Episode notes
Imagine a company with its own navy, the power to mint coins, wage war and sign treaties. That was the Dutch East India Company, or VOC. This deep dive explores how a 17th-century spice cartel helped invent modern corporate capitalism while leaving a legacy of brutal exploitation.
We look at the 1602 merger that created the first joint-stock company with permanent capital and accidentally spawned the Amsterdam stock exchange. Then we follow Jan Pieterszoon Coen's intra-Asian trade network, the violence in the Banda Islands, history's first shareholder revolt, and the corruption, profitless growth and debt-funded dividends that led to the company's end in 1799.
- Why inelastic demand and elastic supply made early spice voyages a financial trap
- How permanent capital forced investors to trade shares and created a secondary market
- The conquest of Jayakarta, the founding of Batavia and the massacre in the Banda Islands
- Shareholders complaining that the books were smeared with bacon in 1622
- How shifting tastes toward tea, sugar and textiles broke the VOC's armored-ship model