Commodity and Market 27
At different times, there were various trading zones in the Malay-
Indonesian Archipelago,^93 serving the long-distance trade of maritime
Asia. The following are some of them:
“The Spice Islands”:^94 For many centuries, the area of the Moluccas
had earned itself a reputation as “the Spice Islands” on account of the
production of the cloves, nutmeg and mace that had found their way into
many households in the west and east. The small producers and local
people from the areas of production often brought their products to the
nearby market-places in small boats to be sold to traders who traveled
from island to island to collect them. As well as other spices, during
the Song-Yuan periods China had been one of the major end-markets
for cloves from the Moluccas. They were brought to Guangzhou by the
“tribute bearers” from Srivijaya and other Nanhai countries. By the late
fourteenth century, foreign traders including Chinese, Arabs and Javanese,
were among the collectors sailing to the Spice Islands from the northeast
coast of Java from where they conducted inter-island trade. The βifteenth
century saw the rise of Malacca as the major international center for the
spice trade.^95 Although not widely known for their navigational skills,
even the islanders from Banda would row their boats laden with spices
to cover the long distance to Malacca in the βinal days of the sultanate,
shortly before the Portuguese occupation.^96
Aceh: Located in northwest Sumatra lay Aceh. It had successfully
grasped the opportunity presented by a weakening Srivijaya to shake
off its control in the late thirteenth century. As it strengthened it began
to conduct direct trade with China. Beneβiting from its geographical
location, Aceh was able to establish trade relations with the Arabs and
- The term “trading zones”, rather than the oft-used “trading networks”, indicates
a sub-unit of the long-distance trade. It might sometimes involve the trade in
certain special products, or the active participation of a particular ethnic group.
The term trading network implies a much more complex structure depicting an
operational system. It involves horizontal and vertical human relationships and
the organizational mechanisms that form in total an operational system. The
discussion here does not cover the operating system as deβined above. - More speciβically, the Spice Islands include Banda Islands, Moluccas (Maluku),
Ceram, Timor and some other neighboring islands. - Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern
Period (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), pp. 1–2. - M.A.P. Meilink Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Inϔluence in the Indonesian
Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962),
p. 96.