Saturday, 26 April 2025

Special Guest Blogger: Jan Pieterszoon Coen

The British had the East India Company but us Netherlanders had the rival Dutch East India Company  and some may say there have been relative goodies and baddies but to many when it came to the British and the Dutch, it was baddies versus baddies.
I ended the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands in Indonesia by eliminating most of the local population by slaughtering them or selling them as slaves.
We wanted exclusive rights to the precious nutmeg that came from the islands, but the natives wanted the freedom to not be killed and to sell on the open market since the English were offering more.
My plan was to subjugate Banda and populate it with other people and by subjugate i obviously meant eliminate and the other people were our own people, they call it genocide today but this was a time of Empire building and our motto was:  'Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us’ or  sorry to slash, shoot, burn and hang you, mate, but it’s what God wants so stop whinging and keep still when i separate your head from your shoulders.
As well as denuding eastern peoples of their spices, the Dutch East India Company robbed them of rich artifacts and cultural treasures. We were also adept at engineering mass famines and I depopulated the Banda Islands to such a degree that of around fifteen thousand original residents, only a thousand remained by the end, with the rest dead, exiled or taken as slaves although quite a few unsportingly jumped to their deaths from the cliffs rather than fall into our hands.
Not surprisingly, our people were suddenly short of workers so we imported slaves from China and India to labour on the plantations alongside the few remaining Banda people who had been enslaved.
I eventually died of cholera, but i was revered as a hero of the Dutch with the usual statues, streets and even a town named after me therefore proving that the late 16th and early 17th Centuries were a very good time to be an utter douchebag.

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