1 - Father Company or Husband Company: Language of Kinship in VOC-Malukan Correspondences in the Early Modern Period

Presentation Abstract
In the early sixteenth century, Portuguese sailors arrived in the islands of Maluku in present-day eastern Indonesia. In addition to seeking the highly valued “trinity” of spices—clove, nutmeg, and mace—that attracted European merchants and sailors as well as merchants from other nations to islands of Maluku, the Portuguese were keen to spread Christianity and combat Islam. These latter goals were comparatively straightforward in the context of the Iberian Peninsula and northwestern Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, in the far-distant islands of Maluku, where their resources were limited, the Portuguese discovered that the production and trade of cloves were dominated by several polities whose royal families had converted to Islam. These polities, including the sultanates of Ternate and Tidore, often fought with one another. Moreover, they conceived of their regional politics in terms of kinship. The Portuguese, and later the Spanish and Dutch, nevertheless formed alliances with several of these polities and defined their relationships in terms of peace and friendship. Yet, the Portuguese desire to convert Malukans to Christianity clashed with the Islamization effort of their local allies. Diplomatic letters and contemporary reports reveal efforts from the Europeans and their Malukan allies to condone their interfaith relations using the language of friendship and kinship even as their political, military, and proselytizing actions demonstrate clear frustration with one another.