Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiastate formation such networks did not really matter. The situation was
different elsewhere in the Amboina Islands, especially along the coasts
of Seram and Buru and on the small islands. The entire coastal area had
become important, in the first instance not because it produced spices
or other valuables, but because it functioned as a stepping-stone on the
trade routes to the clove-producing Moluccas and nutmeg-producing
Banda Islands (discussed below). In the sixteenth century, however, the
cultivation of clove also spread to the Amboina region, first to Hoamoal
and then to Hitu, the northern part of Ambon Island. The land surface
of these islands was about 30,000 km^2 , a little less than the present-day
Netherlands.^10
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the population of the
Amboina Islands might be estimated at almost 100,000. Like in the
case of the Philippines, the Ambonese lived in settlements numbering
between less than 100 and up to 2,000 people, with an average of about
400, usually ruled by orangkaya, “wealthy men”. Sometimes, even in
Seram’s interior parts, chiefs were addressed, particularly by outsiders,
with more grandiose titles, such as raja or “king”, suggesting that the
chiefs ruled “principalities”, while in fact they were only controlling one
or, at the most, a handful of settlements. In Seram’s jungle landscape,
warfare was often a matter of bands of headhunters attacking any person
they could ambush in the swidden fields or paths outside villages. In
contrast to the interior of Seram, coastal society in Amboina had seen a
clustering of villages into uli, village federations. Such federations were
capable of organizing one or two kora-kora for amphibious warfare.
Kora-kora were used for raids, the purpose of which was to provide
severed heads as well as captives. The latter might be sold to equal the
costs of the expeditions. On land, an uli usually had a fortified top of a
hill for retreat in case of danger. There were also a few federations of
village federations, which had not yet reached the state of a “monarchy”
as in the case of Ternate, Tidore, Sulu and Maguindanao. They were
- G. J. Knaap, “Some Observations on a Thriving Dancing-Party; The Cultivation of
and the Competition for Cloves in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Ambon”,
in Sartono Kartodirdjo (ed.), Papers of the Fourth Indonesian-Dutch History
Conference. Volume 1: Agrarian History (Yogyakarta: Gadja Mada University Press,
1986): 67–69; Idem, “The Saniri Tiga Air (Seram): An Account of its ‘Discovery’
and Interpretation between about 1675 and 1950”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 149 (1993): 250–56, 269–71.