Willem Schouten
Willem Cornelisz Schouten( – 1625) was a Dutch navigator for the Dutch East India Company.
He was the first to sail the Cape Horn route to the Pacific Ocean.
Abraham van Riebeeck
Abraham van Riebeeck (18 October 1653 – 17 November 1713) was a merchant with the Dutch East India Company and the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies from 1709 to 1713.
Dutch East India Company
The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company (VOC) was a megacorporation founded by a government-directed amalgamation of several rival Dutch trading companies ("voorcompagnieën") 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 (i.e. a company of merchants who buy and sell goods produced by other people) or sometimes a shipping company.
However, VOC was in fact a proto-conglomerate company, diversifying into multiple commercial and industrial activities such as international trade (especially intra-Asian trade), shipbuilding, and both production and trade of East Indian spices, Formosan sugarcane, and South African wine.
The Company was a transcontinental employer and an early pioneer of outward foreign direct investment.
In the early 1600s, by widely issuing bonds and shares of stock to the general public, VOC became the world's first formally listed public company.
In other words, it was the first corporation to be listed on an official stock exchange.
It was influential in the rise of corporate-led globalisation in the early modern period.
With its pioneering institutional innovations and powerful roles in global business history, the Company is often considered by many to be the forerunner of modern corporations.
In many respects, modern-day corporations are all the 'direct descendants' of the VOC model.
It was their 17th century institutional innovations and business practices that laid the foundations for the rise of giant global corporations in subsequent centuries – as a highly significant and formidable socio-politico-economic force of the modern-day world – to become the dominant factor in almost all economic systems today.
They also served as the direct model for the organisational reconstruction of the English/British East India Company in 1657.
The Company, for nearly 200 years of its existence (1602–1800), had effectively transformed itself from a corporate entity into a state or an empire in its own right.
One of the most influential and best expertly researched business enterprises in history, the VOC's world has been the subject of a vast amount of literature that includes both fiction and nonfiction works.
The company was historically an exemplary company-state rather than a pure for-profit corporation.
Originally a government-backed military-commercial enterprise
, the VOC was the wartime brainchild of leading Dutch republican statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the States-General.
From its inception in 1602, the Company was not only a commercial enterprise but also effectively an instrument of war in the young Dutch Republic's revolutionary global war against the powerful Spanish Empire and Iberian Union (1579–1648).
In 1619, the Company forcibly established a central position in the Javanese city of Jayakarta, changing the name to Batavia (modern-day Jakarta).
Over the next two centuries the Company acquired additional ports as trading bases and safeguarded their interests by taking over surrounding territory.
To guarantee its supply, the Company established positions in many countries and became an early pioneer of outward foreign direct investment.
In its foreign colonies, the VOC possessed quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies.
With increasing importance of foreign posts, the Company is often considered the world's first true transnational corporation.
Along with the Dutch West India Company (WIC/GWIC), the VOC was seen as the international arm of the Dutch Republic and the symbolic power of the Dutch Empire.
To further its trade routes, the VOC-funded exploratory voyages, such as those led by Willem Janszoon ("Duyfken"), Henry Hudson ("Halve Maen"), and Abel Tasman, revealed largely unknown landmasses to the western world.
In the Golden Age of Netherlandish cartography (c. 1570s–1670s), VOC navigators and cartographers helped shape geographical knowledge of the world as we know it today.
Socio-economic changes in Europe, the shift in power balance, and less successful financial management resulted in a slow decline of the VOC between 1720 and 1799.
After the financially disastrous Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784), the company was nationalised in 1796, and finally dissolved in 1799.
All assets were taken over by the government with VOC territories becoming Dutch government colonies.
The company has been criticised for its monopolistic policy, exploitation, colonialism, uses of violence, and slavery.
Sanjiv Mehta (British businessman)
Sanjiv Mehta( born October 1961) is an India- born British businessman.
He is the owner of" The East India Company", which he launched in 2010, presenting it as a revival of the historic East India Company that was dissolved on 1 June 1874.
James Salmond
Major- General James Hanson Salmond( 1766–1837) was an officer in the East India Company's Forces who went on to be Military Secretary to the East India Company.
Olof de Wet
Olof Godlieb de Wet( 1739- 1811) was a South African high- ranking official in the Dutch East India Company and co-founder of the Freemasons in South Africa.
Johan van Oldenbarnevelt
Johan van Oldenbarnevelt , Heer van Berkel en Rodenrijs (1600), Gunterstein (1611) and Bakkum (1613)
(14 September 1547 – 13 May 1619) was a Dutch statesman who played an important role in the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain.
Van Oldenbarnevelt was born in Amersfoort.
He studied law at Leuven, Bourges, Heidelberg and Padua, and traveled in France and Italy before settling in The Hague.
He supported William the Silent in his revolt against Spain, and fought in William's army.
In his later years he was a supporter of the Arminians, in the religious-political controversy which split the young Dutch Republic.
Mir Qasim
Mir Qasim( died 8 May 1777) was the Nawab of Bengal from 1760 to 1763.
He was installed as Nawab with the support of the British East India Company, replacing Mir Jafar, his father- in- law, who had himself been supported earlier by the East India Company after his role in the Battle of Plassey.
However, Mir Jafar was in conflict with the East India company over too many demands and tried to tie up with the Dutch East India Company.
The British eventually overran the Dutch forces at Chinsura and played a major role in replacing Mir Jafar with Mir Qasim.
Qasim later fell out with the British and fought them at the Battle of Buxar.
His defeat has been suggested as the last real chance of preventing a gradual British expansion in large parts of North East India following Britain's victory in the Seven Years War.
Thomas Sandys (merchant)
Thomas Sandys was an English merchant.
Sandys traded in India, returning with a shipload of cloth which arrived in the English Channel in January 1682.
When the ship sailed up the River Thames, officials of the East India Company, which held a monopoly on trading in the East Indies, seized the ship and attempted to levy a fine.
Sandys was the respondent in the resulting legal case," East India Company v. Sandys", heard in 1683.
Lord Chief Justice Lord Jeffreys ruled for the East India Company, citing the Statute of Monopolies of 1624 and finding that, as the interloping merchants had never been possession of the East India trade, they had suffered no loss of freedom or restraint of liberty.
He thus upheld the East India Company charter, and the royal prerogative over foreign trade.
Willem Verstegen
Willem Verstegen( c. 1612 – 1659) was a merchant in service of the Dutch East India Company and chief trader of factory in Dejima.

Question: Where did the founder of Dutch East India Company die?
Answer: Hague