The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period

It was the coveted trinity of spices - clove, nutmeg, and mace - that first lured European and other foreigners to Maluku (the Moluccas) in eastern Indonesia. There, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans recorded their activities and observations in minute detail. The descriptions of events and customs they left us, though colored by European assumptions, individual perceptions, and national concerns, represent the only written accounts of indigenous traditions.
The World of Maluku encompasses three centuries of European presence in Maluku and critically evaluates a wide sweep of Iberian and Dutch sources in an ambitious attempt to understand the intellectual milieu in which European and Malukan interactions took place. Leonard Andaya argues that a general Western conception of the center and periphery based on ancient classical and Christian European traditions underlay European views of the people of Maluku. His own documentation of the changes and continuities that occurred in local societies supports a different interpretation of center-periphery relations that emphasizes the four principal Malukan kingdoms or "pillars" and the dualism between two centers, Ternate and Tidore. Prosperity will prevail, Malukans believed, as long as the four pillars and the proper dualism were maintained. By integrating this structure into his narrative, the author avoids a framework governed by European concerns and brings new significance to Malukan events described but only partially understood by European observers.
This highly readable book is an important contribution to the historiography of Southeast Asia. It provides a deeper understanding of culture contact and will become a standard history of a relatively unknown and complex region.