Dutch East India Company

The flag of the Dutch East India Company, a model of the Halve Maen - the ship on which Henry Hudson first sailed into what is now New York harbor. Model at Museum of the City of New York, exhibition in honor of the 400th anniversary of Hudson's "discovery" of New York & the Hudson River.

• Founded: 1602
• Dissolved: 1800
• Japanese: オランダ東インド会社 (Oranda higashi indo gaisha)

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. At its peak, the Company boasted 257 ships and 12,000 employees.

Though overshadowing the Chinese merchants in Nagasaki in most Western treatments of the subject, in fact the volume of trade in which Chinese dealt dwarfed that of the entire VOC operation. This held true both in Nagasaki in particular, and throughout the region.

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. 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.

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 1613, and closed it in 1623, leaving the Japan trade at that time.) The Dutch factory was moved to Dejima in 1641.

Fort Zeelandia was established on Taiwan in 1624, and served as a powerful entrepot (intermediary trading port) for trade with both China and Japan. In 1639, the Dutch exported 1.85 million taels of silver (527,250 florins) from Japan via Taiwan. One of the fort's chief individual trading partners was the smuggler/pirate/trader Zheng Zhilong, who traded gold, silks, and other goods to the Dutch in exchange for Japanese silver, but also competed against them. His son, Zheng Chenggong (aka Coxinga), later drove the Dutch out of Taiwan entirely, seizing Fort Zeelandia in 1662. It was only after this that Batavia came to eclipse Taiwan as the VOC's chief trading post in the region.

Under the leadership of Jan Pieterzoon Coen, who has been quoted as saying that trade cannot be conducted without war, nor war without trade, the VOC took Jakarta in 1619, burning down much of the town, driving out the local population, and building a fortress from which it would base its operations in Southeast Asia. Two years later, they took the Banda Islands, known for their nutmeg, similarly driving out, enslaving, and/or murdering the local inhabitants. After securing a monopoly on nutmeg, the VOC pushed on to seize control of the trade in cloves, and destroyed every last cloves tree on a number of islands, leaving only a few islands as the only sources of cloves in the region, thus driving prices up dramatically, to the benefit of the Company, which controlled the islands. Soon afterwards, they turned their attentions to pepper, taking control of the Javanese port of Bantam (Banten), the chief pepper-exporting port in the region. By 1670, the Company had taken the Maluku Islands as well, and dominated the spice trade in the Dutch East Indies. Though focusing on monopolizing the spice trade, and on extracting as much volume of spices as possible from these islands, the Dutch found they also needed to engage in trade in a variety of other goods, including textiles, tea, and coffee, in order to have goods to trade in China other than precious metals, since the Chinese were generally disinterested in European manufactures.

Despite its dominance of the spice trade, however, the VOC still had to contend with Chinese, English, and other merchants as competitors. The Dutch and English East India Companies in particular often clashed as they competed for control of the spice trade, but sometimes reached agreements; in 1667, in the Treaty of Breda, the English traded the tiny nutmeg-rich island of Run to the Dutch, in exchange for an island on the other side of the world, Manhattan. Tensions between the VOC and the English East India Company (EIC) sometimes escalated into actual violence, however. 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 VOC employed some 300 Japanese mercenaries in their various campaigns. Japanese are known to have fought for the VOC in the Tidore expedition of 1613, the siege of Jakarta in 1619, and the 1621 conquest of the Banda Islands, as well as the 1623 Amboyna Massacre. Soon after that, however, the Tokugawa shogunate banned Japanese from leaving Japan, thus putting an end to the VOC's source of mercenaries.

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.

A VOC base in Ayutthaya (Siam) was of particular significance as well. Until 1715, ships traveling from Batavia to Nagasaki more often than not stopped in Ayutthaya to purchase Siamese goods to then sell in Japan. These included deer skins, ray skins, and aromatic woods, among others, and were typically purchased either with Japanese silver, or textiles obtained in India. In 1715, the Shôtoku shinrei ("New Edicts of the Shôtoku Era") were put into place by the Tokugawa shogunate, altering the terms of trade at Nagasaki, and impelling VOC ships to now travel directly between Batavia and Nagasaki, without stopping over to pick up Siamese cargoes. Yet, VOC ships based in Ayutthaya continued to ply the waters, and after 1715 in fact came to hold a near monopoly on the Ayutthaya-Nagasaki route, pushing the Chinese aside for a time.

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.

Nagasaki was also of great significance to the Company. In 1649, profits from business in Japan reached almost 710,000 guilders, one-and-a-half times as much as the VOC factory in Taiwan, and more than double the profits in Persia that year. Fully one third of these Nagasaki profits were from the sale of silks purchased in Tonkin.

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. 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.; 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. 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. 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 large part due to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The Dutch homeland was conquered by France in 1794, becoming a client-state known as the Republic of Batavia, and losing much of its overseas holdings to Britain. The governor of the Dutch East Indies sided with France against the British at first, but the islands later fell to the British, from 1811 to 1816. As a result of these developments, there were quite a few years in the 1780s-1810s that no Dutch ships appeared at Nagasaki, leading to a serious decline in Japanese intelligence regarding events in Europe and elsewhere in the world. For example, the Japanese did not learn of the French Revolution until five years after it occurred, and were kept in the dark for a time as to the fate of the Dutch East Indies. 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. 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 and otherwise regained some general stability.

In 1844, H.H.F. Coops, acting as a special ambassador from the Netherlands, arrived in Nagasaki and delivered a letter from King Willem II, addressed to the "King of Japan." It discussed the Opium War, and advised the shogunate, in order to avoid a similar fate, to open up diplomatic and trade relations with other European powers. The following year, the VOC factor received a reply not from the shogun, but from the rôjû, stating that in accordance with "ancestral laws" or "ancient precedent," Japan maintained only trade relations (tsûhô) with the Netherlands and China, and diplomatic relations (tsûshin) with only Korea and Ryûkyû; as a result, the reply explained, not only was opening diplomatic relations with other nations out of the question, but further the Dutch should avoid any further attempts to engage in formal diplomatic communications with the shogunate themselves. This may have been the first time that an official shogunate document noted a distinction between tsûshin and tsûhô, and in the nature of relations with these four named polities.

Dutch Factors

• Cornelis van Nijenroode (1623-?)
• Francois Caron (1639-1641)
• Carl Peter Thunberg (1775-1777)
• Isaac Titsingh (1779-1784)
• Hendrik Casper Romberg (1784-1785)
• Gijsbert Hemmij (d. 1799)
• Willem Wardenaar (?-1803)
• Hendrick Doeff (1803-1817)
• Jan Cock Blumhoff (1809-1823)
• J.W. de Sturler (c. 1820s)
• G.F. Meijlan (1825-1831)
• Jan Hendrik Donker Curtius (c. 1850s)