Company
DissolvedThe Dutch East India Company
Amsterdam · 1602 – 1799
Bankrupt, it was nationalized in 1799. Its debts passed to the Dutch state.
The Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie was chartered by the Dutch Republic in 1602. It merged competing trading ventures into one company, sold shares to the public in Amsterdam, and gave those shareholders a claim on profits without giving them a say in each voyage.
That is the modern company, arriving early. The VOC could wage war, sign treaties, build forts, and coin money. It also published a dividend. For most of the seventeenth century it was the richest firm on earth, and the employer of sailors, soldiers, clerks, and the enslaved people its spice monopoly required.
A permanent staff for a seasonal trade
Chambers in Amsterdam, Zeeland, and four other cities fitted out the ships. Batavia, founded in 1619, was the Asian capital, a city the company owned. Clerks there ran a bureaucracy as elaborate as a state's. Ships took eight months. Mortality on the passage was high enough that the company was always hiring. The Heeren XVII, the seventeen directors, met in the Netherlands and governed by letter. Distance made the local governor powerful and the audit late.
Bankruptcy as policy
The cost of the garrisons ate the profit from the nutmeg. Corruption in Asia was structural, because a company servant's real income was private trade. By the 1780s the VOC was borrowing to pay dividends, which is how a firm pretends to be healthy. The Batavian Republic nationalized it in 1799 and inherited the debts. The share, the fort, and the dividend had come as a package. They ended as one too.
The work it organized
- Sailor
- Bookkeeper
- Merchant-soldier
- Director
On the timeline
Related
- The East India CompanyDissolved
- The Dutch West India CompanyDissolved
- The Bank of AmsterdamDissolved