“True” should indeed be in quotation marks here—the term reflects the historically contingent tastes of Europeans, rather than any botanical category: The cinnamon of Sri Lanka was valued for its supreme quality as a spice, but various other Cinnamomum species have been, too, and are still used under the name “cinnamon.” But even today, botanists still call the cinnamon of Sri Lanka Cinnamomum verum (“verum” meaning true).
The rarity of cinnamon in the early modern period made it one of the most coveted spices of that era, and European countries without direct access to the cinnamon trade tried to imitate, substitute, steal, smuggle, or transplant the “true” product from Sri Lanka.
Experiments with “cinnamon gardens” (kaneeltuinen in Dutch) led to enormous successes, and the company eventually grew millions of cinnamon trees on plantations in the final decades of the eighteenth century.