Overview

East Indies follows the trade winds, the trade routes, and the port cities across the East Indies and the Orient. High finance, piracy, greed, ambition, double dealing, exploitation all is here.  Driven by the search for spices, silks, gold, silver, porcelains, and other oriental goods, the Portuguese trading monopoly was challenged by the Dutch East India Company and then the English East India Company, the world's first joint stock and multi-national trading companies. The struggle for supremacy between the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English ranged across the Eastern Seas and in the settlements of Goa, Malacca, Ambon, Macao, Canton, Nagasaki, Solor, Batavia, Macassar, Johor, and Singapore for 250 years.  The story is told by the history of these port cities, beginning with Malacca — one of the world's largest trading ports in the 16th Century — and ending with the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong.  

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9780994562753

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Ian Burnet has spent thirty years, living, working and travelling in Indonesia. His three prior books show his fascination with the diverse history and cultures of the archipelago. Spice Islands tells the 2000 year history of the spice trade from the Moluccas of Eastern Indonesia until the spices reached Europe. It was the lure of the fabled Spice Islands and exotic spices such as cloves and nutmegs that drove The Age of Discovery' and the first circumnavigation of our planet. East Indies begins in the port city of Malacca, and tells the story of the 200 year struggle between the Portuguese Crown, the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company for trade supremacy in the Eastern Seas. It follows the rise of the world's first joint stock and multinational trading companies and their conversion to huge colonial states ruling over millions of people in Indonesia, India and Malaya. Archipelago takes us on a journey across the islands of the Indonesian archipelago, the most ethnically and culturally diverse nation on the planet. Through Ian Burnet's eyes we see the layers of ethnicity, culture, language and religion that make up the nation of Indonesia, a nation whose national motto had to be Unity in Diversity'. Ian lives with his family in Sydney, Australia.

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