The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Back to the Glory Days of the Spice Trade || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Global trade was once fragmented into many regional economies. Goods like spices traveled overland through countless intermediaries before reaching the gateway cities of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi. So, what can we learn from the glory days of the spice trade?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4dnPf63

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from the Promenadevosto, uh, Adriatic Sea. So I thought I'd talk about the geopolitics of trade and how it's evolved. Uh, in this area, we used to be the terminus of the spice trade. So in the world before, roughly 1,500, 1,500, everything was basically transported by land or coastal ship. And as a result, the world was separated into dozens of little micro economies compared to the globalized system we have now. And in the cases of things like spices or silks or porcelains. They all originated either in East Asia or Southeast Asia, and they passed through dozens, if not hundreds of middlemen on their way through to Western

Europe. Most of those routes funneled through Central Asia and eventually ended in the Ottoman Empire in the city that is today Istanbul. And then the Turks of Istanbul shipped them by water, coastal trade, to the cities of the Italian coast, most notably Venice, but also So places like Genoa and Amalfi, which is just to the south of here, Pisa as well. And then those cities became the gateway for those product into Western Europe, and they made mad money on it as a result. Getting too windy, going to relocate. Okay, that lasted for a few centuries, and the Italian city-states involved just got

madly wealthy, and since they were on the opposite side of the Alps from all of the powers of the Northern European plane, they basically could do whatever they wanted, and they did. and they partnered with Islamic Turkey in order to make themselves wealthy at the expense of Christian Europe. Different cultural conversation for another time. Anyway, this lasted until the Portuguese, which at the time were one of the poorer countries in Europe, all the way out on the western end of the Iberian Peninsula, figured out how to sail out of sight of land, deep water navigation. And guys like Dagama eventually figured out how to go around Africa and hit India direct

and eventually take over the spice trade directly cutting out all those middlemen. And so over the course of a couple of centuries, Istanbul and the Italian city states went from being the wealthiest parts of the world to all of a sudden being completely cut off from what until then had been one of their primary sources of funds. Why is this relevant today? Well, the technologies of globalization are failing, and the system that has allowed the whole world to go wherever it wants and access any particle are breaking down. And in the world we're about to be in, we're going to have to go back to kind of sequestered trade.

And the Adriatic model, the spice trade model, is probably the best one we have to understand what's coming. You see, deep water navigation isn't going away. But everybody who has ships has access to the wider world, the question is whether they can protect their sea lanes. And I would argue that there is not a single country on the planet that can do so on a global basis. We have a number of countries, with the U.S. being the most powerful, that can intervene. in those trade routes on a global basis, but none can actually protect them, which means that most trade is going to become much more regionalized or even localized, and we're going to have to militarize a lot of it.

That changes everything from the culture of what it means to be a shipping company to the nature of what it means to be a military and a navy. We're probably going to be going into a world where the single biggest impact is going to be a collapse in what we considered manufactured goods trade, because right now, unlike the world of the Silk Road, where it was all one way, we have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of products that require multiple supply chain steps and sometimes in the thousands. And the intermediate parts that go into the final product shoot back and forth and back

and forth among countries many, many, many, many, many times. That entire model is going to collapse. And things that can't be produced relatively locally or within a network like, say, the European Union, simply aren't going to be pretty. at all. So, if you're looking at what the economy of 5, 10, 15 years is going to look like, not bad place to start is going back to the 12, 13th, and 14th century when the spice trade was all that. It's a great baseline to start the conversation. All right, that's it for me today.