Tristan Mostert – The Regional Dynamics of the 17th Century Spice Wars in Maluku

2024 Global Encounters Network Seminar Series Thursday 28 November 2024 Topic – The Regional Dynamics of the 17th Century Spice Wars in Maluku Speaker – Dr Tristan Mostert, Leiden University The period from the late 16th to the mid-17th century saw various European powers vying for control of the spice-producing regions of the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia. Parts of the resulting conflicts in the region are well-known and the topic of, largely popular, histories – particularly the genocide the Dutch East India Company (VOC) perpetrated in the Banda Islands in 1621. Such works have tended to turn the events on Banda into a deceptively straightforward narrative, with the Bandanese cast in the role of comparatively helpless and isolated victims of quickly escalating, and ultimately genocidal aggression by the VOC – an approach that divorces the Bandanese from their wider regional context and deprives them of agency. Other works still tend to describe the conflict over access to the spices as primarily a rivalry between European powers, turning a blind eye to the crucial importance of the Malukan political dynamics in the conflict, as well as the role of other local powers such as Makassar. In this talk, Tristan Mostert will dive into this broader context and the regional political dynamics of these conflicts over access to spices, specifically looking at the agency of local polities, as well as the environmental dimension of the conflict. He will use Banda as a starting point for a wider discussion of the conflicts in the region (mostly over access to cloves), which engulfed the entire eastern Indonesian archipelago, from Makassar to Ambon to Ternate.