The buying and selling of Indonesian spices, the production of which is limited and the sources often remote, initially fuels this early modern age of commerce.
Nutmeg (and mace) come from the nut of the tree Myristica fragrans, which, until the late eighteenth century, grows almost exclusively on six tiny islands in the Banda Archipelago, some three hundred kilometers west of the Papua coast.
Cloves are the dried flower buds of the tree Syzygium aromaticum, the cultivation of which until the mid-seventeenth century is largely limited to a handful of small islands off the west coast of Halmahera in the Maluku Islands.
These spices had long been distributed in modest quantities via the trade networks of the archipelago.
After about 1450, however, demand and the ability to pay for them had climbed rapidly in both China and Europe.
In the century between the 1390s and the 1490s, for example, European imports of cloves rise nearly one thousand percent, and of nutmeg nearly two thousand percent, and continues to rise for the next one hundred and twenty years.
Another product, black pepper (Piper nigrum), is grown more easily and widely (on Java, Sumatra, and Kalimantan), but it too becomes an object of steeply rising worldwide demand.
These changing global market conditions lie at the bottom of fundamental developments, not only in systems of supply and distribution but in virtually all aspects of life in the archipelago.
