I bet those fat Dutch burghers didn't care about the Banda Islanders.
And I guess we didn't either. There's only one reference on the blog, and that's in a post on the wealth extracted from the silver mines at Potosi Bolivia:...
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We will rectify the oversight, more on Banda forthcoming.The V.O.C. and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange got a few posts:...
And the promise kept.
From Gastro Obscura, February 28, 2019:
The Hidden History of the Nutmeg Island That Was Traded for Manhattan
Dutch colonists committed genocide to secure a spice monopoly. But there’s more to the story.
Several Banda islands depicted above a port. The islands were trading centers that depended on imports for food.
Most people know Indonesia’s Banda Islands—if they know of them at all—for one historical Snapple fact: In 1677, the Dutch traded Manhattan to the British for their claim on just one of them, a barely one-square-mile speck of land. They did so because these 11 obscure islands on the southeastern edge of modern Indonesia were, until several centuries ago, ostensibly the world’s sole source of nutmeg, which was then one of the most valuable commodities in Western Europe, largely thanks to its purported power to cure anything from gas to the bubonic plague.For the Dutch, securing a nutmeg monopoly was worth giving up Manhattan. The tradeoff was likely a no-brainer, given the lengths they’d already gone to corner the market. In 1621, Dutch East India company officials committed genocide against the uncooperative local Bandanese people, and enslaved those who survived, just to remove one obstacle to their monopolistic dreams.Manhattan soon developed into a cosmopolitan trade center. The Bandas, meanwhile, turned into a single-purpose, slave-driven plantation economy. As transatlantic trade and American commerce boomed, so did Manhattan. As nutmeg’s value eventually collapsed, so did the Bandas’ economy.The simple story of the islands and their people—thrust onto the world stage because they sat on a valuable natural resource, then wholly eradicated by the unstoppable force of European colonization—is a staple of Did You Know articles on Manhattan and nutmeg. For economists, it is a potent economic parable. For food historians, a dash of flavor. Even full-fledged historians often neglect the region. When they do speak to its history, notes Timo Kaartinen, a Finnish academic whose work touches on the Bandas, they “tend to focus on the competition between different European powers.”...
....MUCH MORE
