Dutch ports, Maldivian shells: how the fall of Galle, Colombo and Jaffna rerouted the cowrie trade without moving its fishery. The Dutch East India Company’s conquest of the Portuguese coastal forts in Ceylon changed the geography of purchase in the Maldivian cowrie trade, not the geography of production. The money cowrie, Monetaria moneta (then Cypraea moneta), continued to be gathered in the central atolls of the Maldives, packed under a royal staple, and exchanged above al