Company
DissolvedThe Dutch West India Company
Amsterdam · 1621 – 1792
A first company failed in 1674. The second was dissolved in 1792.
The Dutch West India Company received its charter in 1621, a generation after the VOC, to do in the Atlantic what the older company did in Asia. Its mandate covered West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, and it included the slave trade from the start.
The company captured the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, held northeastern Brazil for a time, and founded New Amsterdam. None of that made it the VOC. Sugar and enslaved people were profitable for some voyages and ruinous as a standing empire. The company was often at war and often short of cash.
What the charter employed
Sailors, soldiers, and the factors who bought people at Elmina and sold them in Curaçao and Brazil. Clerks in Amsterdam fitted out ships that were partly warships. In New Netherland the company was the landlord and the government until the English took the colony in 1664. The jobs were the jobs of a trading fort: gunner, warehouse keeper, bookkeeper of human beings counted as cargo. The museum records that without euphemism. It was the business.
Two companies, one ending
The first WIC went bankrupt in 1674. A second company was chartered on the remnants and lasted, smaller, until 1792. By then the Dutch Atlantic trade had passed to private merchants who did not want to pay for the company's forts and still used them. The charter was a machine for concentrating capital. It was also a machine for concentrating costs the trade would not cover.
The work it organized
- Factor
- Sailor
- Fort clerk
- Soldier
On the timeline
Related
- The Dutch East India CompanyDissolved