Dutch East India Company

10 Key excerpts on "Dutch East India Company"

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  Management History

  • Bradley Bowden, David Lamond(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION As the first joint stock company in the world and a pioneer of several key capitalist practices (Gelderblom, De Jong, & Jonker, 2013), the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—VOC) was the most suc- cessful European trade merchant of its time (Meilink-Roelofsz, Raben, & Spijkerman, 1992). Over the course of its lifespan (1602–1795), the VOC acquired a central place in the Dutch economy (De Vries & Van der Woude, 1997), rendering it not only a landmark in the history of the Netherlands, but also a template for other trade merchants such as the English East India Company (EIC) and the French Compagnies des Indes Orientales. The VOC is therefore a key to understanding the formation of the global colonialism in the seventeen century and its failure in the 18th century (Adams, 1996). Most historical work tends to conceptualize the VOC in terms of “rise and fall” (e.g., Gaastra, 2009; Klerk de Reus, 1894). Set up as a chartered company, the VOC was essentially a patrimonial organization that conjoined economic and sovereign political goals at the behest of a merchant elite’s discretion (Adams, 1996). It is commonly accepted that the social structures and practices that made the company a success in the 17th century remained unchanged throughout (e.g., Adams, 1996; Jacobs, 2006; Van Goor, 2002), rendering it too rigid to address the 18th century’s changing competitive landscape. As a result, the VOC gradually degenerated from an institutional innovation (Steensgaard, 1982) into a financial burden (Enthoven, 2002). However, studies of the VOC’s inner organization do not seem to charac- terize the company’s agents as one-dimensional figures. On the contrary— the general verdict seems to be that the company was in the hands of pro- fessionals with a good feeling for trade and Asian politics (Van Goor, 2002).

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  The Modern World-System II

  Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750

  • Immanuel Wallerstein(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  The story of the East Indies trade is of course the story of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). It was a model of a capitalist trading com-pany, part speculative enterprise, part long-term investment, part col-onizer. 63 It had sober directors in Amsterdam, De Heeren Zeventien, the seventeen gentlemen, and hard-to-control proconsuls in Batavia, hrst among them Jan Pieterszoon Coen. 64 In some ways the Dutch backed into the East Indies trade. When Antwerp fell to the Spanish in 1585, the Euro-58 Even among grains, which were a relatively minor agricultural product, there was a shift in the seventeenth century from barley to wheat, a crop of more exacting production requirements (J. de Vries, 1974, 148). 59 This expression of the time is reported in Clark (1960, 14). 80 The quote is from I.ipson (1956, II, liii). See also Lipson (1956, III, 10-11), Parry (1967, 176, 210), Glamann (1974, 452), and Minchinton (1974, 164). Bowman says that as of 1650, Dutch ships numbered 15,000-16,000 out of the 20,000 ships in the world carrying trade (1936, 338). fil From A Man of the English Commerce, p. 192, cited in Wilson (1941, 4). 82 Coornaert (1967, 244). M For a description of the legal structure of the VOC, see Rabe (1962, 351-366). 64 Despite the claim of Werner Sombart and the outward similarity of names, Coen is not Cohen, and he was not Jewish. For the speculation about why Coen's father changed the family name from van Twisk to Coen, see Masselman (1963, 229-230). 2: Dutch Hegemony in the World-Economy 47 pean spice market was transferred to Amsterdam. But since Spain had annexed Portugal in 1580 and Lisbon was the European port of entry for spices, the Dutch sought to bypass the Spanish.

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  South East Asia Colonial History V1

  • Paul Kratoska(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11 Monopoly and Free Trade in Dutch–Asian Commercial Policy. Debate and Controversy Within the Voc DOI: 10.1201/9781003101666-11 S. Arasaratnam

  Source: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 4(1) (1973): 1–15.

  The Dutch East India Company (VOC) secured in March 1602, by charter from the States General of the Netherlands, a monopoly of eastern trade. Throughout its history of two centuries, it sought zealously to maintain and safeguard this monopoly against all interlopers and against any attempts at private trade by its own officers. With its establishment and expansion in the east the Company extended this concept of monopoly to embrace as much of Asian trade as it could master. It developed early the policy of acquiring a monopoly of certain key commodities of Asian trade by controlling the areas of production and hence the supply. It soon went further and declared a total monopoly of the entire seaborne trade of specific trading areas by virtue of conquest, enforced contracts and naval domination. Thus the close monopoly of the Europe/Asia trade and of large areas of their inter-Asian trade constituted a commercial system to which the Company’s Directors and its officers in Asia became closely attached and it formed a major plank in its commercial policy in the two centuries of its existence. Through this period, its energies and exertions were largely directed to the acquisition and maintenance of this many-sided monopoly system. Monopolistic policies and practices in trading dominated the thinking and activities of the Company at all levels of operation. The VOC was held as the archetype of such a trading body.

  Yet, despite the fact that the acquisition of a monopoly in any form of trade has always been considered by the Directors an axiom of commercial policy, there have been occasions in the course of the Company’s history when this has been challenged and various officials have strongly advocated opposite policies of freedom in trade and traffic and have questioned the belief that monopoly was desirable and profitable. Usually they fought losing battles but provoked interesting discussions in the Councils of the Company and anticipated the later and popular arguments for free trade. These challenges to official policy are spread through the two centuries from the first disputes between Jan Pietersz Coen and Laurens Reael (1614–1619) to the final comprehensive assault on the Company’s system by Dirk van Hogendorp (1799).1

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  The Dutch and English East India Companies

  Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia

  • Adam Clulow, Tristan Mostert, Adam Clulow, Tristan Mostert(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  Clulow, Adam and Tristan Mostert (eds.), The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, trade and violence in early modern Asia . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462983298/ch09 9 The Dutch East India Company in global history A historiographical reconnaissance Tonio Andrade Abstract This chapter provides a brief overview of scholarship on the Dutch East India Company, focusing on the work of major figures, including J.C. van Leur, M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Niels Steensgaard, and Leonard Blussé, among others. It suggests that one can discern a consistent trend in that scholarship: toward a greater appreciation of the power and strength of Asian trading networks. It then reflects on trends in current and future scholarship, including the work of contributors to this volume, suggesting that the network models currently in the zeitgeist are paying dividends in understanding, particularly when one keeps in mind the signif icance of the Asian networks that underlay and competed with the European networks. The chapter ends by recognising that recent scholarship seems to support a sort of ‘global early modernity’ whose salient characteristic is a dramatic – and largely reciprocal – increase in intercultural adoption. Keywords: Capitalism, peddling trade, TANAP, early modernisation, networks How influentia l was the Dutch East India Company in Asia? To what extent did it transform or revolutionise Asian trading patterns? And how powerful and resilient were the Asian trade networks that the VOC competed with? For a long time, historians thought they had answers to such questions. In the past, the Company has been portrayed as a catalyst for capitalism and a force that brought modern rational economic practices to world trade, thereby transforming preexisting trading structures throughout

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  Spices, Scents and Silk

  Catalysts of World Trade

  • James F Hancock(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • CAB International

    (Publisher)

  20 Age of Expansion Setting the Stage – The EIC and VOC Move into India

  When the Dutch and English first entered the Indian Ocean, the primary goal of both nations was to gain a monopoly in the spice trade. To do this, they had to militarily push out the Portuguese and prevent the other from gaining a foothold. Ultimately, the VOC came out the big winner taking control of the clove, nutmeg and mace trade of the Moluccas. It also took a considerable portion of the Indonesian pepper trade by force, but not all.

  With the loss of the Spice Islands, the British shifted their attention to India and its pepper, saltpetre, cotton and indigo. The VOC also turned its eyes to India, but with far less lasting impact. To gain their foothold in India the English and Dutch were faced with two significant challenges: they would need to gain the favour of the Mughals who now controlled most of North India and they would have to push back the Portuguese who were well entrenched along the west coast. The Mughals had left the Portuguese ports mostly alone, preferring to trade with them rather than fight.

  The arrival of the East India companies in India marked a new era in European–Indian commercial exchange (van Meersbergen, 2018 ). As Nadri describes:

  The companies displayed a different approach to trade and trading from their predecessors, the Portuguese, whose relationship with Indian maritime merchants frequently ended in conflict. Unlike the Portuguese, the English and the Dutch had a strong mercantile tradition and tended to be more pragmatic in their dealings with Indian and other Asian merchants. They forged a close commercial relationship with Indian merchants and secured permission from Indian rulers to establish trading stations or factories in port cities and in the interior ... The companies’ large-scale trading enterprise and the kind of commodities that they exported from India required a close interaction with Indian merchants, brokers, and bankers. There was a well-developed market structure in place with a hierarchy of merchants and intermediaries as well as banking and brokering services. These merchants and intermediaries were willing to extend their commercial services to the EIC and VOC and to take the business opportunities that the companies presented to them.

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  The Lost Samurai

  Japanese Mercenaries in South East Asia, 1593–1688

  • Stephen Turnbull(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Frontline Books

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6

  The Dutch East India Company and their soldaten van Japon

  In spite of entertaining considerable misgivings about the Japanese that were broadly similar to the doubts expressed by the Spanish on the Philippines, out of all the colonial powers the Dutch would prove to be the most enthusiastic employers of Japanese mercenaries, wholeheartedly embracing their volatile ferocity and recruiting freely within Japan itself in a unique scheme that promised an extension of Dutch power and influence beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The Japanese mercenaries would become the first Asian soldiers to be recruited by the Dutch, and even though the programme only lasted for a few years and was far from being the golden age of Japanese mercenaries that the scheme originally promised, the service rendered to these particular European masters forms an important episode in the story of Japan’s Wild Geese.

  The actual agency that employed Japanese mercenaries in Dutch service was the remarkable entity known as the Vereeinigde Oostindisches Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company, which had been founded in Amsterdam in March 1602. It was formed (after long and tortuous negotiations) by merging a number of individual pioneering companies who since 1594 had been sending fleets to the East in defiance of the papal jurisdiction that had supposedly divided the world exclusively between Spain and Portugal. The earlier Dutch system had been inefficient; in 1598 fourteen different Dutch companies sent 65 ships.1 The replacement of competition and duplication by unity and cooperation gave strength and enhanced ambition, both of which were backed to the hilt by the rulers of the States General of the Netherlands, who delegated power and responsibility to the ‘Heeren 17’, the seventeen-strong committee who ran the VOC. In the words of Adam Clulow (from whose extensive works much of this chapter is drawn) their support meant that the VOC ‘combined the attributes of both corporation and state’.2

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  Visible Cities

  Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans

  • Leonard Blussé, Leonard BLUSSE, Leonard Blussé(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  In addition, from their bases at Macao and Nagasaki they monopolized the trade be-tween a Chinese market in want of silver bullion from Japan to grease its system of taxation, and a Japanese market that craved silks, porce-lain, and other Chinese products. The Spaniards situated themselves along the Dongyang, or eastern route, by establishing their headquarters in Manila in 1571, and they gave a further boost to the existing traffic by importing South Ameri-can silver to the Philippines for the purchase of silk and porcelain from Chinese traders there. The Newcomer The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, owing to the expansive nature and inordinate scope of its activities in Asia, has sometimes been characterized as the world’s first multinational company. It was founded in 1602 in the midst of the Dutch Republic’s protracted war for independence from the Spanish crown. The Dutch States-General conferred on this long-distance company an extraordinary number of privileges, including the rights to wage war and to conclude treaties with “Oriental Princes and Potentates” east of the Cape of Good Hope. With such powers at its disposal, the VOC became an effective offen-sive weapon in the Dutch revolt against the crown of Spain and Por-tugal. 29 By the time the first Dutch ships arrived in Southeast Asia, in 1595, the Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese trading links had already been in full operation in the area for thirty years. Another two decades passed before the Dutch settled on an ideal location from which to direct their trading activities in the Indian Ocean, the China Sea, and the seas of the Indonesian Archipelago. This was Batavia, which Governor-Gen-eral Jan Pietersz Coen, mastermind of the Dutch empire in the East, situated quite consciously on the western edge of the island of Java near the Sunda Strait, an important thoroughfare between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

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  On the Edge of the Banda Zone

  Past and Present in the Social Organization of a Moluccan Trading Network

  • Roy Ellen(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  But Van Leur’s eloquent attack on orthodox colonial historiography altered the course of studies of the spice trade and shifted European histor-ical scholarship of Asia from colonial and orientalist preoccupations to a postcolonial, sociological, and altogether more detached view. This sea-change in vision instigated by Van Leur was followed by a series of major studies, the most important of which were those of Meilink-Roelofsz (1962) and Resink (1968). For Meilink-Roelofsz (1962:8), Asian trade was not pre-dominantly small-scale peddling, as had been suggested by Van Leur, but a mixture. It involved local rulers, aristocracy, native commercial groups, officials, and foreign merchants, as well as hawkers or itinerant traders, who depended on the “financiers” or “harbor princes.” It involved bulk goods such as rice, dried fish, and salt in addition to valuables; it was sys-tematic and flexible rather than anarchic. 1 Nowadays, we recognize its complex and multifaceted character. By comparison, Resink’s contribution was, in an impressive series of papers published in the 1950s and early 1960s (1968), to observe that the character of political relations between the Netherlands and the Indies led to a regiocentric (“regiocentrische”) view of Indonesian history, one focused on those dominant polities with which the Dutch had dealings, and one that fostered the independent power of most of the outer islands until well into the colonial period. In many cases, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, hereafter abbreviated to VOC), and after 1800, the government of the Dutch East Indies, was deal-ing with foreign relations rather than internal administration until about 1910: a world in which there was no Netherlands Indies, but only Dutch Java, Dutch Amboina, and so on, and alongside that a whole autonomous island world of “undiminished vigour” (Smail 1961:87).

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  Origins of Shareholder Advocacy

  • J. Koppell(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In those respects the company is a worthy precursor of modern corporations and Dutch limited liability companies. However, the VOC’s corpo- rate governance was a clear step backward, a deviation from both the preceding evolution and contemporary conceptions of business 52 G e l d e r b lo m , d e Jo n g, a n d Jo n k e r organization and accountability. Directors appointed by outsiders and sitting for life were an anomaly, as was the disregard for sharehold- ers’ rights to information, but they became the norm in the VOC, over vociferous protests from shareholders and prominent business- men such as Le Maire and Usselinx, because reasons of state overrode the interests of private investors. Like the company’s permanent cap- ital, its corporate governance model was the consequence of state intervention, not of a quest for greater economic efficiency. Notes 1. We are indebted to Matthijs de Jongh and Judith Pollman for pointing us to sources that helped to shape the argument of this chapter, and to the participants of conferences and seminars at Yale, Antwerp Univer- sity, the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, and CalTech for their constructive comments. Rienk Wegener Sleeswijk made us understand the precise legal character of early shipping companies; Ailsa Röell gave very useful detailed comments. 2. The original documents lie in the Dutch National Archives, the Hague (henceforth NA) 3.01.14 van Oldenbarnevelt no. 3123. Cf. De Jonge 1865, 364–378, and Haak and Veenendaal 1962, 293–294 for transcriptions. An English translation in Shareholder Rights 2009. 3. According to De Vries and van der Woude 1997, 385, the directors of the predecessors did not enjoy third-party limited liability, whereas Den Heijer 2005, 35–36, thinks they did. 4. To be sure, this kind of adaptation of the general partnership can be traced back to the Justinian code: Zimmerman 1990, 457–459.

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  An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

  • M. (Germain) Garnier(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The old English East India company was established in 1600, by a charter from Queen Elizabeth. In the first twelve voyages which they fitted out for India, they appear to have traded as a regulated company, with separate stocks, though only in the general ships of the company. In 1612, they united into a joint stock. Their charter was exclusive, and, though not confirmed by act of parliament, was in those days supposed to convey a real exclusive privilege. For many years, therefore, they were not much disturbed by interlopers. Their capital, which never exceeded seven hundred and fourty-four thousand pounds, and of which fifty pounds was a share, was not so exorbitant, nor their dealings so extensive, as to afford either a pretext for gross negligence and profusion, or a cover to gross malversation. Notwithstanding some extraordinary losses, occasioned partly by the malice of the Dutch East India Company, and partly by other accidents, they carried on for many years a successful trade. But in process of time, when the principles of liberty were better understood, it became every day more and more doubtful, how far a royal charter, not confirmed by act of parliament, could convey an exclusive privilege. Upon this question the decisions of the courts of justice were not uniform, but varied with the authority of government, and the humours of the times. Interlopers multiplied upon them; and towards the end of the reign of Charles II., through the whole of that of James II., and during a part of that of William III., reduced them to great distress. In 1698, a proposal was made to parliament, of advancing two millions to government, at eight per cent. provided the subscribers were erected into a new East India company, with exclusive privileges. The old East India company offered seven hundred thousand pounds, nearly the amount of their capital, at four per cent. upon the same conditions

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