JSTOR Daily on nutmeg’s “violent” history

I associate nutmeg with my Jamaican grandparents putting it in food and drinks. But JSTOR Daily published a piece detailing its colonial history: From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dutch cultivation of nutmeg and the related spice mace involved “one of very few historical situations where Asian slaves worked on European-owned farms or plantations,” according to anthropologist Phillip Winn. The Banda Islands, once the world’s only source of nutmeg, were home to between 13,000 and 15,000 people until their conquest by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1621. “Enslaved Bandanese were deliberately distributed about the islands to make use of their expertise in cultivation and spice production.” The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the perkenier system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk). The post JSTOR Daily on nutmeg’s “violent” history appeared first on Cultrface.