Baai van Banda Besar 1875 - 1890

This photograph of Banda Besar Bay was taken by C. Dietrich. It's a scene of tranquility, but one shaped by the Dutch East India Company, which brutally exploited the Banda Islands for their nutmeg. The perfectly ordered buildings with their pointed roofs, the neat parade ground, and the ships in the bay all speak to a colonial project, an assertion of control and extraction of resources. How do we read the social context of this imagery? The bay itself appears calm and undisturbed. Yet, the image is a silent witness to the violence and exploitation inflicted on the local population during the spice trade. The Banda Islands were a site of immense suffering and this photograph offers no hint of that. By tracing the institutional history of the Dutch East India Company and delving into archival sources that record the experiences of the Bandanese people we can gain a much deeper understanding of the social relations that made an image like this possible.