The Dutch East India Company was an early modern megacorporation, founded by a government-directed amalgamation of several rival Dutch trading companies in the early 17th century. It was originally established, on 20 March 1602, as a chartered company to trade with India and Indianized Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted it a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade. The VOC was an early multinational/transnational corporation in its modern sense. The Company has been often labelled a trading company or sometimes a shipping company. However, the VOC was in fact a proto-conglomerate company, diversifying into multiple commercial and industrial activities such as international trade , shipbuilding, production and trade of East Indian spices, Formosan sugarcane, and South African wine. The Company was also a transcontinental employer and an early pioneer of outward foreign direct investment at the dawn of modern capitalism. The Company's investment projects helped raise the commercial and industrial potential of many underdeveloped or undeveloped regions of the world in the early modern period. In the early 1600s, by widely issuing bonds and shares of stock to the general public, the VOC became the world's first formally listed public company. In other words, it was the first corporation to be ever actually listed on an official stock exchange. The VOC was influential in the rise of corporate-led globalization 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 the VOC's 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, whether for better or worse. The VOC also served as the direct model for the organizational reconstruction of the English/British East India Company in 1657. The Company, for nearly 200 years of its existence , 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. Dubbed the 'VOC Republic' or 'VOC Empire' by some, 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 . In 1619, the Company forcibly established a central position in the Indonesian city of Jayakarta, changing the name to Batavia . 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 it 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 , the VOC became 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 , Henry Hudson and Abel Tasman who revealed largely unknown landmasses to the western world. In the Golden Age of Netherlandish cartography , VOC navigators and cartographers helped shape geographical knowledge of the modern world as we know them 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 , the company was first nationalised in 1796, and finally dissolved in 1799. All assets were taken over by the government with VOC territories becoming Dutch government colonies. In spite of the VOC's historic roles and contributions, the Company has long been heavily criticized for its monopoly policy, exploitation, colonialism, uses of violence, and slavery.
Continue reading...From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.