Dutch East India Company (VOC) Founded
The Dutch East India Company was chartered by the States General on 20 March 1602, and is generally reckoned the first company in the world to issue tradable shares to the public. It was created by merging six competing Dutch trading chambers, on the reasoning that they were bidding each other's prices up in Asia and down in Amsterdam, and needed to face the Portuguese as one. The charter granted a twenty-one-year monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, and with it powers that belonged to states: to build fortresses, keep troops, wage war, conclude treaties, coin money and administer justice in its own name. The capital was raised by public subscription — 6.4 million guilders from some 1,800 investors, including servants and craftsmen — and, critically, the shares could be sold to another party rather than redeemed, which created a permanent capital base and, at the same time, the Amsterdam exchange as a secondary market. The consequences followed from the powers. Jan Pieterszoon Coen took Jakarta in 1619 and renamed it Batavia; the company destroyed the population of the Banda islands in 1621 to secure the nutmeg monopoly, killing or enslaving most of some fifteen thousand people; it took Malacca from Portugal in 1641 and Ceylon by 1658, and held the sole European access to Japan at Dejima for two centuries. At its height it employed some 70,000 people and had 150 merchant ships and 40 warships. It went bankrupt in 1799, and the Dutch state inherited Indonesia. Its shares are sometimes said to have made it the most valuable company ever, on calculations that do not survive scrutiny. What it certainly did was invent the institutional form.
- Year: 1602 CE
- Category: Economic
