page_title: Dutch East India Company
section_title: Roles in the history of the global economy and international relations
hierarchical_section_title: Dutch East India Company / Historical roles and legacy / Roles in the history of the global economy and international relations
caption_attribution_description: TAIOAN English: 17th century watercolor drawing of the Dutch East India Company's Fort Zeelandia on the island of Formosa. The survey image includes a legend identifying government buildings, markets, neighbourhoods etc. 中文（繁體）‎: 《大員港市鳥瞰圖》，藏於荷蘭米德爾堡哲烏斯博物館（Zeeuws Museum） Nederlands: Waterverftekening van VOC-fort Zeelandia op het eiland Formosa.
context_page_description: The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company, was a megacorporation founded by a government-directed amalgamation of several rival Dutch trading companies in the early 17th century. It was established on 20 March 1602, as a chartered company to trade with Mughal India during the period of proto-industrialization, from which 50% of textiles and 80% of silks were imported, chiefly from its most developed region known as Bengal Subah. In addition, the company traded with Indianised Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted it a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade. It has been often labelled a trading company or sometimes a shipping company. However, the VOC was in fact a proto-conglomerate, diversifying into multiple commercial and industrial activities such as international trade, shipbuilding, and both production and trade of East Indian spices, Indonesian coffee, Formosan sugarcane, and South African wine. The company was a transcontinental employer and a corporate pioneer of outward foreign direct investment at the dawn of modern capitalism.
context_section_description: Its [the VOC's] fame as the first public company, which heralded the transition from feudalism to modern capitalism, and its remarkable financial success for nearly two centuries ensure its importance in the history of capitalism.
  — Warwick Funnell & Jeffrey Robertson, in "Accounting by the First Public Company" (2014)
  (...) Here [17th-century Ternate, North Maluku, Indonesia], surely, was a very early, fully operational manifestation of international integration, the embryonic form of today's ubiquitous globalisation. We would recognise its constituent elements. Here was the tenuous but well-structured supply-chain, extended all the way from Banda to Amsterdam, via numerous ports and functionaries, administered with brutal efficiency by the Dutch East India Company, perhaps the first business organisation that bears resemblance to today's multinational corporations. The company raised money by issuing shares. It had the first widely-recognised commercial logo. Even without today's computers, the company's officials were linked through a hierarchy of regular detailed reporting and accounting. Production was brought together in plantations and processed in 'factories'. Near-subsistence agriculture was replaced with scale and quality control, supervised by the perkeniers with an incentivising profit-sharing deal with the company. Customer feedback was insistently relayed to producers: 'small nutmegs are of no value'. This mighty machine produced 3000 tons of nutmeg annually and transported it across hazardous waters to deliver it to the burghers of Holland and on to the rest of Europe's spice-hungry upper-class. Ad hoc trade between nations, with goods passing through many hands, many owners and many markets, was replaced by 'straight-through' processing by a single entity – the Dutch East India Company.
  — Stephen Grenville, in "The first global supply chain", Lowy Institute, November 2017
  The VOC was a transcontinental employer and an early pioneer of outward foreign direct investment at the dawn of modern capitalism. In his book The Ecology of Money: Debt, Growth, and Sustainability (2013), Adrian Kuzminski notes, "The Dutch, it seems, more than anyone in the West since the palmy days of ancient Rome, had more money than they knew what to do with. They discovered, unlike the Romans, that the best use of money was to make more money. They invested it, mostly in overseas ventures, utilising the innovation of the joint-stock company in which private investors could purchase shares, the most famous being the Dutch East India Company." The VOC's intercontinental activities played a major role to the Dutch Republic's prosperity, as well as it could awaken socio-economic dynamism elsewhere. Wherever Dutch capital went, urban features were developed, economic activities expanded, new industries established, new jobs created, trading companies operated, swamps drained, mines opened, forests exploited, canals constructed, mills turned, and ships were built. In the early modern period, the Dutch were pioneering capitalists who raised the commercial and industrial potential of underdeveloped or undeveloped lands whose resources they exploited, whether for better or worse. For example, the native economies of pre-VOC-era Taiwan and South Africa were virtually undeveloped or were in almost primitive states. In many way, recorded economic history of Taiwan and South Africa began with the golden age of the VOC in the 17th century. It was VOC people who established and developed the first urban areas in the history of Taiwan (Tainan) and South Africa (including Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Swellendam).
  The VOC existed for almost 200 years from its founding in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly over Dutch operations in Asia until its demise in 1796. During those two centuries (between 1602 and 1796), the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combin
caption: Overview of Fort Zeelandia in Dutch Formosa (in the 17th-century). It was in the Dutch rule period of Taiwan that the VOC began to encourage large-scale mainland Chinese immigration.[246][247] As a corporate pioneer of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) at the dawn of modern capitalism,[248][249] the VOC's economic activities changed the demographic and economic history of the island forever.
exif: {}