Maluku is a cosmopolitan society where spice traders from across the region take residence in settlements, or in nearby enclaves, including Arab and Chinese traders who visit or live in the region.

Social organization is usually local, and relatively flat—a general populace guided by a council of elders or rich men, or orang kaya which is Indonesian word can be translated as "rich man".

The earliest archaeological evidence of human occupation of the Maluku Islands is about thirty-two thousand years old, but evidence of even older settlements in Australia may mean that Maluku had earlier visitors.

Evidence of increasingly long-distance trading relationships and of more frequent occupation of many islands, begins about ten to fifteen thousand years later.

Onyx beads and segments of silver plate used as currency on the Indian subcontinent around 200 BCE have been unearthed on some of the islands.

In addition, local dialects employ derivations of the Malay word then in use for 'silver'.

Arabic merchants had begun to arrive in the fourteenth century, bringing Islam.

Peaceful conversion to Islam has occurred in many islands, especially in the centers of trade, while aboriginal animism persists in the hinterlands and more isolated islands.

Archaeological evidence here relies largely on the occurrence of pigs' teeth, as evidence of pork eating or abstinence therefrom.

The most significant lasting effects of the Portuguese presence is the disruption and reorganization of the Southeast Asian trade, and in eastern Indonesia—including Maluku—the introduction of Christianity.

After the Portuguese annexed Malacca in August 1511, one Portuguese diary noted 'it is thirty years since they became Moors'—giving a sense of the competition taking place at this time between Islamic and European influences in the region.

The rulers of the competing island states of Tidore and …