Spice Islands Forts
Spice Islands Forts

Author: Simon Pratt

Publisher:

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781922440945

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Priceless nutmeg and cloves were for millennia only found on a scattering of active volcanos rearing up from equatorial seas at the far edge of the world; the Spice Islands of today's Indonesia.The Portuguese were the first Europeans to put them on the world map in 1512. To warn off the Spanish, they soon built the first Spice Islands fort. The profits were immense for whoever controlled these Spiceries, and a century of conflict and fort building followed as local sultanates, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the English all fought for supremacy. The Spice Islands hold one of the greatest concentrations of colonial forts anywhere in the world.Now the guns are silent, the galleons long sailed away. Many forts are ruined or lost forever. But across the spectacular islands, still thick with the scent of spices, many old ramparts and bastions remain as testament to an historic era of conflict.Spice Islands Forts tells the story of these forgotten colonial outposts for the first time, and includes over 200 stunning photographs, historic maps and contemporary artwork, as well as a catalogue and useful tips for adventurous travellers.

Nathaniel's Nutmeg
Nathaniel's Nutmeg

Author: Giles Milton

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-06-10

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1466873477

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A true tale of high adventure in the South Seas. The tiny island of Run is an insignificant speck in the Indonesian archipelago. Just two miles long and half a mile wide, it is remote, tranquil, and, these days, largely ignored. Yet 370 years ago, Run's harvest of nutmeg (a pound of which yielded a 3,200 percent profit by the time it arrived in England) turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and the British Crown. The outcome of the fighting was one of the most spectacular deals in history: Britain ceded Run to Holland but in return was given Manhattan. This led not only to the birth of New York but also to the beginning of the British Empire. Such a deal was due to the persistence of one man. Nathaniel Courthope and his small band of adventurers were sent to Run in October 1616, and for four years held off the massive Dutch navy. Nathaniel's Nutmeg centers on the remarkable showdown between Courthope and the Dutch Governor General Jan Coen, and the brutal fate of the mariners racing to Run--and the other corners of the globe--to reap the huge profits of the spice trade. Written with the flair of a historical sea novel but based on rigorous research, Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg is a brilliant adventure story by Giles Milton, a writer who has been hailed as the "new Bruce Chatwin" (Mail on Sunday).

The Spice Islands in Prehistory
The Spice Islands in Prehistory

Author: Peter Bellwood

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2019-06-18

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1760462918

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This monograph reports the results of archaeological investigations undertaken in the Northern Moluccas Islands (the Indonesian Province of Maluku Utara) by Indonesian, New Zealand and Australian archaeologists between 1989 and 1996. Excavations were undertaken in caves and open sites on four islands (Halmahera, Morotai, Kayoa and Gebe). The cultural sequence spans the past 35,000 years, commencing with shell and stone artefacts, progressing through the arrival of a Neolithic assemblage with red-slipped pottery, domesticated pigs and ground stone adzes around 1300 BC, and culminating in the appearance of Metal Age assemblages around 2000 years ago. The Metal Age also appears to have been a period of initial pottery use in Morotai Island, suggesting interaction between Austronesian-speaking and Papuan-speaking communities, whose descendants still populate these islands today. The 13 chapters in the volume have multiple authors, and include site excavation reports, discussions of radiocarbon chronology, earthenware pottery, lithic and non-ceramic artefacts, worked shell, animal bones, human osteology and health.

Amboina, 1623
Amboina, 1623

Author: Adam Clulow

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0231550375

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In 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō was arrested for asking suspicious questions about the defenses of a Dutch East India Company fort on Amboina, a remote set of islands in what is now eastern Indonesia. When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was tortured until he confessed that he had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants based nearby to seize control of the fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich islands from the Company’s grasp. Two weeks later, Dutch authorities executed twenty-one alleged conspirators, sparking immediate outrage and a controversy that would endure for centuries to come. In this landmark study, Adam Clulow presents a new perspective on the Amboina case that aims to move beyond the standard debate over the guilt or innocence of the supposed plotters. Instead, Amboina, 1623 argues that the case was driven forward by a potent combination of genuine crisis and overpowering fear that propelled the rapid escalation from suspicion to torture, that gave shape and form to an imagined plot, and that pushed events forward to their final bloody conclusion. Based on an exhaustive analysis of original trial documents, letters, and depositions, this book offers a masterful reinterpretation of a trial that has divided opinion for centuries while presenting new insight into global history and the nature of European expansion across the early modern world.

Merchant Kings
Merchant Kings

Author: Stephen R. Bown

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2010-12-07

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1429927356

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Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records. Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.

Spice Island
Spice Island

Author: Ginger Rankin

Publisher: Independently Published

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 9781092176781

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Paki and Jerold live on Spice Island where chickens roost all night in the trees and every day is summer. They swim and snorkel and fish for silver jacks in the soft Caribbean Sea that surrounds them. They climb mango trees that are heavy with ripe juicy fruit - good for eating and even better for throwing at their friends in mango fights. They know where to find mountain springs where the water tastes like sparkling soda and they've found the best places to hide in old Fort George where the cast iron cannons still angle toward the sea.So what is their secret adventure? Why are they putting together a raft from driftwood and twisted palm fiber? Who is Mr Ready? And what happens when the two eleven year olds find out that the sea is not always their friend?

The Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices
The Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices

Author: P N Ravindran

Publisher: CABI

Published: 2017-12-28

Total Pages: 1178

ISBN-13: 1780643152

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The Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices provides comprehensive coverage of the taxonomy, botany, chemistry, functional properties, medicinal uses, culinary uses and safety issues relating to over 250 species of herbs and spices. These herbs and spices constitute an important agricultural commodity; many are traded globally and are indispensable for pharmaceuticals, flavouring foods and beverages, and in the perfumery and cosmetic industries. More recently, they are increasingly being identified as having high nutraceutical potential and important value in human healthcare. This encyclopedia is an excellent resource for researchers, students, growers and manufacturers, in the fields of horticulture, agriculture, botany, crop sciences, food science and pharmacognosy.

The Nutmeg's Curse
The Nutmeg's Curse

Author: Amitav Ghosh

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-09-07

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0226823954

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In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.