9.
REVERSING DEVELOPMENT
S PICE AND G ENOCIDE
T HE M OLUCCAN A RCHIPELAGO in modern Indonesia
is
made up of three groups of islands. In the early seventeenth
century, the northern Moluccas housed the independent
kingdoms of Tidore, Ternate, and Bacan. The middle
Moluccas were home to the island kingdom of Ambon. In
the south were the Banda Islands, a small archipelago that
was not yet politically unified. Though they seem remote to
us today, the Moluccas were then central to world trade as
the only producers of the valuable spices cloves, mace, and
nutmeg. Of these, nutmeg and mace grew only in the
Banda Islands. Inhabitants of these islands produced and
exported these rare spices in exchange for food and
manufactured goods coming from the island of Java, from
the entrepôt of Melaka on the Malaysian Peninsula, and
from India, China, and Arabia.
The first contact the inhabitants had with Europeans was
in the sixteenth century, with Portuguese mariners who
came to buy spices. Before then spices had to be shipped
through the Middle East, via trade routes controlled by the
Ottoman Empire. Europeans searched for a passage
around Africa or across the Atlantic to gain direct access to
the Spice Islands and the spice trade. The Cape of Good
Hope was rounded by the Portuguese mariner