Banda Islands

And it would not be the last.

A century later, on the other side of the world, the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands in what's now Indonesia essentially annihilated the indigenous communities who'd lived there for centuries.

This was another example of two civilizations colliding and one destroying the other.

Two centuries on, in the 1820s and 30s, British colonists basically wiped out the Aboriginal Tasmanians as they asserted control over Van Diemen's land.

The commodities had changed, the structure hadn't.

The VOC forced nutmeg production in the Banda Islands through a plantation system worked by enslaved labor.

The colonial government that followed it forced export crop production across Java through a coercive labor system that extracted from living farmers instead.

Different legal category, same direction the value flowed.

And the combination did something none of the pieces could have done alone.

It made the consequences of an operation permanently separable from the people who funded it.

You could own a share of what the VOC did in the Banda Islands without ever being required to know what the VOC did in the Banda Islands.

The structure the VOC invented, the joint stock company, the shareholders who cannot audit operations, the geographic and informational distance between investment and consequence, outlasted the company itself by centuries.

It was very valuable.

It was fought over on some islands, the Banda Islands, um, the only place on Earth where it actually grew.

And there's a widely told account that the Dutch traded away Manhattan to part with to secure nutmeg territory.

Interesting, right? Manhattan for a spice.

Jan Pieterszoon Koon came back from the Banda Islands and submitted his paperwork.

What happened on those islands in 1621 was not a secret.

It was not a rogue operation that the herein 17 later disavowed or quietly buried.

It is the largest surviving corporate archive from the pre-industrial world.

And somewhere in those 25 million pages are the letters Kuhn sent home in 1621, describing what was done and the letters that came back authorizing the next phase.

Cohen landed on the Banda Islands in March 1621.

He had under his command Dutch soldiers and Japanese mercenaries, the latter recruited because they were effective fighters with no prior relationship to the islands and no particular reason to hesitate.

The operation proceeded across several months.

Every pomander in London, every prescription from every European physician, every wealthy household that used nutmeg to demonstrate status at the table, all of it came from 10 islands that most Europeans couldn't name.

The Bandanese who lived on those islands had understood the commercial implication of their geography long before the Dutch arrived.

The Arab and Javanese traders who had worked the Banda Sea for centuries had built a system of exchange around that geography, and the Bandanese had shaped that system deliberately.

You did not come to the Banda Islands as a conqueror and walk away with nutmeg.

You came as a buyer, you negotiated, and you paid a price that the Bandanese considered fair.

The Orang Kaya, that's the term.

It means roughly the wealthy ones, the men of standing.

They were the merchant leaders of the Bandanese communities, not kings in the European sense, something closer to a council of prosperous men whose authority derived from commercial success and community standing.