Batavia, founded by Jan Pieterszoon Coen on Java in 1618, became the Dutch East India Company’s new capital and the operational base for its attempt to monopolize mace and nutmeg. Its role in the conquest of the Banda Islands shows how the company used a colonial center not merely to trade, but to impose the political and economic order needed to control production.

A New Company Capital

The Dutch faced a problem in the Banda Islands: their many small, autonomous city-states had no central authority that could be pressured into signing a monopoly treaty, and their village meetings governed without a hierarchy the Dutch could take over. As a result, Dutch merchants initially had to compete with English, Portuguese, Indian, and Chinese traders, sometimes losing the spices when they would not pay enough.

Coen’s answer was to establish Batavia as the company’s new capital in 1618. Three years later, he sailed from the city to Banda with a fleet. Batavia thus served as the launch point for a shift from commercial competition to direct force.

The Banda Conquest

In 1621, Coen’s expedition massacred almost the entire Bandanese population, estimated at about fifteen thousand people. The islands’ leaders were executed; only a few people were left alive, in part to preserve the knowledge required to produce mace and nutmeg. The killing cleared the way for the company to remake the islands around plantation production.

The Banda Islands were divided into sixty-eight parcels and granted to sixty-eight Dutchmen, most of them current or former company employees. The few surviving Bandanese taught the new owners how to grow the spices. The plantation owners could then buy enslaved people from the company to populate the islands and produce spices, which they were required to sell back to the company at fixed prices. Batavia’s commercial ambition was realized through a system of land allocation, coerced labor, and controlled sales.

Monopoly and Its Cost

The institutions imposed on the Spice Islands achieved the Dutch company’s immediate aim, but at an immense human cost and with consequences for the islands’ future development. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had reduced the world supply of the spices by about 60 percent, and the price of nutmeg had doubled.

Batavia’s significance in this account lies in the contrast between its function as a company capital and the devastation carried out in its name. It anchored a project that replaced the Banda Islands’ autonomous political arrangements with plantation ownership and monopoly, demonstrating how colonial commercial power could be organized from a distant administrative center and enforced through the restructuring of local society.