Indonesian Banda (1978) by Willard Hanna

 Book Review

Indonesian Banda: 

Colonialism and Its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands (1978)

by Willard Hanna

   Recent books I've read on the history of Capitalism and the relationship of Capitalism to slavery have pointed out that the genocidal elimination of an entire population of a specific territory was not, as they computer nerds of today say, "a bug, but a feature" of early capitalism.  Specifically, the idea that if one encountered a geographically distinct territory, an island, for example, that was otherwise amenable to factory/plantation agriculture BUT such exploitation was presently prevented by the presence of an existing population that did not want to become slaves to foreigners, one could simply remove the population, one way or another.  

  I was familiar with this dynamic in the New World milieu, but it wasn't until recently that I'd heard about the adventures of the Dutch in this same area, not in the new world, but in the Indonesian archipelago, namely, the island of Banda, where an enterprising Dutch merchant-warlord utterly extirpated an indigenous population so he could bring in slaves to grow the nutmeg he wanted.   This went on from about 1609 to 1621, when Jan Pieterszoon Coen led a mixed army of Dutch soldiers, local recruits and Japanese mercenaries to take the island once and for all.  Coen remained a culture hero in the Netherlands until relatively recently, when the scholarship caught up with him.  Note at how early this sequence of events took place, around the same time the North American British colony at Jamestown was founded.