The Banda Islands District (kecamatan) is sub-divided into eighteen administrative villages (desa), listed below with their areas and their officially-estimated populations as at mid 2002.

[7] Before the arrival of Europeans, Banda had an oligarchic form of government led by orang kaya ('rich men') and the Bandanese had an active and independent role in trade throughout the archipelago.

[8]: 24  Banda was the world's only source of nutmeg and mace, spices used as flavourings, medicines, and preserving agents that were at the time highly valued in European markets.

In exchange, Banda predominantly received rice and cloth; namely light cotton batik from Java, calicoes from India and ikat from the Lesser Sundas.

In August 1511, on behalf of the king of Portugal, Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca, which at the time was a major hub of Asian trade.

In November of that year, after having secured Malacca and learned of the Banda Islands' location, Albuquerque sent an expedition of three ships led by his good friend António de Abreu to find them.

Malay pilots, either recruited or forcibly conscripted, guided them via Java, the Lesser Sundas and Ambon to Banda, arriving in early 1512.

[9]: 7  D'Abreu sailed through Ambon and Seram while his second in command Francisco Serrão went ahead towards the Maluku islands, was shipwrecked and ended up in Ternate.

The Bandanese were, however, hostile to such a plan, and their warlike behavior was both costly and tiresome to Garcia whose men were attacked when they attempted to build a fort.

Dutch–Bandanese relations were mutually resentful from the outset, with Holland's first merchants complaining of Bandanese reneging on agreed deliveries and price, and cheating on quantity and quality.

The Javanese, Arab and Indian, and Portuguese traders for example brought indispensable items along with steel knives, copper, medicines, and prized Chinese porcelain.

[citation needed] As much as the Dutch disliked dealing with the Bandanese, the trade was a highly profitable one with spices selling for 300 times the purchase price in Banda.

[9] Until the early seventeenth century the Bandas were ruled by a group of leading citizens, the orang kaya (literally 'rich men'); each of these was head of a district.

Jan Pietersz Coen, who was a lower-ranked merchant on the expedition, managed to escape, but the traumatic event likely influenced his future attitude towards the Bandanese.

Newly appointed VOC governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen set about enforcing Dutch monopoly over the Banda's spice trade.

Japanese mercenaries were hired to deal with the orang kaya,[14] forty of whom were beheaded with their heads impaled and displayed on bamboo spears.

[21][22] The population of the Banda Islands prior to Dutch conquest is generally estimated to have been around 13,000–15,000 people, some of whom were Malay and Javanese traders, as well as Chinese and Arabs.

But readings of historical sources suggest around one thousand Bandanese likely survived in the islands, and were spread throughout the nutmeg groves as forced labourers.

[9]: 54 [23]: 18 [24][25] The Dutch subsequently re-settled the islands with imported slaves, convicts and indentured labourers (to work the nutmeg plantations), as well as immigrants from elsewhere in Indonesia.

Some 530 of these individuals were later returned to the islands because of their much-needed expertise in nutmeg cultivation (something sorely lacking among newly arrived Dutch settlers).

[9]: 55 [23]: 24 Whereas up until this point the Dutch presence had been simply as traders, that was sometimes treaty-based, the Banda conquest marked the start of the first overt colonial rule in Indonesia, albeit under the auspices of the VOC.

Having nearly eradicated the islands' native population, Coen divided the productive land of approximately half a million nutmeg trees into sixty-eight 1.2-hectare perken.

Banda Malay is famous in the region for its unique, lilting accent, but it also has a number of locally identifying words in its lexicon, many of them borrowings or loanwords from Dutch.

They have inherited aspects of pre-colonial ritual practices in the Banda Islands that are highly valued and still performed, giving them a distinct and very local cultural identity.