Dutch West India Company (WIC) Founded
The Dutch West India Company was chartered by the States General on 3 June 1621, receiving a twenty-four-year monopoly on Dutch trade and navigation in the Atlantic — the Americas, the Caribbean, and the west coast of Africa. It was modelled on the East India Company founded in 1602, and had the same extraordinary powers: to make war and peace, to conclude treaties, to build forts, to appoint governors and to administer justice, on behalf of a state that had itself only recently stopped being a Spanish province. Its purpose was as much strategic as commercial. The twelve-year truce with Spain expired in 1621, and the company was designed to attack Iberian shipping and colonies in the Atlantic while the republic fought on land in Europe. Privateering was the first business and the most profitable. Piet Hein captured the entire Spanish silver fleet off Cuba in 1628 with a haul of some eleven million guilders, which paid a fifty per cent dividend and financed a land campaign. It took much of Brazil from Portugal between 1630 and 1654, and lost it. It established New Netherland on the Hudson, took Curaçao and the Guianas, and seized Elmina and the Portuguese slave forts on the Gold Coast in 1637. That last decision defined it. From the 1640s the company became a principal carrier of the Atlantic slave trade, shipping several hundred thousand people to the Caribbean and to Brazil. It went bankrupt in 1674 and was refounded on narrower terms. Its Atlantic slaving continued under the second company until the trade was abolished.
- Year: 1621 CE
- Category: Economic
