price when these global corporations get involved in a place.

And we see that in the Bandar Islands, which ended in the massacre of some 90% of the population, the original population of the Bandar Islands.

So I think that, yes, while this is a story from 400 years ago, it remains deeply and increasingly relevant in the world we live in today.