Monopolizing the Spice Trade

The heart of the spice trade was the Moluccas, a small section of the Indonesian archipelago that was the world's only indigenous source of cloves and nutmeg.

In the first decade of the 1600s, the VOC seized these islands, focusing and concentrating the trade in both cloves and nutmeg by destroying sources not under their control and exterminating the native populations.

It was brutal, but it worked...more or less.  While the Dutch never succeed in completely "pacifying" the islands, they do reap monopoly profits and returned profits of several hundred percent in good years.

For more than 200 years, from 1602, the VOC paid an annual divident of 18% or more.

Brits