Some Defining Traits
Institutional format was a principal trait that set the Dutch East India Company apart from other maritime trading firms. As a chartered joint stock company, the VOC possessed unique features which enabled it to invest in the creation of a permanent infrastructure abroad.
The far-reaching privileges that had been assigned by the States-General allowed the Company to engage in war, administer justice, and enter into treaties with Asian rulers. Freely acting on its own in Asia, the VOC constituted a state outside the state that could operate with remarkable independence from the policymaking of the mother country, or patria, as the VOC correspondence steadfastly called it.At Batavia the governor-general and Council of the Indies effectively executed their own policy. In 1644 they informed the States-General of their liberty to sell their overseas possessions, if necessary to the king of Spain himself. And to add insult to injury, the Gentlemen Seventeen, the directors of the Company in Holland, were told by their inferiors in Batavia, “The Directors in Patria decide matters, as it seems best to them there; but we do here, what seems best and most advisable to us.”[2111]
A second special feature was the Dutch monopoly of the spice trade. The prime aim of the VOC was to obtain the monopoly on the purchase of spices from the Indonesian archipelago. The Dutch not only aimed to be the sole suppliers of nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon to the European market, but they also used this monopoly in order to participate in the intra-Asian trade. The merchant who controlled the supply of spices could join the economies of the Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Mughal worlds. It would take some 60 years of protracted warfare with the Portuguese Estado da India, and use of force or diplomacy vis a vis Asian “declared enemies and feigned friends,” before the production areas of cloves and nutmeg in the Moluccas and of cinnamon in Ceylon ended up in the hands of the Dutch.
Especially Antonio van Diemen, governor-general between 1636 and 1645, believed that the Company's hegemony in Asian trade could not be assured unless it first eliminated Portuguese competition. He was convinced that the capital-intensive VOC could not beat the free Portuguese merchants at their own game and therefore advocated an all-out offensive to do away with the Portuguese presence, first in Malacca (1641) and then Ceylon (1644). In 1663 Governor-General Ryckloff van Goens would finally conquer pepper-rich Malabar from the Portuguese. The bellicose behavior of these viceroys in the East was hardly appreciated by the directors in Holland, who feared the high costs of those operations and maintained that it was better “to be subjected to the laws and customs of those [Asian] regions than to resort to arms, as long as it is tolerable and one can still trade profitably.”[2112]The jealously guarded spice monopoly remained the mainstay of the Company's affairs right into the final decades of its existence. The VOC never gained a monopoly on pepper because this product was cultivated in too many different places, from Malabar on the west coast of India up to Sumatra and Java in the Indonesian archipelago. Over the years, the demand for spices in Europe did not see much growth, and there was little elasticity in the trade in these products. But when after 1700 the European demand for calicoes, coffee, and tea exploded, the VOC had to reckon with other rivals in the field, the French East India Company and the English East India Company (EIC), who quickly expanded their presence on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. While the VOC continued to focus on textile trading in bulk (often for consumption in Asia itself), the English and French sought to supply the European market with better quality, high-end products.[2113] [2114] Yet in the trade in coffee—the Dutch successfully started the cultivation of coffee in Java—and in Chinese tea, the VOC kept its footing all the way until the outbreak of the fourth Anglo-Dutch war in 1780.20 The third feature was the Company's participation in the intra-Asian trade. The fourth point was the extraordinary size of the East India Company, not only in Asia but also at home. Within the Dutch Republic the VOC was by far the largest single employer. It operated its own ship wharves in six different port towns; it had some 25,000 persons on the pay list in the Netherlands and abroad. For 200 years the VOC continued to function as the umbilical cord between the Low Countries and the overseas empire in Asia. It is astonishing how much this organization shaped not only European presence in Asia, but also an Asian presence in the Netherlands. The phenomenon of the “embarrassment of riches,” as Simon Schama terms the Dutch Golden Age, cannot be understood without considering the impact of Asian imports by the VOC on the Dutch economy. These commodities changed Dutch consumption patterns and brought much hustle and bustle to the most important port towns of the Netherlands and their hinterland.[2116] Products like Indian cotton textiles, Chinese and Japanese silk clothing, Indonesian spices, Chinese tea, and coffee from Mocha and Java were all exclusively delivered by this singular business enterprise to be auctioned off in Holland.