8 - Genocide in the Spice Islands

Summary

The Spice Islands or the Moluccas in Indonesia are home to an abundance of cloves, nutmeg and mace. The region was historically highly coveted by various foreign merchants Asian and European alike. When the Dutch joined the search for possession of the spices in the region their eye fell on the Banda Archipelago where nutmeg and mace had formed the cornerstone of the Banda civilization of free traders consisting of 15,000 people. The Dutch set out to capture the spices and succeeded in making small encroachments on several of the small islands of the Banda Archipelago in the first decades of the 17th century. In 1621 Jan Pieterszoon Coen the Dutch Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company gave the order to capture the whole of the Banda Archipelago and caused a genocide that destroyed the Bandanese Civilization in the archipelago. In that year many Bandanese elites were killed or enslaved and the Banda population decimated or made to flee into the hills or in the sea where many passed away. Their lands were occupied by the Dutch East India Company who from then on had a monopoly of the nutmeg and mace production in the world.