Turbulence and profound change in the Indonesian archipelago occur between the mid-fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century.

Java loses much of its commanding position as new states, some great and some small, also race to acquire wealth and exercise power.

Urban populations grow rapidly, and with them the influence of expanding commercial elites.

New technologies, for example in weaponry and ship design, change the face of trade, and Islam extends its reach at the same time as a wide variety of influences diversify and secularize culture.

It is also a time in which Europeans begin to play a direct role in the archipelago's affairs, although they do not rule it, and Chinese merchants and laborers become more important.

All of this takes place in the context of a commercial boom that greatly expands prosperity but also greatly heightens competition and exposes Indonesia directly to the swift and often dangerous currents of what might justifiably be called the "first globalization".

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.

Indonesians hold virtually exclusive control of the spice trade, and decisive power in the extensive exchange of luxury and bulk goods that accompanies it, until the challenge of direct traders from Europe (first the Portuguese and Spanish at the beginning of the sixteenth century, then the Dutch, English, and others at the end of it) and renewed interest from the Chinese (after the Ming government relaxed prohibitions on private overseas trade in the mid-sixteenth century).

Over a period of about two hundred and fifty years, however, they will gradually lose their commercial primacy and, in some cases, much of their political independence.

This crucial process is far too complex to be understood simply as a struggle between East and West, or Christianity and Islam, or "modern" and "traditional" technology.

Europeans not only war vigorously among themselves, but they routinely ally themselves with local powers, many of them Muslim, and become participants in local rivalries; they also frequently find that their weaponry does not give them obvious superiority over indigenous powers, who purchase both light and heavy firearms and sometimes, as in Java well into the eighteenth century, are able to manufacture serviceable copies of European models.

Europeans find their position fluctuates as a result of a multitude of factors, some of them well beyond their control.