In 1667, two empires sat down to end a war — and made what might be the most lopsided real-estate deal in human history. Britain got Manhattan. The Dutch got a three-kilometer-long island in eastern Indonesia that most people alive today have never heard of.
The island is called Run (or Pulau Run), one of the tiny Banda Islands in Indonesia's Maluku province. At the time of the trade, almost everyone in Europe would have told you the Dutch got the better deal — by far.
Why a Tiny Island Was Worth More Than New York
The answer is a single word: nutmeg. For centuries, the ten small volcanic islands of the Banda archipelago were the only place on Earth where nutmeg grew. Not the main place. The only place.
In 17th-century Europe, nutmeg was worth more than its weight in gold. It flavored the tables of the rich, and — crucially — physicians believed it could ward off the plague. A sack of nutmeg bought in Banda for one English penny could be sold in London for a markup historians estimate at up to 60,000 percent. Whoever controlled the Banda Islands controlled one of the most profitable monopolies that has ever existed.
"The trade of the Banda Islands was worth more, pound for pound, than any commerce the world had yet seen."— Giles Milton, author of "Nathaniel's Nutmeg"
The War Over Spice
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) — the world's first multinational corporation — seized the Banda Islands with shocking brutality. In 1621, Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen led a campaign that killed, enslaved, or deported almost the entire native Bandanese population of around 15,000 people. It remains one of the darkest chapters of colonial history, and one of the least taught.
But one island held out: Run, where the English East India Company had planted its flag in 1616. The islanders had signed a treaty with England — making little Run, in the eyes of English law, one of England's very first overseas colonies. For decades, England and the Netherlands fought over it.
The Deal That Changed the World
The Treaty of Breda in 1667 ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War with a simple swap: England formally gave up its claim to Run, and the Netherlands gave up its claim to a small North American trading post the Dutch called New Amsterdam — an island the local Lenape people knew as Manhattan.
The Dutch celebrated. They had secured the nutmeg monopoly and handed over a cold, unprofitable fur-trading town of about 9,000 people. Nobody in Amsterdam could have imagined that the swampy island would one day become the financial capital of the world — or that nutmeg trees, smuggled out by the French and later transplanted by the British to Grenada and Zanzibar, would eventually break the Banda monopoly entirely.
Run Today
Today, roughly two thousand people live on Run. There are no cars, no hotels of note, and electricity for only part of the day. Nutmeg still grows everywhere, and the islanders still harvest it, selling it for ordinary market prices. Manhattan's land is now valued in the trillions of dollars.
Yet the people of Run famously joke about the trade with more grace than bitterness. Visit, and someone will point across the water and tell you, smiling: "We are the real New York." They are not wrong. History simply forgot to tell the story.
Key Facts
- Run is about 3 km long and 1 km wide — Manhattan is roughly 20 times larger
- The Treaty of Breda was signed on 31 July 1667
- Until the 1800s, the Banda Islands were the world's only source of nutmeg and mace
- The VOC's 1621 Banda campaign killed or displaced ~15,000 Bandanese people
- New Amsterdam was renamed New York after the Duke of York