The Aru Islands are situated at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean world, in the southern Moluccas. It is also one of the easternmost places in the world where Islam and Christianity gained a (limited) foothold in the early-modern period, and housed the easternmost fortress of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The present paper discusses Western-Arunese relations up to the early 19th century in terms of economic exchange and political networks. Aru society was stateless and relatively egalitarian but eluded strong colonial control up to c. 1900. Still the perceived marginality of the islands was paired with its status as a source of natural products destined for luxury consumption in Asia and Europe: pearls, tripang, birds-of-paradise, edible birds' nests. All this positioned Aru in a global economic network while leaving it largely ungoverned. The extant textual material consists of Dutch reports; however, critically read and compared with oral and archaeological data, these may yield important information about indigenous responses to European attempts to control the flow of goods. It is possible to develop the argument made by Roy Ellen about economic flows in eastern Indonesia beyond the VOC system, and also to draw parallels with James Scott's thesis about state-avoidance among ethnic minorities in mainland Southeast Asia.