The Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, "United East India Company"), was a joint-stock company formed in 1602 which held a monopoly on Dutch colonial and mercantile activities in the Far East. The VOC maintained major bases of operations in Batavia (today, Jakarta), Fort Zeelandia (on Taiwan), and on the man-made island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Following the imposition of maritime restrictions in the 1630s, the Dutch were the only Europeans with whom Japan traded or otherwise interacted, for the duration of the Edo period (until the 'opening' of the country in the 1850s).
The VOC is often cited as the first company in history to sell stocks and operate based on responsibilities to stockholders, and as, perhaps, the first multi-national corporation.[1] At its peak, the Company boasted 257 ships and 12,000 employees.[2]
History
The VOC was originally founded in 1602, as the result of the merger of a number of different firms which had previously been in competition with one another; these firms united under a board of directors known as the Seventeen Gentlemen, forming the United East India Company.[3] Based at Amsterdam, a city with perhaps the most efficient money market and lowest interest rates in the world, the VOC raised ten times the capital of the English East India Company.[2]
The Dutch originally established their presence in Japan with a factory in Hirado in 1609. (The English East India Company established their Hirado factory in 1615, and closed it in 1623, leaving the Japan trade at that time.) The Dutch factory was moved to Dejima in 1641.
Tensions between the VOC and the English East India Company (EIC) sometimes escalated into actual violence. One of the more major incidents was the Amboyna massacre, which took place in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in 1623. Agents of the Dutch East India Company executed a number of men in the service of the EIC, accusing them of being involved in corporate espionage. Though the English maintained no presence in Japan from 1623 until the 1850s, tensions, and violence, between the VOC and EIC continued. In 1808, in the so-called Phaeton Incident, several British ships entered Nagasaki harbor looking for Dutch ships to harass; none were in port at the time.
The Dutch entered the Vietnam trade at Hoi An in 1633, where a community of Japanese traders was already established. For the first few years after this, the Japanese are said to have dominated commercial activity in the port, particularly in the trade of silks, despite the Japanese population being only a tiny fraction of the Chinese presence. After 1635, though, Japanese were no longer allowed to leave Japan and to return; Japanese involvement in overseas trade declined dramatically, but Japanese traders remained for some time hesitant to deal with the Dutch. They dealt chiefly with Chinese merchants, leaving very little supply for the Dutch to purchase, thus driving up the prices dramatically for the Dutch. Eventually, however, Japanese influence in the port died out, and the Dutch were able to fill the niche thus vacated. The Dutch remained active in central-southern Vietnam afterwards, but closed their factory in Hanoi (northern Vietnam) in 1700. Their base in Ayutthaya (Siam) closed in 1663.
The Dutch presence in Nagasaki was of great importance for Tokugawa Japan not only economically (in terms of the importation of goods), but also in terms of the inflow of information. Rangaku, or "Dutch studies", was a major development in the Edo period, with a number of scholars eagerly studying Dutch books and other materials (and, on very rare occasions, meeting with Dutchmen personally) and introducing to Japan new technologies, scientific information (especially in the fields of medicine and botany), world maps, and painting techniques. It was through the Dutch that Japan obtained telescopes and microscopes, among other technologies, and it was through the Dutch that Japan was kept up to date on world events.
Representatives of the Company journeyed to Edo to pay their respects to the Shogun once every few years. Originally, from 1633 until 1789, they made this journey every year; from 1790 onwards, the journey was made only once every five years. This change in the frequency of the missions coincided with similar efforts to reduce the costs of receiving Korean embassies to Edo; from 1790 onwards, the VOC was to send three men, not four, and to bring only half as much gifts for the shogun and for other officials.[4]
As their visit was considered one strongly associated with trade purposes, and indeed as the shogunate extending the courtesy or privilege of allowing them to visit Edo, the VOC representatives were not received as "guests" in the same sort of formal ceremonial receptions (chisô) that Korean and Ryukyuan envoys were.[5]; the Dutch, for their part, are said to have seen the affair as simply a matter of protocol which they needed to perform in order to be permitted to maintain their special relationship and trade access.[6]
When they did receive an audience with the shogun, they were permitted to approach no further than the outer veranda outside the Ôhiroma, rather than being formally received within the audience hall. On at least one occasion, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi arranged a series of informal audiences with the VOC representatives, assigning officials to lead the Dutch deeper into the palace, where their exotic appearances could be witnessed by the women of the palace, and others (all hidden behind blinds or screens), as a source of humor. The Dutch were also recieved in an unofficial audience at that time at the mansion of the Yanagisawa clan, where Tsunayoshi himself observed from behind a blind, completely unseen himself.[7] On occasion, the VOC representatives presented the Shogun with exotic animals, such as elephants or camels, which stirred up great popular interest, but these animals rarely lasted very long.
The company struggled in the 1790s through the 1810s, in part due to the involvement of the Dutch Republic in the French Revolutionary Wars, resulting in no Dutch ships appearing in Nagasaki in 1791 or 1796. In attempts to maintain its position, the VOC began hiring foreign ships to carry its goods, for example hiring the American ship Franklin, which arrived in Nagasaki in place of a Dutch ship in 1799.[8] That same year, however, the Company went bankrupt, and was dissolved the following year, becoming nationalized. Dutch activities in the Far East after 1800 were more directly driven by the Dutch national government, and continued to heavily employ American and Western European chartered ships until 1816, when the Kingdom of the Netherlands regained Java from the British (who had taken it in 1811) and otherwise regained some general stability.[9]
Dutch Factors
- Carl Peter Thunberg (1775-1777)
- Isaac Titsingh (1779-1784)
- Hendrik Casper Romberg (1784-1785)
- Gijsbert Hemmij (d. 1799).
- Jan Cock Blumhoff (1809-1823)
References
- ↑ Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, Cambridge University Press (2012), 73.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Robert Tignor, Benjamin Elman, et al, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, vol B, Fourth Edition, W.W. Norton & Co (2014), 495.
- ↑ Matsuda, 77.
- ↑ Hellyer, 106.
- ↑ Kurushima Hiroshi, presentation at "Interpreting Parades and Processions of Edo Japan" symposium, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 11 Feb 2013.
- ↑ Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement, Harvard University Press (2009), 45.
- ↑ Anne Walthall, "Hiding the shoguns: Secrecy and the nature of political authority in Tokugawa Japan," in Bernard Scheid and Mark Teeuwen (eds.) The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion, Routledge (2006), 341-342.
- ↑ Hellyer, 108.
- ↑ Hellyer, 133.