The Dutch and English spent years warring over nutmeg.

World History

W hile nutmeg today is a common kitchen spice used to jazz up vegetables or top holiday favorites such as pumpkin pie and eggnog, it was once also highly valued for its medicinal properties and its alleged power to ward off the Black Plague. As such, the Banda Islands of Indonesia, which were flush with nutmeg trees, became a prime target of European business interests in the Late Middle Ages.

By the beginning of the 17th century, members of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) arranged what they thought were exclusive trade agreements with several Banda chiefs. However, many of the Banda continued dealing their valuable wares to other buyers, including those from the English East India Company (EIC). Although the Dutch mainly channeled their hostility over this toward the Banda instead of the EIC, the two European powers threatened each other until forging a treaty that ostensibly shared control of the islands in 1619. But the treaty failed to diffuse tensions, as the Dutch continued their aggressive behavior in the region, including a brutal massacre of much of the Indigenous population in 1621, while extorting extra funds from the English for protection and administration of the islands.

As the tensions boiled over, the "nutmeg wars," as they are sometimes known, also produced an interesting geopolitical development that became far more relevant the following century. As part of the Treaty of Breda, which ended the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, the English agreed to officially transfer ownership of what remained of their holdings in the Banda Islands, while the Dutch ceded formal control of New Netherland, a little-used territory across the Atlantic Ocean that included modern-day New York City.

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By the Numbers

Islands comprising the Banda Islands

Height (in feet) reached by a fully grown nutmeg tree

Did you know?

A pig nearly started a war between the U.S. and Great Britain.

In the 1850s, a mix of American settlers and British employees of the Hudson's Bay Company lived in an uneasy truce on San Juan Island, one of a string of islands that were disputed territory between Britain's Vancouver Island and the mainland U.S. That truce was shaken in June 1859 when an American farmer named Lyman Cutlar shot and killed a Hudson's Bay-owned pig that had been rooting around his property. Cutlar's attempt to compensate the company was rebuffed, and after an angry mob threatened him with retribution, a U.S. Army garrison led by future Confederate officer George Edward Pickett was sent to San Juan Island to assert American authority. That, in turn, prompted the arrival of a pair of British warships, and then three more after additional American troops turned up. It required the negotiation capabilities of U.S. Army Commanding General Winfield Scott to de-escalate the situation that autumn. Thirteen years later, an independent arbitration commission awarded San Juan Island to the United States, ending the chances of a global conflict over farm animals in the area.