Recapitalization or Reform? The Bankruptcy of the First Dutch West India Company and the Formation of the Second West India Company, 1674 (original) (raw)
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Bachelor Thesis: The First Dutch West India Company (1621-1674). An historical approximation to the conflicts and circulations of Dutch goods and people in the Atlantic Ocean, 2019
The First West India Company can also be considered to some extent the less studied sister cooperation of the East India Company, her Pacific counterpart that was founded in 1602 to unify trade and thus obtain the commercial monopoly in Asia. This same mission relied on the WIC in 1621, experimenting with remarkable highs and lows. My objective is to study these first +/- 50 years, until the bankruptcy of 1674, approaching them from the following previously devised questions: 1) How did the Habsburg Dynasty affect the development of Dutch commerce? What do we see in the Atlantic world after the creation of the Dutch West India Company? 2) How the United Provinces developed and what framework gave birth to the creation of this new company. 3) What were the prime differences between the North and the South Atlantic, and how did the loss of Dutch Brazil influence the Caribbean.
A. Polonia and C. Antunes (eds.), Mechanisms of Global Empire Building (Porto: CITCEM) , 2017
This chapter seeks to highlight an episode within the history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from a new perspective. The Dutch company, often called «the first multinational company in the world», is most often studied from the perspective of business history, history of trade or maritime history. However, Philip Stern, in his recent The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, introduces a new perspective to study the Early Modern commercial companies. Instead of seeing the various chartered companies as filling «state-like» functions, he argues we should see them as states in their own right 1. Stern argues that the English East India Company, acted as a state in Asia and viewed itself as such even as early as the seventeenth century. Rather than seeing the company as a commercial entity that also fulfills some «state-like» roles, the company was a state. This state, moreover, was not constituted solely by the charter granted in England, but also by the privileges received from sovereigns in Asia, as well as the rights it had acquired in specific locations due to purchase, lease, or conquest. This has a number of important consequences for the study of the company. In the first place, we should approach the company as an organization with a political life of its own, independent from that of the mother country. In the second place, this means that we may study the companies from a political perspective, rather than from a purely commercial one. This will also allow scholars to study ideological conflicts within company
Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, 2019
Although French chartered companies operating on the west coast of Africa and in India followed a similar model of organization, their liquidation processes differed depending of the area of their monopoly. As well as exploring the reasons for the distinction between these two regions of exclusive trade, this article demonstrates that the differing liquidation processes negatively impacted company shareholders in the two regions. Taking the perspective of shareholders farther, it explores the case of a specific investor and the informal economic profits he benefitted from. This approach contributes to deepening our understanding of the French early modern companies’ bankruptcies by examining informal aspects that would not be readily visible from an exclusively institutional point of view.
The VOC as a Company-State: Debating Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Expansion
Itinerario. International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, 2014
What was seventeenth-century Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia all about? In the traditional historiography, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was predominantly presented as a multinational corporation and non-state colonial actor. Recent research, however, has significantly challenged this view, stressing instead the imperial aspects of VOC rule. This article aims to break new ground by analysing the vocabularies used in seventeenth-century reasoning about Dutch expansion overseas. Focusing on three critics of the VOC from the 1660s and 1670s, Pieter van Dam, Pieter de la Court, and Pieter van Hoorn, the article shows how voices within and outside of the ranks of the Company tried to make sense of the many-faced VOC as a commercial company that was also, in different ways, a state. In an on-going debate that centred on the issues of colonisation, conquest, free trade, and monopoly, the VOC was characterised as a distinctive political body that operated as an overseas extension of the state (Van Dam), as a competitor of the state (De la Court), or as a state as such (Van Hoorn). Following Philip J. Stern's recent analysis of the English East India Company, the VOC should therefore be considered to be a particular political institution in its own terms, which challenged its critics to think about it as a body politic that was neither corporation nor empire, but rather a Company-State.
The seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the Netherlands, or the Republic of the (Seven) United Provinces as it was then called. The Dutch were on the cutting edge of academia, art, science, engineering and defence and were well-known for their world-wide trading in the Levant, the Baltic, Africa, Asia (known as the East Indies), the Caribbean and the Americas (together known as the West Indies). One of the most remarkable of organisations created in the United Provinces was the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company. It created a territorial legacy in Asia that would last until the middle of the twentieth century, a hundred and fifty years after its disappearance, and has become one of the symbols of Dutch entrepreneurial spirit and empire. This essay will analyse the creation, overseas evolution and the decline of the VOC as well as explain its territorial legacy to the Netherlands.
1961
The object of this thesis is two-fold: first to make an economic study of the East India Company's many-sided activities in the first four decades of the seventeenth century, and secondly, through such a study to cast light upon the business-technique of a great merchant company of the period. In many ways, the East India Company was a unique organization. From a limited and modest beginning it quickly developed into a trading organization with wide commercial ramifications both in Asia and Europe. The Company's port to port trade in the Indies and the role it assumed as local traders in Asiatic Continent was ultimately responsible for the rise of the multilateral trade-triangles which characterised the English commerce overseas in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Such a development brought with it the twin problems of a chronic shortage of finance capital and the political rivalry with the Dutch in the Indies. At home, the Company's existence depended on the succe...