The Moluccan spice monopoly, 1770–1824. Passages concerning Bencoolen written in collaboration with J. Bastin
H.R.C. Wright’s 1958 monograph-length article in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society provides a comprehensive economic and administrative history of the Dutch spice monopoly in the Moluccas between 1770 and 1824, with a dedicated section on Bencoolen written in collaboration with J. Bastin. Wright argues that the monopoly, once a source of enormous prestige and profit, became progressively unworkable and unprofitable under the combined pressures of declining European demand, the 1778 Banda hurricane, British military occupations, and the successful transplantation of spice trees to rival colonies.
Summary
The Dutch East India Company maintained its spice monopoly through a system of forced delivery at fixed prices, systematic extirpation of unauthorised trees, and the suppression of all foreign trade in the Moluccan seas. On the Ambonese islands, clove cultivators were organised into households with a fixed quota of trees, which was progressively reduced from 140 per household in 1770 to 40 by 1795 (p. 3). On Ceram, the annual hongi—a circuit of inspection and extirpation by the Governor’s fleet—served both to destroy spice plants and to terrorise the population into compliance, with villages burnt and sago trees devastated as punishment for smuggling (pp. 8–11). In the northern Moluccas, the Sultans of Ternate, Tidore, and Bachan were bound by treaty to provide men for extirpation expeditions in exchange for annual subsidies, though their cooperation was unreliable and the returns of plants destroyed were often exaggerated (pp. 12–16). The 1778 hurricane at Banda, which destroyed the majority of nutmeg trees, triggered a crisis that the Company never fully resolved: deliveries fell from an average of 600,000 lb. of nutmegs and 140,000 lb. of mace before 1778 to less than a tenth of these amounts in the 1780s (p. 17).
The two British occupations of the Moluccas (1796–1803 and 1810–1817) exposed the structural weaknesses of the system. During the first occupation, British country merchants engaged in large-scale smuggling that the local authorities could not control until R.T. Farquhar took decisive action in 1799, arresting chiefs and confiscating cargoes (pp. 29–32). The British also initiated the transplantation of spice plants to Penang and Bencoolen, where botanist C. Smith shipped over 71,000 nutmeg and 55,000 clove plants from the Moluccas between 1798 and 1802 (p. 52). At Bencoolen, 846 nutmeg plants were successfully landed in 1798, and by 1809 the aggregate number of nutmeg trees in cultivation had reached 46,225 (p. 56). The French had achieved earlier success at Mauritius under Pierre Poivre, with 4,500 fruit-bearing clove trees by 1792 and production reaching 932,000 lb. on Bourbon by 1820 (pp. 48, 91).
After the final restoration of Dutch rule in 1817, Governor Merkus and Governor-General Van der Capellen attempted reform. Merkus proposed replacing the clove monopoly with a tax of half the crop, while Van der Capellen officially ended extirpation and permitted collection of spices in the northern Moluccas at fixed government prices (pp. 80–85). Yet the Dutch government, anxious to protect Amsterdam’s commercial privileges and to support Belgian manufacturing, ultimately retained the monopoly until 1854 (p. 101). The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 ceded Bencoolen to the Netherlands but provided only for the continuance of the monopoly until the Dutch “shall think fit to abandon” it, leaving the Bencoolen planters without compensation or protection (pp. 100–102).
Key Findings
- The authorised number of clove trees per Ambonese household was reduced from 140 in 1770 to 40 by 1795, and the total number of mature trees fell from 330,599 in 1774 to 105,927 in 1795, yet the average delivery fell by less than a seventh, indicating the system’s inefficiency (p. 3).
- The 1778 Banda hurricane reduced nutmeg deliveries from a pre-hurricane average of over 500,000 lb. to approximately 60,000 lb. in the 1780s and early 1790s; by 1822 the harvest had recovered to nearly 500,000 lb. from 286,805 fruit-bearing trees (pp. 17, 94).
- During the first British occupation, Farquhar estimated the Company had lost £400,000 to British, Buginese, and other smugglers in just two years; his enforcement measures from 1799 onward compelled smugglers to concentrate on the northern Moluccas (p. 30).
- By 1818/19, Bencoolen had 109,298 nutmeg and 26,215 clove trees in cultivation, increasing to 130,461 and 56,077 by the end of Raffles’ administration in 1822; Raffles estimated that Bencoolen’s spice production then exceeded by about 4,000 lb. the highest average annual consumption of Great Britain during the period of exclusive British access to the Moluccas (p. 96).
- The average annual Dutch clove delivery declined from 751,000 lb. (1675–99) to 425,000 lb. (1800–20), while Bourbon’s clove production rose from 200,000 lb. in 1802 to 943,800 lb. by 1825, demonstrating the monopoly’s irreversible erosion (pp. 91–92).
- The Company’s total expenditure on establishing spice plantations at Bencoolen was estimated at 125,374 drs. by 1816, while exports between 1811 and 1816 yielded only 4,167 drs. in local duties, prompting the Directors to order the sale of the Company’s plantation (p. 96).
Conclusion
Wright’s definitive historical takeaway is that the Dutch spice monopoly was a self-defeating institution: the very measures designed to protect it—extirpation, forced delivery, suppression of trade—depopulated and demoralised the cultivating communities, while the monopoly’s financial burden drove the Dutch to increasingly desperate and counterproductive policies. The transplantation of spice trees to Bencoolen, Penang, Bourbon, and Cayenne rendered the monopoly’s core premise—that the Moluccas were the sole source of quality spices—increasingly untenable, and by 1824 the Dutch were maintaining an expensive and unprofitable system of control over a diminishing share of world production. The treaty that ceded Bencoolen to the Dutch in exchange for Malacca thus transferred to them not a source of revenue but a growing competitive threat that they were ill-equipped to manage.
Context
- The Bencoolen passages were written in collaboration with J. Bastin, whose own work on Raffles’ native policies (1954, 1957) provided the administrative framework for understanding the settlement’s governance during the critical years of spice transplantation.
- Wright draws extensively on the O.I. Company archives (O.I. Co. series), the Batavia government’s Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië (TNI), and the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI), reflecting the standard archival base for Dutch colonial economic history at mid-century.