Origins

In histories of the Silk Road, the term “silk” tends to stand in for a whole range of luxury goods, including musk, jade, rosewater, and luxury furs. Likewise, discussions of the “spice” trade often include, alongside Southeast Asia’s “fine spices,” such as cloves, nutmeg, and mace, a variety of other tropical luxuries. These range from aromatics such as sandalwood and camphor, to turtle shells, bird-of-paradise feathers, and pearls. This is only appropriate, since premodern practitioners of cooking, medicine, and other arts frequently made use of “spices,” such as frankincense, which are generally viewed in the 21st century strictly as aromatics.¹ This introduction to the spice trade in Southeast Asia will focus primarily on the spices and aromatics which were effectively unique to eastern Indonesia until early modern times, above all cloves, nutmeg, mace, and white sandalwood, with occasional reference to other natural luxury products which were exported along with them.

The two basic keys to understanding the origins and early development of Southeast Asia’s spice trade are biogeography, that is, the “study of the past and present geographic distributions of plants and animals and other organisms,” and the monsoon winds.² Geographically, maritime Southeast Asia straddles the tropical eastern Indian and western Pacific Oceans (here, the Indo-Pacific), and two distinct biogeographic terrestrial realms, the Indo-Malay and Australasian. The latter converge in the Indonesian archipelago, close to the famous Wallace Line which divides the fauna of Asia from that of the Pacific. The Indo-Malay realm extends from India to the Philippine islands, Borneo, and Bali, while Australasia stretches from Sulawesi and Lombok to New Guinea and Australia, and includes Pacific island groups such as the Solomons and Vanuatu. Within these two vast Indo-Pacific realms are a great many individual ecoregions, which, while often sharing characteristics, possess their own unique environmental configurations and arrays of plant and animal species.³ While some species, for example flying foxes or the coconut palm, may inhabit a wide range of ecoregions, others may be historically restricted to one. Thus, the various tree species responsible for producing cloves, nutmeg, mace, and aromatic white sandalwood are indigenous to individual Australasian ecoregions of the eastern Indonesian archipelago. The clove tree (Syzygium aromaticum) evolved on the five small islands of Maluku (also the name of two much larger provinces in modern Indonesia). These lie on the western side of the larger Halmahera Island and belong to the Halmahera rainforest ecoregion. Further south, Myristica fragrans, the tree which produces the single fruit from which nutmeg and mace are derived, was native to the Banda Sea Islands moist deciduous forests ecoregion, which covers the six small islands of the Banda archipelago. The aromatic sandalwood tree (Santalum album, not to be confused with the nonaromatic red sandalwood of South Asia), thrived in the relatively arid deciduous forests ecoregion which covers Timor and nearby islands of the Lesser Sunda Chain, such as Sumba. Santalum album also grew in northern Australia, and closely related aromatic sandalwood species thrived in central Indo-Pacific archipelagoes such as Hawaii and Fiji, but these sources did not become part of the trade until the early modern era.⁴

While biogeography determined the evolution and location of Southeast Asia’s spices and aromatics, it was the monsoon winds that enabled the trade which revolved around them. From prehistory to the 19th-century invention of steam engines, virtually all long-range sailing and trading in maritime Southeast Asia was governed by the rhythms of two great annual wind systems—the Asian and the Australian monsoons. North of the equator, the Asian monsoon dictated sailing schedules from the South China Sea to the western Indian Ocean. In this monsoon system, the summer monsoon winds blew from the southwest toward the Asian mainland, filling the sails of ships bound from the Indian Ocean to the Melaka Strait region in Southeast Asia, and from the Strait to South China. The winter months saw the winds reverse, blowing from the northeast, signaling the departure of vessels from China to the Melaka Strait, or from the Strait to India and beyond.⁵ In subequatorial Indonesia, on the other hand, the winds of the Australian monsoon blow from the southeast in the summer, and from the northwest in the winter. Thus, for vessels bringing spices from eastern Indonesia to the ports and trading posts of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the outbound sailing season was the summer, with returns in the winter. The fact that the winds of the Asian monsoon blew from the southwest while those of the Australian monsoon blew from the southeast meant that eastern Indonesia’s spices could be brought some two thousand miles west to the Melaka Strait region and landed during the season when traders from the Indian Ocean would be arriving.⁶ This remarkable convergence of monsoon systems was fundamental to the development of the spice trade in Southeast Asia.

Exactly when the nutmeg, mace, cloves, and sandalwood of eastern Indonesia were first cultivated or gathered, and when they became items of international trade, has long been a mystery. In the earliest periods, none of the Southeast Asian peoples who produced and gathered them, from the hills of Timor to the volcanic slopes of Maluku, used writing. Moreover, when substances such as sandalwood and cloves began to appear regularly in written sources from India, China, West Asia, and the Mediterranean, merchants and consumers were apparently already familiar with them, with no indication of when they had been introduced.⁷ In spite of this dearth of textual evidence, archeology is beginning to shed some light on the puzzle. Recent excavations reveal that peoples on Pulau Ai in the Banda archipelago were already making use of nutmeg between 1500 and 300 bce, whether in cooking, medicine, or both. Whether it had already entered interisland trading circuits by that time is unknown, but the presence of possibly imported sago (a starch and staple food in eastern Indonesia and New Guinea) at the same site raises the possibility that the Banda islanders were already exchanging nutmeg and mace for foodstuffs from neighboring islands—a trade pattern which is well attested in the late medieval and early modern era.⁸ While similar evidence has yet to emerge for cloves and sandalwood, there is much to suggest a general acceleration of trade and communications across the region between the last centuries bce and the first centuries ce. A new style of incised ceramic pottery, glass beads, and for the first time, metal artifacts and metal-working technology, spread across the Indonesian archipelago from west to east, with one bronze artifact reaching the Admiralty Islands near present-day New Britain and New Ireland around the beginning of the Common Era—a reminder that early Southeast Asian trade networks bridged Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds. Most spectacular among the metal artifacts were the ornate bronze Dong Son drums from northern Vietnam, which circulated to the Malay Peninsula and then eastwards to Borneo, South Sumatra, Java, Lombok, and Sumbawa between 300 bce and 100 ce. A second wave of Dong Son drums, typologically distinct from the first, arrived in eastern Indonesia between the 3rd and 4th centuries ce, apparently largely bypassing the western archipelago on their journeys. These drums circulated in eastern Indonesian island networks from the 5th to at least the 10th centuries, with examples reaching the Lesser Sunda Islands, the Bird’s Head Peninsula of Western New Guinea, and sandalwood-bearing Timor. Some of the bronze drums were decorated with depictions of creatures completely alien to Australasia, such as tigers and elephants.⁹ While metal artifacts in general would probably have been highly exotic to peoples who were unused to them, such decorations may have heightened their desirability further. More perishable trade goods, such as textiles or Javanese cubeb pepper, would almost certainly have accompanied these rarities from the west. In return, peoples of eastern Indonesia likely offered Moluccan cloves, Banda nutmeg and mace, bird-of-paradise feathers from Aru and New Guinea, and Timor sandalwood.¹⁰ For peoples on the Indo-Malay side of Southeast Asia, such luxuries from islands far to the east would probably have been as exotic as bronze drums with depictions of elephants were to peoples in Maluku or Timor. Thus, even in its earliest stages, the spice trade was likely having a significant impact on Southeast Asia, altering the material cultures of peoples from the Vietnamese coast to the shores of New Guinea—a harbinger of things to come.

In the last centuries bce and first few centuries ce, and chronologically overlapping with the eastward spread of metal culture across the archipelago, trade goods from India began circulating in the western reaches of Southeast Asia. Austronesian peoples of Island Southeast Asia, with their seafaring traditions and experience with long-range voyaging, were likely instrumental in forging these early contacts. Indian merchant-seafarers soon began to follow suit, with voyages to the Malay Peninsula and Melaka Strait region, possibly traveling at first in Austronesian vessels. Their initial interest in Southeast Asia probably had much to do with the rich deposits of gold and tin in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra (the subcontinent is a poor source of the latter metal). Eastern Indian bronze coinage with high tin content, which first appeared in this period, along with the enduring Sanskrit names, which early Indian writers applied to the tropical realms across the eastern seas—e.g., Suvarnabhumi (the “Land of Gold”) and Suvarnadvipa (the Island of Gold)—bear witness to the formation of these trading networks. At the same time, distinctive glass beads from eastern India began circulating in sites around the Melaka Strait and in western Indonesia. By the beginning of the Common Era, small quantities of Indian ceramics were reaching the coasts of mainland Southeast Asia, Northwest Java, and North Bali. The subsequent flourishing of trade between India and Southeast Asia in the first few centuries ce dovetailed with and contributed to the rise of a number of early complex polities in the latter region, notably Funan (likely a Chinese transcription of Khmer bnam) on the Mekong Delta, and Ge-Ying, probably in western Java. Third-century Chinese emissaries to Funan (which had initiated contact with China) reported that both polities traded with India, from which Funan had adopted the art of writing. Ge-Ying, which “was not yet in contact with China,” also traded with the Malay Peninsula, a region which the Chinese thought Funan had conquered. During this period, merchant ships sailing eastwards from India appear to have generally landed their cargoes on the Malay Peninsula—a natural choice, given its proximity to eastern India and their interest in the tin and gold trade. From there, goods were ported across the Isthmus of Kra and loaded onto ships in the Gulf of Thailand, before being taken to Mekong Delta-based Funan and to Vietnamese, Javanese, and Chinese ports. In what would become a pattern common across much of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, the rulers and elites of Funan creatively adopted and adapted Buddhist and Hindu religious beliefs and practices, Sanskrit literature, and Indian statecraft to their own traditions. In addition to aesthetic, spiritual, and philosophical attractions, these adaptations were clearly intended to increase the cohesion of their tribal polity, and to bolster commercial and diplomatic ties with South Asia.¹¹

As with the circulation of metal artifacts into eastern Indonesia, a range of perishable items would likely have accompanied the Indian ceramics and glass beads that were flowing into Southeast Asia during this period. It is hard to know to what extent the advent of India’s trade with Southeast Asia and the spread of Dong Son drums and metallurgy into eastern Indonesia and beyond were related. Nonetheless, as Wisseman Christie points out, Java and Bali lacked exports such as tin or gold, but the former island possessed cubeb pepper, and both lay directly on the route toward Banda and Maluku, with their nutmegs and cloves, as well as sandalwood-bearing Timor. The abundance of both Dong Son drums and Indian ceramics in or near these places makes it entirely reasonable to infer that they were exporting (and in the case of Java and Bali reexporting) spices and aromatics by the 1st century ce. The 2011 discovery of a clove in the ancient port site of Batujaya in Northwest Java, close to today’s Jakarta, dating from the c. 1st century bce to 3rd century ce, along with Southeast Asian gold artifacts and Indian (or copies of Indian) ceramics, strongly supports such a conclusion.¹²

But if so, how far were the cloves traveling beyond Java? There is no way of knowing exactly when traders began introducing Southeast Asian spices and aromatics to India. Since they were already items of exchange in the Indonesian archipelago, they likely accompanied the Austronesian seafarers who opened sea routes to South Asia. Subsequently, Indian merchants traveling east would also have encountered them while trading for tin and gold around the Melaka Strait. There are a few hints that Southeast Asian spices had started to reach India and beyond around the 1st century ce, but all are controversial. An early Sanskrit medical text attributed to Caraka (fl. 200 bce–c. 100 ce), prescribes cloves, nutmeg, and camphor mixed with betel as breath-fresheners, as well as ointments made with sandalwood, cloves, and nutmeg. The text, however, was edited in the 9th century, which raises the possibility that these substances are later interpolations.¹³ In the distant Mediterranean, the Roman writer Pliny (d. 79 ce) appeared to describe a clove (Caryophyllon) in his Natural History. However, this may have referred to a different fragrant plant in the 1st century, the name of which was later applied to cloves. Even if Pliny had heard of cloves, he had probably never actually seen one.¹⁴ The intensity and volume of Rome’s maritime spice trade with India suggests that if items like cloves had been readily available in South Asian ports, they would soon have appeared in a wide variety of Mediterranean sources. It is thus telling that Southeast Asian spices and aromatics are almost completely absent from both the 1st-century Periplus Maris Erythraei, which describes commerce in the western Indian Ocean in great detail, and the Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius (c. 1st–2nd century ce), while mentions of Indian spices such as black pepper and cumin are plentiful.¹⁵ The sole possible exception is cassia. Pliny, who erroneously thought that both cassia and cinnamon grew somewhere in “Ethiopia,” wrote of seafarers who crossed vast expanses of ocean on “rafts” relying on winds blowing from the southeast, to reach the Arabian port of Ocilia, near the entrance to the Red Sea. Trading their cinnamon for “articles of glass and bronze, clothing, brooches, and bracelets and necklaces,” they then embarked for home.¹⁶ The round-trip voyage lasted five years, he wrote, and claimed the lives of many who had the courage to attempt it. Pliny’s account may be an echo of long-distance voyages by Austronesian seafarers to the coasts of East Africa, using the subequatorial trade winds and staging through the Maldives. In theory this was possible, since Austronesian seafarers would use similar routes to settle Madagascar beginning around the 7th century ce. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Pliny’s “cinnamon” and “cassia” were neither the Cinnamomum verum of Sri Lanka nor the Cinnamomum cassia and Cinnamomum burmanni of East and Southeast Asia, but rather Cassia abbreviata, which is indigenous to the East African coast. If so, then the epic voyages mentioned by Pliny may refer to long-range commerce with East Africa, which is well attested in the contemporary Periplus Maris Erythraei.¹⁷ Chinese sources are equally silent about Indonesian spices during this period, apart from a handful of 2nd–3rd century ce references to an exotic aromatic of Southeast Asia called chi-she-hsiang or “Chicken’s Tongue Perfume,” which may refer to cloves. One anecdote concerning this period mentions officials of the Han emperor Huan (r. 147–67 bce) using this aromatic to sweeten their breath, but this may be anachronistic. The later and enduring Chinese term for cloves (ting-hsiang or “nail perfume”) only appeared in the 5th and 6th centuries. Tellingly, while the 3rd-century Chinese emissaries reported that Funan dealt in unspecified “perfumes,” they made no explicit mention of Indonesian spices or aromatics, either there or from Ge-Ying/Java—a likely sign that the trade had not yet attracted their notice.¹⁸

On balance, while Indonesian spices and aromatics such as nutmeg and cloves were certainly in use and circulating across maritime Southeast Asia by the first few centuries ce, direct evidence for a regular transoceanic trade in them is slight. While Indian traders likely encountered them in places like Java and the Melaka Strait, and may have begun exporting them to India, there is little to suggest that anything more than the occasional sample reached the Mediterranean or China.¹⁹ The situation would change dramatically over the next millennium.

Hemispheric Expansion

Between the 5th and 15th centuries ce, Southeast Asia’s spice trade underwent a profound transformation, growing from a regional commerce with limited interregional extensions, into a hemispheric enterprise, with the Indonesian archipelago as its center. And whereas the preceding formative period from ~1500 bce to ~400 ce is characterized by scant archeological and textual evidence, the age of hemispheric expansion is amply if unevenly documented, in written and in archeological sources. The growth of the spice trade was accompanied by profound sociopolitical, religious, and cultural changes across Southeast Asia, including the development of increasingly complex and powerful polities, engagement with and adaptation of Indian cultural traditions, and later, the appearance of Indigenous Islamic communities and polities. The spice trade was not by any means the sole cause of these transformations, but it was in many places inextricably intertwined with them.²⁰

Repeated notices in a wide variety of written sources, ranging from poetry and medical works to cookbooks, show that Southeast Asia was regularly exporting its spices to India no later than the 4th–5th century, to West Asia and the Mediterranean by the 6th century, and to China by the 7th century or earlier. By that time, consumers in all of these different lands were rapidly gaining varying degrees of familiarity with Maluku cloves (and slightly later, Banda nutmeg and mace), and Timor sandalwood, along with other Southeast Asian rarities such as camphor from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.²¹ This initial expansion of the spice trade roughly coincided with the gradual decline of Mekong Delta-based Funan, on the one hand, and the rise of a range of new polities in Java and Southeast Sumatra, on the other. While other factors likely contributed, the overriding reason for these changes was probably the burgeoning of transoceanic trade through the Melaka Strait by the dawn of the 5th century, which allowed traders to sail between a range of ports and trading posts on the coasts of India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and China, without the inconvenience and expense of first transshipping goods across the Malay Peninsula to the Mekong Delta. Situated at the convergence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with direct access to the Java and South China Seas, the Melaka Strait region was an ideal nexus for the spice trade, as it allowed merchants sailing between India and China to intercept cloves, nutmeg, mace, and sandalwood arriving from eastern Indonesia, as well as cassia, cubeb, camphor, and aloeswood from Sumatra, Java, and mainland Southeast Asia.²² Between the 7th and 10th centuries, three Malay trading polities appear to have dominated the spice trade and long-range commerce in general in the Melaka Strait region: Srivijaya and Malayu, centered respectively on the riverine ports of Palembang and Jambi, in Southeast Sumatra, and Kalah, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. The relatively sparse textual, archeological, and epigraphical evidence makes it difficult to establish the exact relationship between these port-polities, but it appears that they alternately competed and cooperated. Srivijaya was apparently dominant initially, but may have formed part of a loose confederacy or trading league in later times.²³ Following the pattern set by Funan, the Melaka Strait spice ports adapted Indian religion, literature, and statecraft, assimilating them to their Indigenous Malay language and culture. Srivijaya and Malayu rulers practiced a form of esoteric (tantric) Buddhism, sponsored Buddhist temples, monks, and pilgrims, and donated to Buddhist institutions in India. These efforts aligned them with Buddhist merchant networks and polities stretching from India to Java to China, and helped to ensure their commercial and political success. Understandably given their proximity, Srivijaya and Malayu also appear to have had close relationships with West-Central Java, and particularly with the great Buddhist kingdom of Mataram and its ruling Sailendra dynasty, a cadet branch of which gained control over the Strait ports in the late 9th century.²⁴ While India was undoubtedly the prime overseas cultural and commercial partner of the Melaka Strait polities, their rise also coincided roughly with the advent of the Tang dynasty in China. Swelling Chinese demands for foreign luxuries, including Southeast Asian spices and aromatics, ensured regular commercial and occasional diplomatic contact between the Melaka Strait ports and China. With few Chinese merchants venturing abroad in this period, Tang China relied on Indian, Malay, Javanese, and other Southeast Asian traders to bring east Indonesian spices (and a myriad of other goods) to ports such as Guangzhou (Canton).²⁵

In the mid-6th century, Roman author Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote that Sri Lanka was the primary market for cloves and other commodities arriving from the eastern seas, such as Chinese silk, where Persian and Roman merchants regularly obtained them. While at least exploratory ventures had probably occurred earlier, by the 7th or early 8th century, traders from West Asia were regularly sailing beyond Sri Lanka to the Melaka Strait ports, Champa (modern South-Central Vietnam), and South China.²⁶ The willingness of West Asian merchants to undertake long and dangerous voyages to Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim was doubtless motivated by a desire to purchase these products closer to their sources, and thus for better prices. Their expansion east coincided with the advent of Islam, and with the rise of the wealthy and powerful Umayyad and ʿAbbasid caliphates. As with the Tang, consumers in the domains of Islam proved to be avid consumers of Southeast Asian spices and aromatics alongside Indian and Chinese goods, all of which commanded high prices in markets from Baghdad to Cordoba. Reflecting the diversity of early Islamic society, the mainly Arabian and Iranian merchant-seafarers who ventured to the Melaka Strait and Guangzhou to obtain such luxuries included Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews, and increasingly Muslims. While their numbers were likely small compared to Indian and Southeast Asian traders, they evidently found a warm reception in Southeast Asian ports such as Srivijaya, and generally proved adept at ingratiating themselves with local rulers and peoples.²⁷

But how were the spices and aromatics of eastern Indonesia reaching the ports of the Melaka Strait? It is clear that the latter were the usual markets for South- and West Asian merchants who wished to trade in Maluku cloves, Banda nutmeg and mace, and Timor sandalwood, but only a handful of Indian, Arabic, and Chinese written sources of the period contained even the vaguest hints that these products came from somewhere further east.²⁸ Despite the lack of sources, it is possible to make some very cautious analogies with the situation between the 14th and early 16th centuries, when much more information appears. As in earlier and later times, the Australian and Asian monsoon winds governed the basic rhythms of the trade. Summer would have been the season for sailing westwards with cloves, nutmeg, and sandalwood, and winter for returns to eastern Indonesia. We do not know exactly who was bringing the spices to Java and the Melaka Strait ports. They may have been eastern islanders, Javanese and Malay merchant-seafarers, “sea nomads” (forerunners of the Orang Laut or sea peoples of later times), or a combination of the three. With sailing distances of more than two thousand miles between the Spice Islands, Java, and the Melaka Strait region, it is reasonable to infer that trade circuits included multiple stopovers at islands such as Sumbawa along the way, as in later centuries. Likewise, since the islands of Maluku are situated north of the equator, just beyond the reach of the Australian monsoon winds, traders probably first brought cargoes of cloves southwards to islands in the Banda Sea, where they would have then joined consignments of nutmeg, mace, and sandalwood being taken west via the Lesser Sunda Islands and Java. It is also possible that much of the trade was indirect in this period, with cargoes being transferred in “relays” to different handlers and craft at island trading posts along the route. On the other hand, the epic voyages of Austronesian peoples of central and eastern Indonesia, who sailed across thousands of miles of open ocean to settle Madagascar during this period, suggest that Indigenous islanders would have been quite capable of direct voyages to the Melaka Strait.²⁹ Whereas the imperishable remains of trade wares such as ceramics and glassware from West Asia, India, and China are relatively common in the Melaka Strait region in this period, relatively little evidence has emerged to suggest that significant quantities of such goods had begun reaching easternmost Indonesia prior to the 13th century by comparison, although textiles (a mainstay of the trade in later centuries) would have left no trace.³⁰ Similarly, and unlike mainland and western maritime Southeast Asia, the peoples of Maluku, Banda, and Timor (and eastern Indonesia in general), do not seem to have made any significant adoptions of Indian culture, religion, or statecraft during this period, and in many respects their societies probably strongly resembled those of their linguistic cousins in Pacific islands further east.³¹

Between the late 9th and early 11th centuries, a series of wars and political realignments altered the rhythms of trade in Southeast Asia which had prevailed for nearly three hundred years. The rebellions associated with the breakup of the Tang dynasty, including a massacre of foreign merchants in Guangzhou, temporarily discouraged direct West Asian and Indian trade with China. This seems to have worked to the benefit of the Melaka Strait ports, to which the displaced traders redirected their efforts. Southeast Asian seafarers apparently continued to supply the latter with both spices and Chinese goods (presumably at a considerable profit) until conditions improved in the early to mid-10th century, culminating with the advent of the Song dynasty in 960. In spite of the gradual breakup of the ʿAbbasid caliphate in the 9th and early 10th century, powerful regional successor states and a booming economy guaranteed that demand for Southeast Asian spices remained strong across West Asia and the Islamic Mediterranean.³²

The decline of the powerful Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram by the early 10th century, possibly due to multiple volcanic eruptions, was followed by the establishment of a new kingdom and polity on the Brantas River Delta in northeastern Java, which was in a good position to intercept and control the flow of spices from eastern Indonesia. A series of wars in the 10th century between this new East Javanese polity and the Melaka Strait ports was almost certainly connected to tensions over trade. Shortly thereafter, in the early 11th century, the Tamil Chola dynasty of South India launched an unprecedented series of transoceanic naval expeditions against the Strait ports, sacking Srivijaya, Malayu, and Kalah. Here too, the hegemony which the latter group enjoyed over the spice and luxury trade likely prompted the attacks. Neither the Javanese wars nor the Chola raids put a decisive end to Srivijaya and the other port-polities, but they did appear to weaken their hold on the Melaka Strait, opening the way for the rise and flourishing of rival centers on the coasts of Sumatra and Java.³³

The period between the early 12th and late 15th centuries witnessed a number of major changes in the Southeast Asian spice trade, as well as continuities from earlier periods. Demand expanded for the region’s unique natural luxuries, above all the cloves, nutmeg, mace, and white sandalwood of eastern Indonesia, fueled in part by increasingly wealthy and cosmopolitan consumers in western Europe.³⁴ At some point prior to the late 11th century, black pepper (Piper nigrum), was successfully transplanted from its homeland on the Malabar Coast of India to Java, and thereafter to Sumatra. Although the transplanted variety was apparently considered inferior to the Malabari, proximity and better prices guaranteed that it soon became China’s most important source of pepper. The expanding population and economy of Song China created an enormous market for Southeast Asia’s “new” spice, and this demand underpinned the rise of new polities and ports in West Java and northern Sumatra, which were the initial principal growing areas.³⁵ Rising demands probably also contributed to the establishment of new “northern” routes to the Spice Islands of eastern Indonesia. Whereas in earlier periods most cloves, nutmeg, mace, and sandalwood cargoes probably traveled from Maluku, Banda, and Timor along the subequatorial Lesser Sunda Islands toward Java, the late 10th–15th centuries saw merchant-seafarers bringing spices and aromatics to China from Maluku via Sulawesi, the southern Philippines, and Brunei. Whether by southern or northern routes, the intensifying trade connections are evident in the finds of Song-era coins and ceramic fragments from this period in the Banda Islands.³⁶ By the 14th century, a growing number of the spice merchants and shippers along this new “northern” route were themselves Chinese. Whereas relatively few Chinese traders had traveled to maritime Southeast Asia before the 11th century (the early Song dynasty had actively prohibited such ventures), the 12th to late 14th centuries witnessed the appearance of substantial Chinese merchant activity in Southeast Asia, as far east as Timor. The late 14th-century fall of the Yuan and rise of the new Ming dynasty (which prohibited its subjects from trading abroad), prompted the development of numerous overseas Chinese merchant communities in Southeast Asia.³⁷ A great proportion of the latter were in fact Sino-Muslims, underscoring the increasing importance of Islamic merchant networks across the region. In Southeast Asia (as elsewhere in the Indian Ocean and maritime China), merchants, seafarers, and itinerant mystics and legal experts all contributed to the formation of fledgling Islamic communities in ports and trading posts which were involved in the spice trade. A highly heterogenous group, the new Islamic presence in Southeast Asia included West Asians and North Africans, Indians, Sino-Muslims, descendants of unions between foreign Muslim merchants and Southeast Asian women, and local converts.³⁸ Between the late 13th century and early 16th centuries, ruling elites in maritime Southeast Asia began to adopt the new religion, above all in port-polities that were heavily invested in the spice and pepper trade. This process was itself part of a broader general expansion of Islam across large areas of Asia and Africa during the period. As with earlier conversions to Hinduism and Buddhism, both spiritual and commercial considerations played a role in this process, with the new religion offering preferred status in hemispheric trade networks stretching from South China to the Mediterranean to West Africa. Pepper emporia in North Sumatra—such as Samudra-Pasai and Aceh, the Strait entrepot of Melaka (Malacca) on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, Brunei, Sulu in the southern Philippines, as well as the ports of North Java, Maluku, and Banda—all participated to a greater or lesser extent in this trend. Whereas earlier adoptions of Hindu-Buddhist Indian culture had been largely limited to the western archipelago, the appearance of Islam in Maluku and later Banda probably reflected the increasingly direct integration of the Spice Islands into Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean trade networks. In Timor, on the other hand, and in other eastern islands not directly connected to the spice trade, the new religion had not yet attracted local adherents. In both Maluku and Banda, merchants based on the north coast of Java had apparently been instrumental in encouraging initial conversions, mostly among the islands’ elites and those who dealt directly with foreign traders.³⁹

By the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the functioning of the Southeast Asian spice trade becomes relatively clear, due to the convergence of late precolonial and early colonial sources. By this time, if not earlier, traders based in Melaka and the north coast of Java were making annual voyages to Timor and the Banda archipelago, with stopovers in Sumbawa. As seen earlier, Maluku’s position north of the Australian monsoon system prompted most Malay and Javanese traders to pick up consignments of cloves in Banda, rather than making a long layover across the equator. They paid for eastern Indonesian spices and aromatics with exports such as glassware, beads, metal pots and trinkets, low-denomination Javanese coins, rice, and textiles. Indian fabrics were crucially important to the system. Melaka or Java merchants bound for the Spice Islands would typically exchange Bengali and Gujarati textiles for Javanese ones, and then trade some of the latter in Sumbawa for coarser local cloth. Upon reaching Banda, Maluku, and Timor, they sold their rice and Sumbawa cloth, as well as some finer Javanese and Indian textiles, for spices and sandalwood. In Banda, communities devoted most of their small islands and labor to meeting hemispheric demands for nutmeg and mace, to the detriment of local food production. By the 15th century, they had become heavily dependent on imported sago from nearby islands, supplemented by rice from Java and Sumbawa. Demand for sago in Banda, where it was also used as currency, attracted traders from Papua and its offshore islands, such as Aru. Alongside sago, they offered exotic birds and bird-of-paradise feathers (by that time a prized fashion item as far away as Persia). These they exchanged for a share of the textiles which Javanese and Malay traders brought from the west.⁴⁰ Though the details of their arrangements are vague, in Maluku the Sultans of Ternate and Tidore ultimately controlled much of the clove trade by maintaining authority over visiting foreign merchants, and local chiefs and kings seem to have done much the same with sojourning sandalwood traders in Timor. In Banda, on the other hand, where no monarchy had been established, tribal communities negotiated sales with merchants permanently settled on the coast, who in turn arranged prices and terms with visiting traders.⁴¹ Although prominent, Malay and Javanese merchant-seafarers were by no means the only participants in the trade. In the eastern archipelago, Banda and Sulawesi islanders also constructed sizeable cargo vessels of their own and sailed them, laden with spices, to the north coast of Java and to the Melaka Strait.⁴²

After returning from the eastern archipelago, traders forwarded their spices from Java to a range of destinations, but above all to the Sultanate of Melaka, where merchants sailing on the monsoon winds distributed them via hemispheric networks to China, India, West Asia, Egypt, the Mediterranean, and Europe. Situated, like Srivijaya, Malayu, and Kedah in earlier centuries, along the narrow waterway connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Sultanate of Melaka had become the most important single nexus of the spice trade and of Indo-Pacific commerce in general by the end of the 15th century. Initially supported by China’s Ming dynasty, whose rulers were anxious to guarantee the flow of trade through the Strait, the Sultanate quickly became a hub for merchants from across maritime Asia.⁴³ The importance of Melaka as a linchpin of the hemispheric spice trade was epitomized by the Portuguese Tomé Pires, who, while lauding its wealth and the international diversity of its merchant community, wrote that “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.”⁴⁴

The dawn of the 16th century marked the apogee of Southeast Asia’s precolonial spice trade. From Melaka and North Java to Banda, Maluku, and Timor, the trade enriched local merchants and rulers, and facilitated the incipient spread of Islam to eastern Indonesia. In the western archipelago, meanwhile, especially in Java and Sumatra, the pepper trade continued to flourish.⁴⁵ The commercial success and hemispheric importance of the spice trade in Southeast Asia would soon attract the notice of a new and wholly unexpected group of interlopers.

Colonization and Globalization

The 16th century marked an inflection point in the history of Southeast Asia’s spice trade. In the early 1500s, armed Portuguese fleets reached Southeast Asia from the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope. These were followed over the next few decades by Spanish expeditions arriving from the Pacific via the Strait of Magellan and later Mexico. By the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, ships of the fledgling English and Dutch East India Companies had joined them. The arrival of armed European fleets in the region marked the beginning of a three-century-long process, which would transform the spice trade from a hemispheric to a global commerce. As seen in the earlier conflicts between the Cholas of South India and the Melaka Strait ports, between the latter and Java, and in Chinese support for Melaka as a guarantor of peace and suppressor of piracy, violence was not a new phenomenon in the spice trade. Nevertheless, the European interlopers introduced a new scale and intensity to the violence, as well as a novel intent, especially on the part of the Portuguese and later the Dutch, to establish a hegemony over the entire trade, from source to market.⁴⁶ Along the way, Southeast Asia’s traditional spices such as nutmeg, mace, and cloves declined in overall importance, while pepper, along with the newly introduced coffee, became increasingly dominant.

The initial European entrance into Southeast Asia’s spice trade commenced with the Portuguese sack and conquest of Melaka in 1511. This attack was part of an evolving campaign which successive Portuguese expeditionary forces had waged following Vasco da Gama’s pioneering voyage to the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, and especially since 1509 under Afonso de Albuquerque. The latter’s conquests in particular laid the initial foundations for Portugal’s East African and Asian dominions, the Estado da Índia.⁴⁷ By occupying key ports on the East African and Indian coasts, obliging regional merchants and vessels to purchase safe-conduct passes (Pt. cartaz) for the right to trade, aggressively attacking those who refused to comply, and diverting cargoes of spices and other luxuries directly to Europe around the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese hoped to wrest control of the hemispheric trade away from Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean, and to bypass Italian merchants in the Mediterranean. With its command of the Strait which connected the Indian and Pacific Oceans and its correspondingly dominant position in the spice trade, the Sultanate of Melaka was an inevitable target for Portuguese ambitions.⁴⁸ Apart from the physical destruction of the port-city and substantial loss of life during the sack, the fall of the Sultanate displaced Melaka’s ruling elite and much of its merchant community, including Indigenous Muslim and “Gujarati” traders (in this context, a catch-all term for Muslim traders from western India). Many of the latter reestablished themselves in other Sumatran and Malay Peninsula emporia not yet under Portuguese control, and helped to define regional opposition to the Estado in Islamic terms. Enough Asian merchants, especially mainly Hindu-Tamil and Chinese traders remained, however, for the new rulers to carry on a truncated trade under their own supervision.⁴⁹ Having taken Melaka, the Portuguese commanders moved swiftly to enter eastern Indonesia’s spice trade. Lacking the ships and manpower to undertake major conquests east of Melaka, they initially resorted to armed trading expeditions, beginning with Banda in 1511. Having been shipwrecked after an initial round of trade, a group of survivors from the Banda expedition were conducted to Maluku. There, the Sultan of Ternate welcomed them as potentially useful allies in his rivalry with the neighboring Sultan of Tidore, and invited them to establish a fort and “factory” (i.e., trading post) on his island. When the surviving ships and men of Magellan’s trans-Pacific fleet arrived in Maluku in 1521, Tidore’s Sultan was quick to propose a similar alliance with Spain. In the face of the latter threat, the Portuguese established a substantial fortified outpost on Ternate in 1523, and subsequently attempted to prevent others from buying cloves there.⁵⁰ South of the equator, Portuguese expeditions to Timor began around 1516. While they succeeded in acquiring sandalwood, the initially violent behavior of Estado commanders and crews toward Indigenous traders apparently provoked armed resistance from the islanders.⁵¹ Further west, by 1520 the Portuguese had established a factory at Banten in West Java, as well as a factory and fort at the northern Sumatran port-sultanate of Samudra-Pasai, with an eye toward dominating the pepper trade.⁵²

These initial forays set the stage for nearly a century of limited Portuguese ascendancy in Southeast Asia’s spice trade, particularly in the first decades after their arrival. In a break with the trading norms seen earlier, by 1526 Portuguese ships began to sail from Melaka to Maluku via northern Borneo and the southern Philippines. After loading cloves they would then head southwards to Banda for nutmeg and mace, before sailing home via the Java Sea. In the early decades, and unlike the Malay, Javanese, and Indian merchants plying the traditional routes, they generally avoided visiting other ports along the way, both for the sake of speed and to minimize unnecessary battles with regional polities and competitors. Portuguese captains and traders outbound from Melaka were however aware of lucrative opportunities in the many rich entrepôts of Java and the Sunda Islands, and often opted to sail along the southern route instead.⁵³ Portuguese sandalwood expeditions from Melaka to Timor naturally followed the same route. Possibly to avoid risking hostilities with the numerous and fiercely independent Timorese kingdoms during months-long monsoon layovers, they initially followed the practice of Malay and other regional merchants and based themselves nearby on the small island of Solor, only sojourning on Timor for the time it took to acquire sandalwood.⁵⁴

Despite initial disruptions to markets from Maluku to Egypt to Italy, substantial profits from the diversion of a major portion of Europe’s spice imports around the Cape to Lisbon, revenues from the cartaz system, and sales to consumers in Asia, the Estado da Índia was unable to establish a true monopoly over the spice trade in Southeast Asia (or indeed in the wider Indian Ocean).⁵⁵ In Banda, they were consistently refused permission to establish a fort or even a permanent trading post, and regional merchants were able to time their visits to avoid the Estado’s heavily armed ships.⁵⁶ In Maluku, the Estado found itself drawn into complex struggles between Ternate and Tidore, the latter of which allied itself with and supplied cloves to Spanish expeditions arriving from the Philippines. On Ternate, Portuguese demands that the Sultan sell all cloves harvested in his territory exclusively to them provoked the latter into blockading their fortress until they agreed to allow competitive trading. To complicate matters, a revolutionary change to the clove trade occurred around this time. Whereas clove trees had previously been unique to their evolutionary home in the Halmahera rainforest ecoregions of Maluku, by the middle of the 16th century unknown parties managed to transplant them successfully to Seram and the smaller nearby island of Ambon, south of the equator and close to Banda. After Estado commanders provoked an uprising and their own expulsion from the island by assassinating the reigning Sultan of Ternate in 1570, Javanese, Acehnese, and Chinese-Filipino traders rapidly flocked backed to the island. Ternate expeditions also began sailing south to safe anchorages on the island of Seram, where Malay, Javanese, and Middle Eastern traders eagerly bought cloves from both Maluku and the new plantations. By the early to mid-16th century, these merchants were trading gunpowder, artillery, and other firearms to peoples of Maluku and Seram for cloves, along with the tradition textiles.⁵⁷ These weapons could be used against the Estado, of course, but also in inter-island warfare, raiding, and slaving, and were an ominous sign of the increasing militarization of the spice trade.

At the western end of the archipelago, the Estado faced powerful commercial and military rivals from the 1520s onward, such as the Sultanate of Johore and above all Aceh. Quickly conquering regional rivals, such as Samudra-Pasai, Acehnese Sultans, as well as those of the West Javanese port of Banten, were able to deny the Estado control of Southeast Asia’s pepper trade. By the 1570s, these latter ports, along with Jepara on Java’s north coast, had also become substantial entrepôts for cloves, nutmeg, and mace, with their merchants supplying substantial quantities of these spices to Indian and West Asian consumers, further undercutting Melaka and the Estado. From the 1540s onward, the struggle between the Portuguese and Aceh for control of the Melaka Strait region intersected with a wider war between the Estado and the Ottoman Empire for dominance of the Indian Ocean spice trade. By aligning itself with the latter power, Aceh’s rulers gained political and occasional military support from Istanbul, and were strong enough at times to launch attacks on Melaka itself.⁵⁸

Faced with these challenges, and without the ships or manpower to impose effective control over the vast Indonesian archipelago and its emporia, the Portuguese gradually adjusted their strategies. Early attempts at tight Estado control over the spice trade gradually gave way to a mixed approach which relied on crown-operated ships, concession voyages, and ventures by private traders. The latter were a mix of Portuguese, Asian and, through substantial intermarriage and assimilation, Luso-Asian merchants. Operating through entrepôts such as Melaka and in others beyond Estado control, private Portuguese traders soon became a common sight in Southeast Asian ports such as Makassar in South Sulawesi, where they purchased considerable quantities of spices from Muslim merchants trading with Maluku. Similarly, while Aceh remained a formidable opponent of the Estado, private Portuguese traders did much business there.⁵⁹ Taking advantage of the traditional rivalry between Ternate and Tidore, the Estado compensated for the loss of their fortress on the former island by relocating to the latter. Further south, the Portuguese responded to the expansion of the clove trade to Seram and Ambon by establishing a pair of forts on the latter island in the 1560s, which were intended to stem the flow of spices toward Jepara, Banten, and Aceh, and to safeguard against any Spanish attempts at expansion beyond Maluku.⁶⁰ The unification of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns between 1581 and 1640 eased the rivalry between Melaka and Manila over the Maluku clove trade, and put an end to their tendency to support opposite sides in the Ternate-Tidore wars, although their empires and corresponding involvement in Southeast Asia’s spice trade remained largely separate.⁶¹ Nevertheless, at the end of the 16th century, the Estado’s association with Spain would involve it in conflicts with new and far more dangerous European rivals.

The arrival of northern European armed trading companies in Southeast Asia, from the 1590s onward, marked a turning point in the history of the spice trade. While the Portuguese had partially disrupted and realigned earlier patterns of commerce following their arrival in the region, the newcomers, including the English East India Company (EIC, est. 1600), and above all the Dutch United East India Company or VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, est. 1602) would pose a far more serious challenge, with the latter establishing a partial monopoly over Southeast Asia’s spice trade by the late 17th century.⁶²

Whereas the Estado da Índia had lacked the resources to effectively control commerce east of Melaka, the well-funded and well-armed VOC was prepared to seize control of spice emporia and growing areas as far east as Banda, Maluku, and Timor, and to destroy what they could not control. Their sustained campaign to achieve this would mark the apogee of violence associated with the early modern spice trade, and, in places, would alter or end trading patterns and ways of life which had existed for more than a millennium. At the same time, ironically, the VOC onslaught would help set the conditions for the eventual decline of Southeast Asia’s traditional spice trade, while laying the foundations for the introduction of new commodities, such as coffee, which would become the backbone of plantation economies in the colonial period and beyond.

The arrival of the VOC in Southeast Asia was a direct result of complex events in Europe, above all the Protestant Reformation and challenges to Hapsburg-Spanish imperial primacy on the continent and abroad, which must remain beyond the scope of this article. In the briefest of terms, the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, and the corresponding decline of Antwerp as northern Europe’s primary center for the distribution of spice from Lisbon, prompted Dutch merchants to form trading companies to acquire spices directly in Asia. Likewise, Hapsburg-Spanish rule over Portugal and the Portuguese Empire from 1580–1640 made the Estado da Índia a commercial obstacle and a military target for these ventures, which carried the Dutch struggle against the Hapsburgs into Asia.⁶³ Following the 1602 merger of separate Dutch companies, which had been mounting exploratory trading ventures since 1595, the VOC began a sustained, multidecade assault on Portuguese and Castilian strongholds in South and Southeast Asia, while at the same time seeking local allies and attacking those who supported the Iberians. In 1605 they seized Ambon from the Estado and, in alliance with the Sultan of Ternate, ejected the Portuguese from Tidore. The latter action prompted the Castilians to mount a counterattack from Manila in 1606, which established Spanish fortresses in Ternate and Tidore, in alliance with the Sultans of the latter island. Unable to immediately evict the Spanish, the Dutch countered with garrisons on Ternate and other islands of Maluku from 1607 onward. Following the landing in Ambon, the VOC built its first fort in Banda in 1609, and in 1613 took the Portuguese fort on Solor, near Timor. Six years later, the seizure of Jakarta (subsequently renamed Batavia) gave the VOC a permanent base in the western archipelago. In 1641, they conquered Melaka, depriving the Estado of their most important base in Southeast Asia.⁶⁴

Following these early successes, the VOC governors-general in Batavia and directors in the Netherlands (the Heeren XVII) moved to seize control of the region’s spice trade. From their fortress in Banda, they attempted, by treaty and shows of force, to compel the Bandanese islanders to sell nutmeg and mace exclusively to the VOC, at prices fixed by the Company, for often low-quality and overpriced foodstuffs and textiles. Predictably, the Bandanese resisted, with support from both regional merchants and the EIC, frustrating VOC plans. In 1620–1621, the Company’s notorious Governor-General, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, decided to implement a solution which the Heeren XVII had been discussing since 1614—a genocide against the Bandanese people. Through a combination of massacre and starvation, the VOC largely depopulated the islands and imported enslaved peoples to work the Company’s nutmeg and mace plantations, with the surviving Bandanese captives forced to serve as both instructors and as slave laborers. Apart from the fortunate few who escaped and reestablished themselves on the Kei archipelago to the south, the Indigenous Bandanese people and culture had been largely destroyed, and the millennia-old Indonesian nutmeg and mace trade lay in the hands of the VOC.⁶⁵ Potential competition from the EIC, which possessed a fort on Pulau Run in Banda as well as a factory-outpost in Ambon (where they could also obtain cloves), was largely suppressed following the 1623 arrest, torture, and execution of English staff manning the latter (along with some Japanese VOC mercenaries), on the pretext of suppressing a plot to oust the Dutch from the island. Although the EIC continued to trade elsewhere in the region, and the incident remained a point of contention in Anglo-Dutch affairs until the late 17th century, eventually prompting the latter to pay reparations, VOC control of the nutmeg and mace trade had been largely secured.⁶⁶

In Maluku, VOC ambitions were complicated by the presence of rival Castilian garrisons on Ternate and Tidore, which enabled Portuguese traders to continue to ship cloves to Manila, Melaka, Macau, and India. Here too, however, the Dutch gradually gained the upper hand, and following a 1662 Spanish decision to evacuate the islands (to defend the Philippines against Asian corsairs based in Tawain), the VOC found itself in a position to attempt a monopoly over the clove trade.⁶⁷ The larger populations and geographical diversity of Maluku (which included the very large island of Halmahera), combined with the relative strength of the Tidore and Ternate Sultanates, precluded any chance for the VOC to attempt a genocide of the kind perpetrated in the Banda archipelago. Instead, in 1652 the Company embarked on another radical policy—to eradicate the clove trees themselves from their ancient evolutionary home, and to restrict their growth to Ambon and three nearby islands. To accomplish this, the Company paid subsidies to the Sultans of Ternate and Tidore and to key local community leaders, and mounted annual expeditions to chop down, uproot, and burn clove trees wherever they could be found. While the policy reduced the numbers of clove trees in Maluku, it proved impossible to wipe them out. The mountainous terrain and rainforests of Maluku posed a formidable obstacle, VOC manpower resources were limited, and their policies faced resistance from local peoples and even from reluctant Company servants, who at times fabricated reports of clove destruction rather than face grueling expeditions into remote jungles. The inability of the Company to entirely eliminate clove trees outside of areas that they controlled represented an opportunity for regional merchants (or smugglers from the VOC’s point of view), to carry on a spice trade in the face of repeated Dutch attempts to suppress it. From Hitu and nearby Hoamoal on Seram, Muslim merchants were able to export cloves to the port of Makassar in South Sulawesi until 1656, when a VOC military campaign stopped them. In Maluku, alternative clove emporia developed in southeastern Halmahera and at Misool in the Raja Ampat Islands off New Guinea, where “smugglers” exchanged textiles, weapons, and metal-wares for cloves, bird-of-paradise feathers, and other wares. They shipped the latter goods to the port of Keffing in eastern Seram, where Malay, Javanese, and Sulawesi merchants purchased and took them westwards. The VOC was unable to suppress this alternative trade, which continued into the late 18th century.⁶⁸

Further south, off the coast of sandalwood-rich Timor, the VOC continued to face a tenacious Portuguese resistance, despite their 1613 seizure of the Solor fort. The Portuguese built a new fortress on nearby Larantuka, from which they continued to participate in the sandalwood trade with the Timorese. Solor changed hands twice before the Dutch definitively conquered it in 1646, but by that time, the Portuguese had established their first fortress on the Timorese mainland at Kupang, as well some twenty-two churches. The VOC managed to seize Kupang by 1653, but the Portuguese held on to Larantuka and established a new mainland base for sandalwood trading at Lifau on Timor’s north coast. The latter became the nucleus from which the Portuguese gradually extended their influence to the eastern side of the island in the 18th century. The successful Portuguese stand in Timor had much to do with the successes of Dominican missionaries, as well as the decision of local kings and independent warlords of mixed European-Timorese background (such as the famous De Hornay family, whose founder was a Dutch deserter married to a local woman) to resist the VOC and maintain at least tacit loyalty to the Estado, while dominating much of the sandalwood trade to Macau, Melaka, and Makassar in southern Sulawesi. Frustrated with their failure to establish a sandalwood monopoly, the VOC resorted to buying much of their supply in the latter port.⁶⁹

By the mid-17th century, eastern Indonesian resistance to the VOC’s monopoly policies came to be centered in Makassar. There, thriving communities of Portuguese, English, Danish, Javanese, Malay, and other Asian merchants were able to carry on a free spice trade, dealing in Maluku cloves, Banda nutmeg and mace, Timor sandalwood, and a range of other products, under the protection of the Makassar Sultans. Unwilling to tolerate such defiance, the Company besieged and conquered the port in 1669 after a series of conflicts, violently suppressing the open spice trade there and obliging the Sultan to expel English, Danish, and Portuguese merchants.⁷⁰

A variety of Sumatran and Javanese ports in the Melaka Strait region had defied Portuguese attempts to dominate the black pepper trade in the 16th century, and the trend continued well into the 17th, despite mounting efforts from the VOC to bring the trade under their control. As Reid shows, the VOC strategy in the battle to monopolize Southeast Asian pepper was to co-opt or intimidate local rulers, and to overthrow recalcitrant ones. The surviving “Company kings,” would then ensure that pepper supplies went exclusively to the Dutch. The rebellion of Palembang against such policies led to the VOC conquest of that port in 1659, followed in 1663 by the fall of the Acehnese pepper ports of Pariaman and Tiku, the conquest of Banten in 1683, and finally Jambi in 1687. The fall of Banten in particular denied English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Asian traders of their most important emporium in western Indonesia, echoing the loss of Makassar in the eastern archipelago. Nonetheless, the VOC was unable to establish a definitive pepper monopoly in Southeast Asia. Just as the growing range of cloves had expanded in Maluku during the early to mid-16th century, the period between 1600 and 1700 saw a great expansion of pepper cultivation in southern Borneo and Vietnam, on the Malay Peninsula, and above all in western Sumatra, beyond the reach of Dutch arms. In the latter region, the EIC established a fort at Bengkulu from which they exported significant amounts of pepper, and Chinese merchants remained active in the pepper trade throughout the region.⁷¹

As in earlier periods, the entrance of Europeans into Southeast Asia’s spice trade was accompanied by significant religious and cultural transformations. The arrival of Iberians in the early 16th century marked the beginnings of Roman Catholic missionary activity in the region, and the establishment of the first sizeable Christian communities in Southeast Asia, above all in Melaka, the Philippines, and in eastern Indonesia. The arrival and establishment of Catholic Christianity in Southeast Asia was mirrored by a continued and vigorous expansion of Islam, and in some regions, by intense competition to win local converts. In some regions, such as Ambon, the struggle for control of the spice trade was partially reflected in shifting religious loyalties, with conversion to Catholicism signaling at least a tacit affiliation with the Estado (and/or with the Castilians in Manila), whereas adherence to Islam could potentially indicate alliance with Ternate, Hitu, or Java, as well as with Malay and Javanese merchants. In sandalwood-bearing Timor and nearby islands, Portuguese missionaries likewise helped to establish enduring Catholic communities.⁷² In the 17th century, the first Calvinist Protestant preachers arrived in Southeast Asia with the VOC. In a simultaneous reflection of their ongoing struggle against the Hapsburgs in Europe and their ambition to control the spice trade, the Dutch assumed a generally hostile stance toward Portuguese and Castilian-affiliated Catholic communities in Southeast Asia, especially in the 17th century. In places, the VOC sought to convert local Catholics, as well as followers of traditional eastern Indonesian religions, to Calvinism. However, while thriving Protestant communities developed in areas where the Dutch were dominant, above all in Ambon and Batavia, they did not generally seek to convert Muslim populations. VOC directors and governors were interested above all else in commerce, and recognized that it was not in their interest to antagonize Muslim Southeast Asian merchants and rulers by proselytizing. Despite the individual hostility of some Company preachers and official regulations limiting the practice of Islam in places like Batavia, VOC policy towards Islamic communities tended toward pragmatism, and the prohibitions began to be ignored from the late 17th century onward. By that time, like Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Catholicism before it, Protestant Christianity had established an enduring home in maritime Southeast Asia in the wake of the spice trade.⁷³

By the end of the 17th century, despite the persistence of clove “smuggling,” the tenacious Portuguese presence on Timor, and their inability to fully control the pepper trade, the VOC appeared to have largely triumphed in the struggle to dominate Southeast Asia’s spice trade. In the absence of a definitive monopoly, the Company nonetheless controlled most of the supply of Southeast Asian spices to Europe, India, and the Mediterranean. In contrast to the 1500s, when Asian merchants and rulers continued a thriving Indian Ocean spice trade despite the Estado, the growing VOC stranglehold over spice production and distribution at the source meant that late 17th-century Ottoman consumers were obliged to buy cloves, nutmeg, and mace from Dutch merchants, who transshipped them from the Netherlands to the Mediterranean.⁷⁴ In Southeast Asia, the violence and ruin which accompanied the spice wars encouraged many rulers and populations to withdraw from the trade altogether. The latter trend was hastened by the fact that the VOC, while insisting on setting low prices for commodities such as cloves and pepper, demanded outrageously high prices for the rice and Indian textiles which it supplied in return. Many Southeast Asians reacted by turning from spice to food production, and to a greater reliance on cheaper Javanese and local textiles—a survival strategy which partially undermined age-old patterns of luxury trade between South and Southeast Asia. In Maluku, the VOC’s clove eradication campaign impoverished much of the population, and sowed much discord between rulers, officials, and communities.⁷⁵

Nevertheless, in spite of the apparent effectiveness of their energetic and brutal campaign to control Southeast Asia’s spice trade, the VOC’s victory would prove ephemeral. In one of the great ironies of history, the late 17th and early 18th centuries witnessed revolutions in European culinary and medical practices which would drastically reduce demand for cloves, nutmeg, mace, pepper, and sandalwood. Markets in Asia remained relatively important by comparison, but even there, the Company faced problems. In India, consumers appear to have reacted to the high prices demanded by the VOC by reducing consumption. Although the commodities themselves remained (with fluctuations) profitable as items of trade for the VOC, these changes worked to undermine the relative importance of the Company’s hard-won dominance, which had been obtained at such a terrible human cost.⁷⁶

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a final series of changes combined to bring an end to the uniqueness and relative importance of Southeast Asia’s traditional spice trade. After a number of failed attempts, French smugglers obtained clove and nutmeg/mace seedlings from independent local rulers in Seram. From there, they transplanted them to Mauritius in the western Indian Ocean, and then to Martinique and Guyana. Following their temporary seizure and occupation of Banda and Ambon in 1796, EIC officials transplanted large numbers of seedlings to Bengkulu, Penang, and India. The importance of this revolutionary (from a biogeographical point of view) development was not immediately apparent, with growing conditions in Ambon and Banda still favoring the concentration of the trade there. Over the course of the 19th century, however, Zanzibar overtook eastern Indonesia as the prime supplier of cloves to the world, and Grenada in the Caribbean rivaled Banda in the production of nutmeg and mace.⁷⁷ Sandalwood followed a slightly different trajectory, having been successfully transplanted to India in the late 16th century. Timorese sources remained important, however, particularly to consumers in China, whom the Estado continued to supply via Macau. By the late 18th century, however, rampant exploitation led to the gradual depletion of sandalwood in Timor, and merchants began to seek other sources of supply in Polynesia and Melanesia. Overharvesting in the latter islands in the 19th century brought about a minor revival in the importance of Timor as a supplier, but by that time, coffee had decisively overtaken sandalwood as the island’s most important export product.⁷⁸

The triumph of coffee in Timor brings us to a final factor in the demise of Southeast Asia’s age-old spice trade. While the transplantation of Indonesian spices and aromatics to other parts of the planet (as well as the discovery of Polynesian/Melanesian sandalwood) in effect “globalized” the sources of those once-unique commodities, the expanding cultivation of other cash crops in Southeast Asia decisively eclipsed the importance of traditional luxuries such as cloves, nutmeg, and mace. The first of these, as seen earlier, was black pepper, the production of which continued to expand in maritime Southeast Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries, with merchants from the United States joining Asian and European merchants in the trade. By the 1820s, Southeast Asia had far surpassed India as the world’s primary producer of black pepper.⁷⁹ In 1696, the VOC made its first attempt to transplant coffee from Arabia to Java. By the 1720s, the latter island was able to supply more than 50 percent of Europe’s coffee. In the 19th century, production spread to other parts of maritime Southeast Asia and Vietnam, with the Dutch East Indies accounting for more than 20 percent of global supply. By the late 19th century, coffee, along with refined sugar and black pepper, had relegated Southeast Asia’s traditional spices and aromatics to positions of relatively minor importance in the economy of the region, and its fabled Indo-Pacific spice trade to the pages of history.⁸⁰

Discussion of the Literature

Due to the vast temporal and geographical scope involved in the study of the spice trade in Southeast Asia, research questions vary according to era and region. Up until approximately the last centuries bce and first centuries ce for maritime Southeast Asia in general, and in the case of eastern Indonesia, until the 14th and 15th centuries, we have virtually no written evidence. Questions about the Indigenous discovery, collection, and cultivation of cloves, nutmeg, mace, and aromatic sandalwood, as well as the development of the exchange networks which first brought these items to the western archipelago and beyond, can only be answered by archeology. As discussed in the “Origins” section of the article, research on the distribution of Dong Son drums and metal artifacts, as well as traditional trade patterns in eastern Indonesia and Papua (often involving cautious analogies with later times), has greatly enhanced our understanding of the earliest phases of the spice trade. Nevertheless, much more remains obscure. While recent excavations in the Banda archipelago suggest a terminus ante quem for local use of nutmeg, no such data has yet emerged for Maluku cloves or Timor sandalwood. In the first half-millennium ce, permanent commercial ties between South and Southeast Asia developed, paving the way for a thriving transoceanic spice trade to India, West Asia, and the Mediterranean as well as for significant eastward transfers of South Asian cultural, religious, and political ideas. Whereas early 20th-century scholarship envisioned models of migration and colonization resulting in a “Greater India” extending to Southeast Asia, more recent work has focused on creative adoption and adaptation proceeding from the initiative of peoples in the latter region, and on the likely significant role of Austronesian seafarers in initiating and sustaining contact with the subcontinent. Recently, genetic studies have begun to introduce new potential evidence into this debate, with a 2015 study suggesting that early Indian migration and intermarriage in maritime Southeast Asia, while evident, was relatively small in scale.⁸¹ For the period of approximately 500–1100 ce, scholars have long wrestled with the origin and nature of the great maritime trading polity of Srivijaya, and its relations with the early Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms of Java. Recent scholarship on Srivijaya has emphasized the blending of Austronesian ideas of chieftainship with Indian political-religious traditions, and envisions a relatively diffuse “mandala” model for the polity. In some recent readings of Srivijayan history, the spice-trading Melaka Strait ports of Palembang-Srivijaya, Jambi-Zabaj, and Kalah may at times have resembled a loosely organized “commercial league” or “confederation” rather than the centralized maritime “empire,” envisioned in earlier scholarship.⁸² The late first and early second millennium ce witnessed the development of a thriving Islamic trade with Southeast Asia and China, particularly in spices and ceramics, foreshadowing the later advent of Islamic polities and societies throughout much of maritime Southeast Asia. Research in the 20th and early 21st century has focused on the extent to which West Asian and particularly Muslim merchant-seafarers participated in this trade, with scholars divided on the issue. Some, such as Wade, Chaffee, and Averbuch have argued for an active West Asian-merchant presence in maritime Southeast Asia and southern China by the late first millennium ce, whereas Haw has argued against it.⁸³ Underwater, the discovery in the first two decades of the 21st century of sunken merchant ships dating to the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries ce, in Indonesia and Thailand, has opened new windows into Southeast Asia’s late first millennium maritime trade, and the interpretation of the evidence provided by the shipwrecks themselves and their cargoes is ongoing.⁸⁴ Turning to the early modern period, recent studies of the Portuguese have emphasized the important and dynamic role of independent traders, mercenaries, and “renegades” of both European and mixed Luso-Asian ancestry, operating both within and beyond the political frontiers of the Estado da Índia. Despite the loss of numerous Estado strongholds in Southeast Asia during the 17th century, this “informal” or “shadow” empire ensured a continuing and vibrant Portuguese mercantile, religious, and cultural influence in the region throughout the early modern period.⁸⁵ Recent studies of the VOC have explored both the violence inherent in the Dutch campaign to control Southeast Asia’s spice trade, and the complex social, political, and cultural “worlds” of the Company, with an emphasis on Indigenous as well as European experiences. Notable examples of the latter include an exhibition and book sponsored by the Rijksarchief in Den Hague, a digital atlas, an Indonesian-Dutch initiative to digitize the VOC archives in Jakarta, as well as a book and website which explore the 1621 Banda Genocide and its legacies.⁸⁶

Primary Sources

As with scholarship, the principle primary sources for the history of the spice trade, as well as the languages and other training required to use them, vary substantially according to era. A basic understanding of the spices themselves requires some familiarization with biogeography. For this, the published volumes of the Plant Resources of Southeast Asia (Prosea) project is an essential starting point.⁸⁷ For the prehistory of the spice trade, our primary sources are overwhelmingly archeological in nature, and are published in a wide range of journals and conference volumes. As with the recent finds in Banda and Timor mentioned above, new discoveries are likely to substantially improve our understandings of the earliest phases of Southeast Asia’s spice trade in years to come, and the field is a dynamic one. Primary written sources of relevance for the spice trade in the first and early second millennium include texts and inscriptions in Sanskrit, Chinese, Old Malay, Old Javanese, and for some topics, Latin and Greek. From the 9th century onwards, Arabic geographical and other texts are of the utmost importance. While no scholar can hope to specialize in all or even most of these languages, we are fortunate to possess published scholarly editions and translations of a great many of the principal texts. Nonetheless, the dating and interpretation of these early sources is often very challenging and subject to intense debate. For historians, a basic understanding of these questions and problems is a necessity when handling such texts, and this in turn frequently requires consulting specialized philological literature. The archeological record for this period is extremely important, with excavations of ports, settlements, and shipwrecks often substantially augmenting and expanding the evidence of the texts.

In contrast with the preceding periods, our primary sources for the early modern period are very substantial. In addition to the continuing importance of Chinese and Arabic sources, we have a substantial corpus of texts in Malay, as well as other languages of the archipelago, for example Javanese, Acehnese, and Makassarese. Published primary sources as well archival documents in Portuguese, Dutch, English, Spanish, and other European languages are essential for this period as well. The latter are largely housed in the National Archives of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and others. It is worth mentioning that these archives also contain Indigenous Southeast Asian sources, for example the Malay letters and manuscripts in British archives. The voluminous archives of the VOC include substantial overseas collections, the largest of which is in Indonesia. Increasingly, scholars can consult relatively high-resolution scans of these materials online, but fully digitizing the many kilometers of existing documents is an ongoing process, and in-person visits to archives is still at times a necessity. Finally, early modern ports, fortresses, and shipwrecks, as well as numerous maps, broadsheets, paintings, textiles, and objects of daily life in museum collections constitute essential sources for historians of the spice trade in Southeast Asia.