Trading a tiny nutmeg island for Manhattan

HostIf you walked into a fancy dinner party four hundred years ago, you might see a wealthy person pull out a tiny silver grater and a single nut. It looks like a small, strange hobby, but that one nut was actually worth more than a servant's pay for an entire year.

GuestIt really was the ultimate status symbol. We’re talking about nutmeg, which today is just a common thing we keep in the back of the spice cabinet. But back then, it was the most wanted luxury on the face of the earth. Part of that was because it tasted good, but the real driver was fear. People actually believed that nutmeg was the only cure for the Black Plague. When you have a whole continent terrified of a deadly disease, the price of the supposed cure is going to go through the roof. It got to the point where a small handful of nutmeg could buy you a full house in London.

HostA whole house for a pocket full of seeds? That sounds like a bubble waiting to burst. Why didn't people just grow more of it?

GuestThey couldn't. At the time, nutmeg grew in only one tiny spot in the world. It was a small group of islands called the Banda Islands in what's now Indonesia. Because the supply was so limited, it created this incredibly violent race between the two big superpowers of the day, the English and the Dutch. They weren't just trading; they were fighting a war for total control. The Dutch were especially systematic about it. They wanted to own every single step of the process. To keep prices high, they would go to islands they didn't control and rip every nutmeg tree out of the ground. They even made it a law that if any local person was caught selling to anyone but them, they would be executed.

HostIt sounds less like a spice trade and more like a global mob operation.

GuestIt basically was. These were the world's first giant corporations, and they had their own private armies. The whole conflict eventually came down to one tiny speck of land called the island of Run. It’s only about two miles long, but it was the one place where the English had managed to set up a base. They built a small wooden fort and held out while Dutch warships surrounded the island. It was a total siege. For years, this tiny island was a symbol of national pride. Neither side wanted to give up even an inch because whoever owned Run would finally have a total lock on the entire nutmeg supply of the planet.

HostSo how do you go from a tiny island in the middle of the ocean to owning Manhattan?

GuestWell, the fighting got so expensive and lasted so long that both sides finally sat down in sixteen sixty-seven to work out a deal. This was the Treaty of Breda. The Dutch offered the English a choice. They said, you can have that tiny nutmeg island of Run back, or you can keep a different territory you recently took from us in North America. That territory was a fur-trading post called New Amsterdam.

HostWhich we now know as Manhattan. But back then, was that even a fair trade?

GuestTo the Dutch, it felt like a total win. They actually thought they were tricking the English. At the time, Manhattan was a mess for them. It was a colony that lost money, it was a nightmare to manage from across the ocean, and they were constantly fighting with the local people who lived there. The Dutch figures showed that Manhattan was a sinking ship, while the island of Run was the final piece of the puzzle for their spice monopoly. They happily handed over Manhattan because they thought the real future of the world’s economy was in nutmeg, not some swampy island in the Atlantic.

HostIt's hard to imagine anyone looking at Manhattan and thinking it was the lesser prize.

GuestIt’s one of the biggest gambles in history. For a while, it looked like the Dutch were right. The wealth from the nutmeg trade fueled a golden age in the Netherlands and made their spice company the richest business the world had ever seen. But by keeping the supply so low and the prices so high, they made people desperate to break their hold. Eventually, a French plant expert managed to smuggle some seeds out of the islands. He hid them and brought them to Mauritius to start a new plantation. Once nutmeg started growing in other parts of the world, the Dutch lost their grip. The price fell apart in the eighteen hundreds, and the trade wasn't worth the blood they had spilled for it.

HostSo the tiny island they fought so hard for just became another quiet spot on the map while the "useless" trading post turned into the center of the world.

GuestThat's the big twist. Today, the island of Run has mostly been forgotten by the rest of the world, while Manhattan became the financial capital of the globe.

HostThe entire map of the world was basically redrawn because someone wanted to keep a single nut in a silver box.