Trade and Society in the Banda Islands in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Both Moluccan cloves and Bandanese nutmeg and mace played an important, even crucial, part in the elaborate network of exchanges of commodities which for many centuries before the intervention of the Europeans had been the characteristic feature of inter-island trade in the Indonesian archipelago. From the early sixteenth century the Portuguese, and to a lesser extent the Spanish, added a new strand to this network, but even in the spice islands, the commercial domination of which was their chief goal, they did not seriously disrupt its traditional pattern. This was particularly so in the Banda Islands, which they soon discovered were markedly different from the Moluccas, not only by virtue of the different spices which they produced and in which they traded, but in the economic and political organization of their societies, in the manner in which they reacted to the European intervention and in the effect which that intervention had upon their commercial activities. Both acted as magnets to the Portuguese and Spanish, and later on the Dutch and English, drawn by the lure of great profits, as they had to Asian traders for many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. But both presented rather different problems to those traders, Asian and European alike, once commercial relations had been established