On my previous “how powerful was” videos, I’ve always focused on ancient empires and
talked about how they formed, worked, and lasted however long they did as empires, but
this time around it’s a little bit different, since we’re talking about a company, but
have no illusions, as the Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
(and thus henceforth referred to as the VOC), was the most valuable company ever in world
history, at its height worth the equivalent of around 8 trillion US Dollars (at least
at the peak of its monetary worth at the height of tulipmania in 1637), more than the 20*
biggest companies today combined, and completely beating out the British East India Company.
So with that in mind, what was the VOC, and just how powerful was it?
So first, it might be worth asking what exactly the VOC was.
Was it a completely private company?
Was it basically part of the Dutch Empire?
What exactly was it?
Simply put, the VOC was a publicly traded company focused on trade in and around India
and what became known as the Dutch East Indies, famous today as the one significant piece
of land the Dutch actually managed to keep.
It was not just focused on trading and shipping however, as it also worked in industries such
as shipbuilding and even producing some of the goods they traded, making it in a sense
a kind of proto-conglomeration.
The VOC’s origin story begins in the late 16th century, a time when the Netherlands
was part of Spain but the Dutch decided they really didn’t want that to be a thing, but
Spain was all like “yeah but we do want that to still be a thing”.
The Dutch had already been shipping spices from the Indian Ocean, although in practice
it was mainly Portugal doing the shipping in and out of Europe, seeing as they were
the ones with the colonies and trading posts, so basically Dutch traders would ship everything
into Lisbon, and then redistribute them around Europe.
However in 1580 Spain and Portugal came under a personal union, and due to that whole war
for independence thing, Lisbon became a less viable trading center for the Dutch.
So in order to get the spices they wanted oh-so badly to both flavor and preserve their
food, various Dutch cities started sending out small fleets to the East Indies to establish
their own trading posts.
Now back in these times companies were generally set up to fund a single voyage, and were generally
liquidated when/if these fleets returned.
The spice trade was an extremely high risk venture, not just because the ships coming
back was very much an if, but also because they could come back with really any amount
of spices, be they completely empty-handed or bursting at the seams, meaning prices could
fluctuate dramatically, and thus forming cartels to control the supply once it got to Europe
would have often been the safer strategy to stabilizing the prices, something the English
did in 1600 with the creation of the English East India Company, prompting the Dutch government
to unify all these scattered little companies into one United East India Company in 1602.
As one united company with the backing of the government, this allowed for hundreds
of investors to collectively invest in fleets of well over 500 ships, greatly boosting overall
profit and diminishing the effects of potential losses.
This effectively created the first ever stock market, where investors could invest some
money now for a share of potentially a lot of money later.
Once the VOC had been established, they needed an eastern base of operations, and in 1619
they would forcibly conquer the Javan city of Jayakarta, renaming it Batavia after the
Latin name for the Netherlands, and slowly expanding from there, establishing new trading
ports throughout Indonesia and India, up into Taiwan, as well as fortresses for ships to
recuperate in South Africa (and crashing into Western Australia a few times along the way).
Since the VOC, although still based in Amsterdam, largely operated thousands of kilometers away
in a pre-internet and pre-telegraph age, the company was largely allowed to establish colonies,
wage war and negotiate treaties, and deal justice in a pseudo-governmental fashion on
their own, seeing as they and the Dutch government had basically the same interests anyway.
You may even recall that the Dutch (and therefore the VOC) were (alongside the Chinese) the
only foreigners allowed to trade with Japan in the period in which they were having the
country be closed, though even then they had to keep most of their business to the small
artificial island of Dejima near Nagasaki.
The VOC also owned numerous factories far beyond the territories they actually administered,
from where they would obtain silks, coffee, porcelain, sugar, precious metals, and several
other goods, especially spices including nutmeg, pepper, mace, and cloves from the Spice Islands
(also known as the Maluku Islands, between Sulawesi and West Papua), and also cinnamon,
more pepper, and cardamon from Sri Lanka.
They didn’t just harvest and take resources though, as they also frequently traded for
these goods with spices to Arabia, silver to India, cloth to Sri Lanka, cloth, silver
and ivory to the East Indies, spices, luxury goods and cloth to China, and silk, porcelain,
spices and luxury goods to Japan.
By the end of the 18th century though, things were not looking all too well for the VOC,
as wars with both the British and the French threatened the existence of both the VOc and
the Netherlands in general.
The Franco-Dutch Wars and the occupation of Amsterdam following the French Revolution
prompted the Dutch government to nationalize the VOC in 1796, allowing their lease to finally
end in 1799, upon which most of their colonies and trade infrastructure would be handed over
to the British.
The effects of the VOC, although often brutal to the inhabitants of the regions where they
had established their trading posts and factories, completely overhauled how capitalism in general
would work in many ways over the coming centuries.
The VOC however, in its effective monopoly over Indian Ocean trade, had been ardent practitioners
of slavery, violence, exploitation, and environmental destruction, namely deforestation.
In an effort to stay on top of what was then seen as a zero-sum economy, the largest company
in world history has certainly earned itself a… complex legacy in the modern world.
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