Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, several thousand kilometers from Amsterdam, lie ten tiny volcanic islands with a total area of 172 square kilometers—roughly fifteen times smaller than Moscow. In the 17th century, they were worth more than Manhattan—and they were paid for with something other than money.
Nutmeg is ordinary today. A pinch in béchamel, a grating over a cappuccino, a line in a Christmas cake recipe. But four hundred years ago, a single sack of these wrinkled kernels, delivered to Antwerp or Amsterdam, brought a profit of 600 percent. It came down to geography: the Myristica fragrans tree grew only in the Banda archipelago—a handful of islands in the eastern Molucca Sea. Nowhere else on the planet. Not in India, not in Ceylon, not in China—nowhere. Every nut passed through the hands of Bandanese harvesters, Javanese and Arab middlemen, Malaccan resellers, Portuguese captains, Venetian merchants—and at every stage, the price doubled. By the time a European apothecary weighed a nutmeg seed on brass scales, its price per gram was approaching that of gold.
Two commodities came from a single fruit. The kernel itself—nutmeg. And the lacy covering that wraps it—mace, also known as nutmeg blossom, valued even more highly. Mace was used as a preservative, a cure for plague (unsuccessfully), an aphrodisiac (questionable too), and a status symbol. A pinch of scarlet powder in your wine—and you were no longer just a merchant, but someone who could afford a taste from the other end of the earth. Europe was obsessed with spices in much the same way it would later be obsessed with oil, and later still—with lithium. The difference was that the nutmeg tree grew in a place nobody in Europe could properly put on a map.
1599—Dutch ships drop anchor off the shores of Banda for the first time. By then, the Bandanese were not isolated savages from European fantasy, but participants in a trade network centuries old, stretching from Malacca to China. They had no single king, no centralized state. Each island, each village was governed by its own elite—the orang kaya, “rich men,” whose authority rested on control of the nutmeg groves and trade connections. They were used to selling spices to whoever paid more. Javanese, Malays, Chinese, Portuguese, English—all came, traded, and left. The Dutch appeared to be just another set of buyers.
But the VOC—the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, established in 1602—thought differently. It was a corporation with the right to wage war, conclude treaties, build forts, and mint coin. In essence, a private state with shareholders expecting dividends. Shareholders did not need competition. They needed a monopoly—complete, total, without a crack through which even a single nut might slip to competitors. And to the VOC, the orang kaya, with their habit of selling to everyone, were not partners but a problem.
1609 became the turning point. Admiral Pieter Verhoeff arrived in Banda with orders to build a fortified stronghold and secure an exclusive treaty. On the island of Neira, Fort Nassau rose—stone walls amid the nutmeg trees. Negotiations were difficult: the Bandanese did not want to sign a document forbidding them to trade with anyone but the Dutch. Verhoeff insisted. During one meeting with the orang kaya, he was killed along with several dozen of his men. The Dutch saw this as treachery. The Bandanese, apparently, believed they were defending their freedom to trade. Both sides remembered what happened—but drew different conclusions.
What never ceases to strike me is the bureaucratic precision with which what happened next was planned.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen—Governor-General of the VOC, a man with an accountant’s face and a conqueror’s temperament—by 1621 already had experience solving commercial problems by force. He founded Batavia, present-day Jakarta, after razing a rival settlement to the ground. To him, the Banda question was a question of business model: as long as Bandanese lived on the islands, they would trade with the English and the Javanese. As long as they traded with competitors, a monopoly was impossible. Therefore, the Bandanese had to be removed.
The formal pretext was accusations of violating previously signed treaties. The orang kaya, the VOC claimed, had promised exclusive supplies and failed to keep their word. That those treaties had been signed under pressure, that the Bandanese political system had no single leader capable of speaking for all the islands—none of this troubled Dutch jurisprudence. Coen arrived with a fleet and Japanese samurai mercenaries, whom the VOC recruited for its harshest operations.
The campaign was brief and methodical. The resistance of the Bandanese elite was broken. Some of the orang kaya were executed—according to some accounts, they were beheaded in the square before the fort, their heads displayed on pikes. Before the conquest, the islands’ population stood, by various estimates, at around 15,000 people. The campaign of 1621 took the lives of 2,500–2,800—killed in battle, executed, dead from hunger and disease while fleeing into the mountains. Another 1,700 people were enslaved and taken from the islands. Those who could fled by boat to neighboring islands—to Seram, Kei, and other corners of the Moluccan archipelago. Around 90% of the population was destroyed, deported, or scattered. A society that had existed for centuries, traded with half of Asia, possessed its own elite and its own laws, ceased to exist in a matter of months.
We have to be honest here: the exact death toll is a matter of debate among historians. Estimates of the pre-conquest population vary, methods of counting the victims are imperfect, Dutch sources are biased, and hardly any Bandanese written testimony survives. But nobody disputes the scale of the catastrophe. The islands were emptied.
Empty islands are bad business. Nutmeg trees need tending; the nuts must be harvested, dried, processed. And Coen set in motion a system that would operate for the next two centuries.
Banda’s lands were divided into plots—perkēns (perken). Each perken was a nutmeg grove of a set size, leased to a European colonist—a perkenier (perkenier). The perkenier was not a free farmer in the usual sense. He was obliged to surrender the entire harvest of nutmeg and mace to the company at fixed prices set by the VOC. Selling elsewhere was forbidden. Taking out seedlings was forbidden. Hiding part of the harvest was punishable. Put bluntly, the perkenier was a privileged overseer built into the company hierarchy.
But who worked the plantations? Almost no Bandanese remained. The VOC solved the problem the way all colonial empires did: by importing unfree labor. Enslaved people were brought to the islands from Java, the Moluccas, and other regions of the archipelago. Their legal status varied—from outright slavery to different forms of bonded labor—but the essence remained the same: people torn from their homes worked on чужой land, harvesting a crop whose profits went to Amsterdam. A nutmeg grove, if you stop to think about it, is a strangely beautiful place for such cruelty: evergreen trees with dense canopies, fruits like apricots, and inside them—a kernel wrapped in scarlet lace. A landscape seemingly painted for a botanical atlas, not a textbook on the history of slavery.
The perken system turned Banda into a machine for producing a single commodity. Everything obeyed the logic of monopoly: control of land, control of labor, control of every tree. The VOC even regulated the number of nutmeg trees on the islands, cutting down the “excess” ones to prevent overproduction and falling prices in Europe. Destroying trees to maintain the price of their fruit—there is something rational and mad about it at once.
There was one island the Dutch could not get their hands on for a long time. Run—a tiny scrap of land on the western edge of the archipelago, so small you can walk around it in an hour. But nutmeg trees grew there, and the English were there.
The English East India Company had laid claim to Run since the beginning of the 17th century. For the English, it was an entry point into the nutmeg trade, a thorn in the Dutch monopoly. For the Dutch, a hole in the fence through which profits leaked away. In 1621, during Coen’s same campaign, the English presence on Run was eliminated. The Dutch took the island by force, and the English were expelled.
But Run’s diplomatic story stretched on for another half-century. England did not forget. And when, in 1667, the Netherlands and England signed the Treaty of Breda, ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War, its text included one of the most famous exchanges in the history of colonialism. England formally ceded Run to the Netherlands. In return, the Netherlands gave England a small island at the other end of the world—Manhattan, more precisely the colony of New Amsterdam, which became New York. To the Dutch, a nutmeg island where nuts could be grown seemed a more valuable acquisition than a marshy island at the mouth of the Hudson. It is hard to blame them for that assessment—within the economy of the 17th century, it was perfectly logical.
I admit, this is the moment that fascinates me most: when a system that seemed invulnerable begins to crack.
The Dutch monopoly on nutmeg rested on three pillars. Military control over the islands. The perken system, which funneled the entire harvest to the VOC. And, perhaps most important, Banda’s biological uniqueness as the only place where the nutmeg tree grew. The first two pillars depended on the third. So long as the tree grew nowhere else, controlling ten tiny islands was enough to control the global market.
The VOC understood this and guarded its monopoly with paranoid meticulousness. Exporting seedlings and viable seeds was punishable by death. Before shipment, the nuts were treated with lime to deprive them of their ability to germinate—a buyer could grind the nut into powder, but could not plant it. Company inspectors made rounds of the islands, counting trees and cutting down those that grew in forbidden places or in excessive numbers. In a sense, this was history’s first system of intellectual-property management—except that instead of a patent office, soldiers with axes did the work.
But biology cannot be patented forever. In the 18th century, the French botanist Pierre Poivre—whose surname, ironically, translates as “pepper”—managed to smuggle nutmeg seedlings out of the Moluccas and plant them on Mauritius and Réunion in the Indian Ocean. The English followed suit, spreading the crop to Penang, Sumatra, and later to Grenada in the Caribbean, which today produces more nutmeg than Banda. The monopoly built on massacre and slavery collapsed not because of an uprising or a military defeat—but because of a few stolen seedlings that took root in foreign soil.
Today, around twenty thousand people live on the Banda Islands—roughly as many as inhabited the archipelago before the massacre of 1621. Nutmeg trees still grow there—their dark foliage blankets the slopes of the Gunung Api volcano, which now and then reminds everyone of itself with eruptions. The ruins of Dutch forts stand over the bays, being swallowed by tropical greenery. Tourists come to dive—the coral reefs around Banda are considered among the best in Indonesia.
The descendants of those Bandanese who fled in 1621 live on neighboring islands—on Kei, on Seram. Some researchers have documented the survival of elements of Bandanese culture in these communities, though four centuries is long enough for almost everything to fade away. The perkenier system lasted until the end of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia—that is, until the middle of the 20th century. The VOC itself went bankrupt in 1799—the largest corporation of its age, brought down by corruption, military spending, and ultimately by the fact that monopolies are never eternal.
It seems to me that the most disturbing thing about this story is its ordinariness. Coen was not a madman. He was a manager solving a logistical problem: how to ensure maximum returns for shareholders. Massacre, slavery, deportation—all of it was a means of optimizing the supply chain. In VOC reports, the deaths of thousands take up less space than tables listing mace prices. The Banda Islands are a reminder that the most terrible things are done not in defiance of economic logic, but in full accord with it.