At the beginning of the seventeenth century the establishment of two joint-stock overseas trading companies transformed European long-distance maritime commerce. Both the English East India Company (EIC), established on December 31, 1600, by a charter from the English Crown, and the Dutch United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), chartered on March 20, 1602, by the States-General of the Netherlands, were granted exclusive rights to trade to all destinations east of the Cape of Good Hope. The VOC, established with a joint stock of 6 million guilders (the equivalent of about 300 million euros today), was much larger in size and quite different in organization from its English sister organization.
Comparatively speaking, the Dutch were latecomers in Asia, arriving there almost a century after the Portuguese, although many Dutch and Flemish sailors and soldiers had already sailed to Asia on Portuguese galleons. Consequently, much information about the shipping routes was already known to the Dutch, who had secretly acquired additional rutters (guidebooks that gave sailing directions) and maps in Lisbon. The Itinerario, an extensive account of the Portuguese Empire in Asia written by Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1562–1611), a former secretary of the bishop of Goa, described in detail the navigational routes to and within Asia, and also made a scathing comment on the corruption that reigned in the Estado da India at the end of the sixteenth century. The manuscript accompanied the first Dutch fleet that reached West Java in 1595 and was published one year later in various languages.
ESTABLISHMENT AND PEAK YEARS
After the first fleet returned in 1596 a scramble for the Asian market broke loose. Eight different Dutch companies from different ports sent fourteen fleets with a total of sixty-five ships to the Indies, losing eleven ships en route. At the instigation of the influential landsadvocaat (government prosecutor) of the Province of Holland, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547–1619), all these companies were combined into one. This explains the VOC’s peculiar federalist organization, with six chambers spread over six ports in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland which, depending on their relative size, were represented by one or more directors in the general board of directors, the so-called Gentlemen Seventeen. (Amsterdam had eight seats.) The VOC had to have its charter renewed by the States-General every twenty-one years. Combining all the companies allowed the enormous fluctuation in the prices of Asian import goods such as pepper and spices to be controlled and a common strategy to be followed.
Whereas the EIC was first of all established as a trading organization, the VOC also had another goal: to carry the struggle for independence against the Iberian foe overseas. Thus the historian C. R. Boxer has styled the VOC as “a company of the ledger and the sword” (Boxer 1965). Because of warfare against the Portuguese in the Moluccas, no less than one-third of the original investments was spent on fortresses in those islands, which of course resulted in a much larger overhead.
One of the greatest challenges that European nations trading in Asia faced before the Industrial Revolution was how to pay for the tropical goods and luxury articles they imported. Initially, Europe had very little to offer apart from woolen cloth and bullion. Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1629), who served the VOC first as director general and later as governor-general, developed a master plan to deal with this conundrum. Witnessing the success of his Portuguese rivals in Asia, he stressed the importance of creating an extensive intra-Asian trading network spreading from Mocha on the Arabian Peninsula to Hirado in Japan, which would enable the company to gain such high returns that the profits from intra-Asian trade could pay for the return goods sent to Europe. Textiles from Gujarat were to be traded for pepper and gold in Sumatra; pepper from Banten on West Java for silver rials and textiles from Coromandel in India; Chinese merchandise such as iron ware, silk, porcelain, and gold for sandalwood, pepper, and rials in Banten, and so on.
To improve the supervision of this trading network Coen established a new headquarters at the site of the former Javanese port principality of Jacatra (today, Jakarta) and renamed it Batavia. Batavia remained the capital of the Dutch East Indies until decolonization in 1949. According to Coen the VOC’s Asian trade should rest on at least three pillars: the highly profitable textile trade between the Coromandel Coast in India and the Indonesian archipelago, a monopoly on the spice trade in the Banda archipelago and the Moluccas in the eastern Indonesian archipelago, and trade with China and Japan. Apart from the direct trade with China, which failed to materialize, the other objectives were met, yet the goal to be relieved of the supply of precious metals from Europe was never attained. By the 1660s the VOC had dislodged and replaced the Portuguese (and Spaniards at Tidore) in the Moluccas (1603–1662), Malacca (1641) and Makassar (1667) in the Indonesian archipelago, Ceylon (1640– 1657), Cochin (1663) on the Malabar coast, and Negapatnam (1659) on the Coromandel coast in India. The Dutch replaced the Portuguese on the tiny island of Deshima in Japan, but in 1662 they were driven from the island of Formosa by the Ming loyalist and warlord Zheng Chenggong (alias Coxinga).
The VOC reached its apogee in the 1690s. On average, eighty to ninety company ships were plying the Asian waters, serving twenty-two factories from Persia to Japan. In the Dutch Republic every chamber had its own warehouses and shipyards, where the workmen who built the ships who were all in the service of the local branch of the company, thus boosting the local urban economy. In addition to approximately 2,500 employees in the Netherlands, around 16,000 employees, merchants, soldiers, and sailors served the company in Asia; this number peaked at about 23,000 in 1750. The tropical climate claimed the lives of many company servants. Only one third of the 973,000 men who traveled to Asia on 4,700 ships during the 200-year existence of the VOC eventually returned to the home country, on 3,300 ships.
Generally speaking, three fleets annually left the Dutch shores. Often warships through the English Channel as far as the Atlantic Ocean escorted the outward-bound fleets of five to ten East Indiamen. During the seventeenth century a large Dutch East Indiaman of 700 tons carried, apart from its cargo, between 250 and 300 people— that is, about 140 sailors, 120 soldiers, and a dozen passengers. The majority of sailors came from the Dutch provinces and Scandinavia, but most of the soldiers originated from the German principalities. The passengers were generally high officials with their wives and children.
Over the years the relative importance of the various trade goods changed substantially. Certain goods such as pepper and spices from the archipelago and cinnamon from Ceylon continued to form the mainstay of the trade, but from the 1680s onward the trade in sugar and textiles became increasingly important, closely followed by fashionable products such as coffee (from Java) and tea (from China), which were to revolutionize European drinking habits.
DECLINE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Around the middle of the eighteenth century the character of the VOC underwent a subtle change. Intra-Asian trading activities diminished while the trade between Asia and Europe intensified. At the same time, the company strengthened its grip on large territories in Ceylon and Java by intervening in local succession strife. Thus an organization, which at first had been primarily an overseas trading enterprise, increasingly developed into a large colonial empire. At the end of the eighteenth century the VOC went into a decline. In the past, corruption and lax management have been held responsible for its downfall; indeed, its acronym was even jokingly referred to as Vergaan Onder Corruptie (“decayed under corruption”). Increasing competition from the English East India Company, which frustrated all further Dutch activity in India after it conquered Bengal, also played a role. So did the private “country traders,” who not only undercut the prices of the VOC on its trading routes but also surreptitiously evaded its monopolies. The death blow, however, was dealt by the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784). When the British navy seized almost all homeward-bound ships from the Indies and for a long period all ties with the colonies were cut off, the company headquarters in the Netherlands could no longer pay its large debts. Virtually bankrupt, the VOC was nationalized by the Dutch government in 1795; when the company’s charter expired five years later, its debts amounted to more than 200 million guilders.
The VOC left behind extensive archives in The Hague, Jakarta, Colombo in Sri Lanka, and Chennai in India—in all, approximately 4 kilometers of manuscripts. It was a well-organized bureaucratic institution with a vast information network dedicated to maintaining the company’s trading rights and its political position in Asia. With the exception of most of the bookkeeping records, the bulk of the original archives have been preserved, and part of it has even been published. These archives represent the most important source in any Western language on Monsoon Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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