Dutch East Indies Company

The United East India Company ( nl, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC) was a chartered company established on the 20th March 1602 by the States General of the Netherlands amalgamating existing companies into the first joint-stock company in the world, granting it a 21-year monopoly to carry out trade activities in Asia. Shares in the company could be bought by any resident of the United Provinces and then subsequently bought and sold in open-air secondary markets (one of which became the Amsterdam Stock Exchange). It is sometimes considered to have been the first multinational corporation. It was a powerful company, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies. They are also known for their international slave trade.

Statistically, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asia trade. Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the English (later British) East India Company, the VOC's nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 17th century.

Having been set up in 1602 to profit from the Malukan spice trade, the VOC established a capital in the port city of Jayakarta in 1609 and changed the city name into Batavia (now Jakarta). Over the next two centuries the company acquired additional ports as trading bases and safeguarded their interests by taking over surrounding territory. It remained an important trading concern and paid an 18% annual dividend for almost 200 years.

Weighed down by smuggling, corruption and growing administrative costs in the late 18th century, the company went bankrupt and was formally dissolved in 1799. Its possessions and debt were taken over by the government of the Dutch Batavian Republic. The former territories owned by the VOC went on to become the Dutch East Indies and were expanded over the course of the 19th century to include the entirety of the Indonesian archipelago. In the 20th century, these islands would form the Republic of Indonesia.

Company name, logo, and flag

In Dutch, the name of the company was the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie (abbreviated as the VOC), literally the 'United Dutch Chartered East India Company' (the United East India Company). The company's monogram logo consisted of a large capital 'V' with an O on the left and a C on the right half and was possibly the first globally recognised corporate logo. Brook, Timothy: '' Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World''. (London: Profile Books, 2008) It appeared on various corporate items, such as cannons and coins. The first letter of the hometown of the chamber conducting the operation was placed on top. The monogram, versatility, flexibility, clarity, simplicity, symmetry, timelessness, and symbolism are considered notable characteristics of the VOC's professionally designed logo. Those elements ensured its success at a time when the concept of the corporate identity was virtually unknown. An Australian vintner has used the VOC logo since the late 20th century, having re-registered the company's name for the purpose. The flag of the company was red, white, and blue, with the company logo embroidered on it.

Around the world, and especially in English-speaking countries, the VOC is widely known as the 'Dutch East India Company'. The name 'Dutch East India Company' is used to make a distinction from the ritishEast India Company (EIC) and other East Indian companies (such as the Danish East India Company, French East India Company, Portuguese East India Company, and the Swedish East India Company). The company's alternative names that have been used include the 'Dutch East Indies Company', 'United East India Company', 'Jan Company', or 'Jan Compagnie'.

History

Origins

Before the Dutch Revolt, which started in 1566/68, the Dutch city of Antwerp had played an important role as a distribution center in northern Europe. After 1591, however, the Portuguese used an international syndicate of the German Fugger family and Welser family, as well as Spanish and Italian firms, which operated out of Hamburg as the northern staple port to distribute their goods, thereby cutting Dutch merchants out of the trade. At the same time, the Portuguese trade system was unable to increase supply to satisfy growing demand, in particular the demand for pepper. Demand for spices was relatively inelastic; therefore, each lag in the supply of pepper caused a sharp rise in pepper prices.

In 1580, the Portuguese crown was united in a personal union with the Spanish crown (called the Iberian Union), of which the Dutch Republic was at war. The Portuguese Empire thenceforward became an appropriate target for Dutch military incursions. These factors motivated Dutch merchants to enter the intercontinental spice trade themselves. Further, a number of Dutch merchants and explorers, such as Jan Huyghen van Linschoten and Cornelis de Houtman, went on to obtain first hand knowledge of the "secret" Portuguese trade routes and practices that were already in place, thereby providing further opportunity for the Dutch to enter the trade.

The stage was thus set for Dutch expeditions to the Indonesian islands, beginning with James Lancaster in 1591, Cornelis de Houtman in 1595 and again in 1598, Jacob Van Neck in 1598, Lancaster again in 1601, among others. During the four-ship exploratory expedition by Frederick de Houtman in 1595 to Banten, the main pepper port of West Java, the crew clashed with both Portuguese and indigenous Javanese. Houtman's expedition then sailed east along the north coast of Java, losing twelve crew members to a Javanese attack at Sidayu and killing a local ruler in Madura. Half the crew were lost before the expedition made it back to the Netherlands the following year, but with enough spices to make a considerable profit.

In 1598, an increasing number of fleets were sent out by competing merchant groups from around the Netherlands. Some fleets were lost, but most were successful, with some voyages producing high profits. In 1598, a fleet of eight ships under Jacob van Neck had been the first Dutch fleet to reach the 'Spice Islands' of Maluku (also known as the Moluccas), cutting out the Javanese middlemen. The ships returned to Europe in 1599 and 1600 and the expedition made a 400 percent profit.

In 1600, the Dutch joined forces with the Muslim Hituese on Ambon Island in an anti-Portuguese alliance, in return for which the Dutch were given the sole right to purchase spices from Hitu. Dutch control of Ambon was achieved when the Portuguese surrendered their fort in Ambon to the Dutch-Hituese alliance. In 1613, the Dutch expelled the Portuguese from their Solor fort, but a subsequent Portuguese attack led to a second change of hands; following this second reoccupation, the Dutch once again captured Solor in 1636.

East of Solor, on the island of Timor, Dutch advances were halted by an autonomous and powerful group of Portuguese Eurasians called the Topasses. They remained in control of the Sandalwood trade and their resistance lasted throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, causing Portuguese Timor to remain under the Portuguese sphere of control.

Formative years

At the time, it was customary for a company to be funded only for the duration of a single voyage and to be liquidated upon the return of the fleet. Investment in these expeditions was a very high-risk venture, not only because of the usual dangers of piracy, disease and shipwreck, but also because the interplay of inelastic demand and relatively elastic supply of spices could make prices tumble, thereby ruining prospects of profitability. To manage such risk, the forming of a cartel to control supply would seem logical. In 1600, the English were the first to adopt this approach by bundling their resources into a monopoly enterprise, the English East India Company, thereby threatening their Dutch competitors with ruin.De Vries and Van der Woude, p. 384–385

In 1602, the Dutch government followed suit, sponsoring the creation of a single "United East Indies Company" that was also granted monopoly over the Asian trade. For a time in the seventeenth century, it was able to monopolise the trade in nutmeg, mace, and cloves and to sell these spices across European kingdoms and Emperor Akbar the Great's Mughal Empire at 14-17 times the price it paid in Indonesia; while Dutch profits soared, the local economy of the Spice Islands was destroyed. With a capital of 6,440,200 guilders, the new company's charter empowered it to build forts, maintain armies, and conclude treaties with Asian rulers. It provided for a venture that would continue for 21 years, with a financial accounting only at the end of each decade.

In February 1603, the company seized the ''Santa Catarina'', a 1500-ton Portuguese merchant carrack, off the coast of Singapore. She was such a rich prize that her sale proceeds increased the capital of the VOC by more than 50%.

Also in 1603, the first permanent Dutch trading post in Indonesia was established in Banten, West Java, and in 1611, another was established at Jayakarta (later "Batavia" and then "Jakarta"). In 1610, the VOC established the post of governor-general to more firmly control their affairs in Asia. To advise and control the risk of despotic governors-general, a Council of the Indies (''Raad van Indië'') was created. The governor-general effectively became the main administrator of the VOC's activities in Asia, although the ''Heeren XVII'', a body of 17 shareholders representing different chambers, continued to officially have overall control.

VOC headquarters were located in Ambon during the tenures of the first three governors-general (1610–1619), but it was not a satisfactory location. Although it was at the centre of the spice production areas, it was far from the Asian trade routes and other VOC areas of activity ranging from Africa to India to Japan. A location in the west of the archipelago was thus sought. The Straits of Malacca were strategic but became dangerous following the Portuguese conquest, and the first permanent VOC settlement in Banten was controlled by a powerful local ruler and subject to stiff competition from Chinese and English traders.

In 1604, a second English East India Company voyage commanded by Sir Henry Middleton reached the islands of Ternate, Tidore, Ambon and Banda. In Banda, they encountered severe VOC hostility, sparking Anglo-Dutch competition for access to spices. From 1611 to 1617, the English established trading posts at Sukadana (southwest Kalimantan), Makassar, Jayakarta and Jepara in Java, and Aceh, Pariaman and Jambi in Sumatra, which threatened Dutch ambitions for a monopoly on East Indies trade.

In 1620, diplomatic agreements in Europe ushered in a period of co-operation between the Dutch and the English over the spice trade. This ended with a notorious but disputed incident known as the ' Amboyna massacre', where ten Englishmen were arrested, tried and beheaded for conspiracy against the Dutch government. Although this caused outrage in Europe and a diplomatic crisis, the English quietly withdrew from most of their Indonesian activities (except trading in Banten) and focused on other Asian interests.

Growth

In 1619, Jan Pieterszoon Coen was appointed governor-general of the VOC. He saw the possibility of the VOC becoming an Asian power, both political and economic. On 30 May 1619, Coen, backed by a force of nineteen ships, stormed Jayakarta, driving out the Banten forces; and from the ashes established Batavia as the VOC headquarters. In the 1620s almost the entire native population of the Banda Islands was driven away, starved to death, or killed in an attempt to replace them with Dutch plantations. These plantations were used to grow nutmeg for export. Coen hoped to settle large numbers of Dutch colonists in the East Indies, but implementation of this policy never materialised, mainly because very few Dutch were willing to emigrate to Asia.

Another of Coen's ventures was more successful. A major problem in the European trade with Asia at the time was that the Europeans could offer few goods that Asian consumers wanted, except silver and gold. European traders therefore had to pay for spices with the precious metals, which were in short supply in Europe, except for Spain and Portugal. The Dutch and English had to obtain it by creating a trade surplus with other European countries. Coen discovered the obvious solution for the problem: to start an intra-Asiatic trade system, whose profits could be used to finance the spice trade with Europe. In the long run this obviated the need for exports of precious metals from Europe, though at first it required the formation of a large trading-capital fund in the Indies. The VOC reinvested a large share of its profits to this end in the period up to 1630.De Vries and Van der Woude, p. 386

The VOC traded throughout Asia, benefiting mainly from Bengal. Ships coming into Batavia from the Netherlands carried supplies for VOC settlements in Asia. Silver and copper from Japan were used to trade with the world's wealthiest empires, Mughal India and Qing China, for silk, cotton, porcelain, and textiles. These products were either traded within Asia for the coveted spices or brought back to Europe. The VOC was also instrumental in introducing European ideas and technology to Asia. The company supported Christian missionaries and traded modern technology with China and Japan. A more peaceful VOC trade post on Dejima, an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki, was for more than two hundred years the only place where Europeans were permitted to trade with Japan. When the VOC tried to use military force to make Ming dynasty China open up to Dutch trade, the Chinese defeated the Dutch in a war over the Penghu islands from 1623 to 1624, forcing the VOC to abandon Penghu for Taiwan. The Chinese defeated the VOC again at the Battle of Liaoluo Bay in 1633.

The Vietnamese Nguyen Lords defeated the VOC in a 1643 battle during the Trịnh–Nguyễn War, blowing up a Dutch ship. The Cambodians defeated the VOC in the Cambodian–Dutch War from 1643 to 1644 on the Mekong River.

In 1640, the VOC obtained the port of Galle, Ceylon, from the Portuguese and broke the latter's monopoly of the cinnamon trade. In 1658, Gerard Pietersz Hulft laid siege to Colombo, which was captured with the help of King Rajasinghe II of Kandy. By 1659, the Portuguese had been expelled from the coastal regions, which were then occupied by the VOC, securing for it the monopoly over cinnamon.
To prevent the Portuguese or the English from ever recapturing Sri Lanka, the VOC went on to conquer the entire Malabar Coast from the Portuguese, almost entirely driving them from the west coast of India.

In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck established a resupply outpost at the Cape of Storms (the southwestern tip of Africa, now Cape Town, South Africa) to service company ships on their journey to and from East Asia. The cape was later renamed Cape of Good Hope in honour of the outpost's presence. Although non-company ships were welcome to use the station, they were charged exorbitantly. This post later became a full-fledged colony, the Cape Colony, when more Dutch and other Europeans started to settle there.

Through the seventeenth century VOC trading posts were also established in Persia, Bengal, Malacca, Siam, Formosa (now Taiwan), as well as the Malabar and Coromandel coasts in India. Direct access to mainland China came in 1729 when a factory was established in Canton. In 1662, however, Koxinga expelled the Dutch from Taiwan (''see'' History of Taiwan).

In 1663, the VOC signed the "Painan Treaty" with several local lords in the Painan area that were revolting against the Aceh Sultanate. The treaty allowed the VOC to build a trading post in the area and eventually to monopolise the trade there, especially the gold trade.

By 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, with over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a private army of 10,000 soldiers, and a dividend payment of 40% on the original investment.The share price had appreciated significantly, so in that respect the dividend was less impressive

Many of the VOC employees inter-mixed with the indigenous peoples and expanded the population of Indos in pre-colonial history.

Reorientation

Around 1670, two events caused the growth of VOC trade to stall. In the first place, the highly profitable trade with Japan started to decline. The loss of the outpost on Formosa to Koxinga in the 1662 Siege of Fort Zeelandia and related internal turmoil in China (where the Ming dynasty was being replaced with the China's Qing dynasty) brought an end to the silk trade after 1666. Though the VOC substituted Mughal Bengal's for Chinese silk, other forces affected the supply of Japanese silver and gold. The shogunate enacted a number of measures to limit the export of these precious metals, in the process limiting VOC opportunities for trade, and severely worsening the terms of trade. Therefore, Japan ceased to function as the linchpin of the intra-Asiatic trade of the VOC by 1685.

Even more importantly, the Third Anglo-Dutch War temporarily interrupted VOC trade with Europe. This caused a spike in the price of pepper, which enticed the English East India Company (EIC) to enter this market aggressively in the years after 1672. Previously, one of the tenets of the VOC pricing policy was to slightly over-supply the pepper market, so as to depress prices below the level where interlopers were encouraged to enter the market (instead of striving for short-term profit maximisation). The wisdom of such a policy was illustrated when a fierce price war with the EIC ensued, as that company flooded the market with new supplies from India. In this struggle for market share, the VOC (which had much larger financial resources) could wait out the EIC. Indeed, by 1683, the latter came close to bankruptcy; its share price plummeted from 600 to 250; and its president Josiah Child was temporarily forced from office.

However, the writing was on the wall. Other companies, like the French East India Company and the Danish East India Company also started to make inroads on the Dutch system. The VOC therefore closed the theretofore flourishing open pepper emporium of Bantam by a treaty of 1684 with the Sultan. Also, on the Coromandel Coast, it moved its chief stronghold from Pulicat to Negapatnam, so as to secure a monopoly on the pepper trade to the detriment of the French and the Danes. However, the importance of these traditional commodities in the Asian-European trade was diminishing rapidly at the time. The military outlays that the VOC needed to make to enhance its monopoly were not justified by the increased profits of this declining trade.

Nevertheless, this lesson was slow to sink in and at first the VOC made the strategic decision to improve its military position on the Malabar Coast (hoping thereby to curtail English influence in the area, and end the drain on its resources from the cost of the Malabar garrisons) by using force to compel the Zamorin of Calicut to submit to Dutch domination. In 1710, the Zamorin was made to sign a treaty with the VOC undertaking to trade exclusively with the VOC and expel other European traders. For a brief time, this appeared to improve the company's prospects. However, in 1715, with EIC encouragement, the Zamorin renounced the treaty. Though a Dutch army managed to suppress this insurrection temporarily, the Zamorin continued to trade with the English and the French, which led to an appreciable upsurge in English and French traffic. The VOC decided in 1721 that it was no longer worth the trouble to try to dominate the Malabar pepper and spice trade. A strategic decision was taken to scale down the Dutch military presence and in effect yield the area to EIC influence.

The 1741 Battle of Colachel by warriors of Travancore under Raja Marthanda Varma defeated the Dutch. The Dutch commander Captain Eustachius De Lannoy was captured. Marthanda Varma agreed to spare the Dutch captain's life on condition that he joined his army and trained his soldiers on modern lines. This defeat in the Travancore-Dutch War is considered the earliest example of an organised Asian power overcoming European military technology and tactics; and it signalled the decline of Dutch power in India.

The attempt to continue as before as a low volume-high profit business enterprise with its core business in the spice trade had therefore failed. The company had however already (reluctantly) followed the example of its European competitors in diversifying into other Asian commodities, like tea, coffee, cotton, textiles, and sugar. These commodities provided a lower profit margin and therefore required a larger sales volume to generate the same amount of revenue. This structural change in the commodity composition of the VOC's trade started in the early 1680s, after the temporary collapse of the EIC around 1683 offered an excellent opportunity to enter these markets. The actual cause for the change lies, however, in two structural features of this new era.

In the first place, there was a revolutionary change in the tastes affecting European demand for Asian textiles, coffee and tea, around the turn of the 18th century. Secondly, a new era of an abundant supply of capital at low interest rates suddenly opened around this time. The second factor enabled the company easily to finance its expansion in the new areas of commerce. Between the 1680s and 1720s, the VOC was therefore able to equip and man an appreciable expansion of its fleet, and acquire a large amount of precious metals to finance the purchase of large amounts of Asian commodities, for shipment to Europe. The overall effect was approximately to double the size of the company.

The tonnage of the returning ships rose by 125 percent in this period. However, the company's revenues from the sale of goods landed in Europe rose by only 78 percent. This reflects the basic change in the VOC's circumstances that had occurred: it now operated in new markets for goods with an elastic demand, in which it had to compete on an equal footing with other suppliers. This made for low profit margins. Unfortunately, the business information systems of the time made this difficult to discern for the managers of the company, which may partly explain the mistakes they made from hindsight. This lack of information might have been counteracted (as in earlier times in the VOC's history) by the business acumen of the directors. Unfortunately by this time these were almost exclusively recruited from the political ''regent'' class, which had long since lost its close relationship with merchant circles.

Low profit margins in themselves do not explain the deterioration of revenues. To a large extent the costs of the operation of the VOC had a "fixed" character (military establishments; maintenance of the fleet and such). Profit levels might therefore have been maintained if the increase in the scale of trading operations that in fact took place had resulted in economies of scale. However, though larger ships transported the growing volume of goods, labour productivity did not go up sufficiently to realise these. In general the company's overhead rose in step with the growth in trade volume; declining gross margins translated directly into a decline in profitability of the invested capital. The era of expansion was one of "profitless growth".De Vries and Van der Woude, p. 447

Specifically: " e long-term average annual profit in the VOC's 1630–70 'Golden Age' was 2.1 million guilders, of which just under half was distributed as dividends and the remainder reinvested. The long-term average annual profit in the 'Expansion Age' (1680–1730) was 2.0 million guilders, of which three-quarters was distributed as dividend and one-quarter reinvested. In the earlier period, profits averaged 18 percent of total revenues; in the latter period, 10 percent. The annual return of invested capital in the earlier period stood at approximately 6 percent; in the latter period, 3.4 percent."

Nevertheless, in the eyes of investors the VOC did not do too badly. The share price hovered consistently around the 400 mark from the mid-1680s (excepting a hiccup around the Glorious Revolution in 1688), and they reached an all-time high of around 642 in the 1720s. VOC shares then yielded a return of 3.5 percent, only slightly less than the yield on Dutch government bonds.

Decline and fall

After 1730, the fortunes of the VOC started to decline. Five major problems, not all of equal weight, explain its decline over the next fifty years to 1780:

*There was a steady erosion of intra-Asiatic trade because of changes in the Asiatic political and economic environment that the VOC could do little about. These factors gradually squeezed the company out of Persia, Suratte, the Malabar Coast, and Bengal. The company had to confine its operations to the belt it physically controlled, from Ceylon through the Indonesian archipelago. The volume of this intra-Asiatic trade, and its profitability, therefore had to shrink.
*The way the company was organised in Asia (centralised on its hub in Batavia), that initially had offered advantages in gathering market information, began to cause disadvantages in the 18th century because of the inefficiency of first shipping everything to this central point. This disadvantage was most keenly felt in the tea trade, where competitors like the EIC and the Ostend Company shipped directly from China to Europe.
*The "venality" of the VOC's personnel (in the sense of corruption and non-performance of duties), though a problem for all East India Companies at the time, seems to have plagued the VOC on a larger scale than its competitors. To be sure, the company was not a "good employer". Salaries were low, and "private-account trading" was officially not allowed. Not surprisingly, it proliferated in the 18th century to the detriment of the company's performance. From about the 1790s onward, the phrase ''perished under corruption'' (''vergaan onder corruptie'', also abbreviated VOC in Dutch) came to summarise the company's future.
*A problem that the VOC shared with other companies was the high mortality and morbidity rates among its employees. This decimated the company's ranks and enervated many of the survivors.
*A self-inflicted wound was the VOC's dividend policy. The dividends distributed by the company had exceeded the surplus it garnered in Europe in every decade from 1690 to 1760 except 1710–1720. However, in the period up to 1730 the directors shipped resources to Asia to build up the trading capital there. Consolidated bookkeeping therefore probably would have shown that total profits exceeded dividends. In addition, between 1700 and 1740 the company retired 5.4 million guilders of long-term debt. The company therefore was still on a secure financial footing in these years. This changed after 1730. While profits plummeted the ''bewindhebbers'' only slightly decreased dividends from the earlier level. Distributed dividends were therefore in excess of earnings in every decade but one (1760–1770). To accomplish this, the Asian capital stock had to be drawn down by 4 million guilders between 1730 and 1780, and the liquid capital available in Europe was reduced by 20 million guilders in the same period. The directors were therefore constrained to replenish the company's liquidity by resorting to short-term financing from anticipatory loans, backed by expected revenues from home-bound fleets.

Despite these problems, the VOC in 1780 remained an enormous operation. Its capital in the Republic, consisting of ships and goods in inventory, totalled 28 million guilders; its capital in Asia, consisting of the liquid trading fund and goods en route to Europe, totalled 46 million guilders. Total capital, net of outstanding debt, stood at 62 million guilders. The prospects of the company at this time therefore were not hopeless, had one of the plans for reform been undertaken successfully. However, the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War intervened. British naval attacks in Europe and Asia reduced the VOC fleet by half; removed valuable cargo from its control; and eroded its remaining power in Asia. The direct losses of the VOC during the war can be calculated at 43 million guilders. Loans to keep the company operating reduced its net assets to zero.

From 1720 on, the market for sugar from Indonesia declined as the competition from cheap sugar from Brazil increased. European markets became saturated. Dozens of Chinese sugar traders went bankrupt, which led to massive unemployment, which in turn led to gangs of unemployed coolies. The Dutch government in Batavia did not adequately respond to these problems. In 1740, rumours of deportation of the gangs from the Batavia area led to widespread rioting. The Dutch military searched houses of Chinese in Batavia for weapons. When a house accidentally burnt down, military and impoverished citizens started slaughtering and pillaging the Chinese community. This massacre of the Chinese was deemed sufficiently serious for the board of the VOC to start an official investigation into the Government of the Dutch East Indies for the first time in its history.

After the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the VOC was a financial wreck. After vain attempts at reorganisation by the provincial States of Holland and Zeeland, it was nationalised by the new Batavian Republic on 1 March 1796.TANAP, The end of the VOC The VOC charter was renewed several times, but was allowed to expire on 31 December 1799. Most of the possessions of the former VOC were subsequently occupied by Great Britain during the Napoleonic wars, but after the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands was created by the Congress of Vienna, some of these were restored to this successor state of the Dutch Republic by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814.

Organisational structure

While the VOC mainly operated in what later became the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), the company also had important operations elsewhere. It employed people from different continents and origins in the same functions and working environments. Although it was a Dutch company its employees included not only people from the Netherlands, but also many from Germany and from other countries as well. Besides the diverse north-west European workforce recruited by the VOC in the Dutch Republic, the VOC made extensive use of local Asian labour markets. As a result, the personnel of the various VOC offices in Asia consisted of European and Asian employees. Asian or Eurasian workers might be employed as sailors, soldiers, writers, carpenters, smiths, or as simple unskilled workers. At the height of its existence the VOC had 25,000 employees who worked in Asia and 11,000 who were en route. Also, while most of its shareholders were Dutch, about a quarter of the initial shareholders were Zuid-Nederlanders (people from an area that includes modern Belgium and Luxembourg) and there were also a few dozen Germans.

The VOC had two types of shareholders: the ''participanten'', who could be seen as non-managing members, and the 76 ''bewindhebbers'' (later reduced to 60) who acted as managing directors. This was the usual set-up for Dutch joint-stock companies at the time. The innovation in the case of the VOC was that the liability of not just the ''participanten'' but also of the ''bewindhebbers'' was limited to the paid-in capital (usually, ''bewindhebbers'' had unlimited liability). The VOC therefore was a limited liability company. Also, the capital would be ''permanent'' during the lifetime of the company. As a consequence, investors that wished to liquidate their interest in the interim could only do this by selling their share to others on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
''Confusion of confusions'', a 1688 dialogue by the Sephardi Jew Joseph de la Vega analysed the workings of this one-stock exchange.

The VOC consisted of six Chambers (''Kamers'') in port cities: Amsterdam, Delft, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen, Middelburg and Hoorn. Delegates of these chambers convened as the ''Heeren XVII'' (the Lords Seventeen). They were selected from the ''bewindhebber''-class of shareholders.

Of the ''Heeren XVII'', eight delegates were from the Chamber of Amsterdam (one short of a majority on its own), four from the Chamber of Zeeland, and one from each of the smaller Chambers, while the seventeenth seat was alternatively from the Chamber of Middelburg-Zeeland or rotated among the five small Chambers. Amsterdam had thereby the decisive voice. The Zeelanders in particular had misgivings about this arrangement at the beginning. The fear was not unfounded, because in practice it meant Amsterdam stipulated what happened.

The six chambers raised the start-up capital of the Dutch East India Company:

The raising of capital in Rotterdam did not go so smoothly. A considerable part originated from inhabitants of Dordrecht. Although it did not raise as much capital as Amsterdam or Middelburg-Zeeland, Enkhuizen had the largest input in the share capital of the VOC. Under the first 358 shareholders, there were many small entrepreneurs, who dared to take the risk. The minimum investment in the VOC was 3,000 guilders, which priced the company's stock within the means of many merchants.

Among the early shareholders of the VOC, immigrants played an important role. Under the 1,143 tenderers were 39 Germans and no fewer than 301 from the Southern Netherlands (roughly present Belgium and Luxembourg, then under Habsburg rule), of whom Isaac le Maire was the largest subscriber with ƒ85,000. VOC's total capitalisation was ten times that of its British rival.

The ''Heeren XVII'' (Lords Seventeen) met alternately six years in Amsterdam and two years in Middelburg-Zeeland. They defined the VOC's general policy and divided the tasks among the Chambers. The Chambers carried out all the necessary work, built their own ships and warehouses and traded the merchandise. The ''Heeren XVII'' sent the ships' masters off with extensive instructions on the route to be navigated, prevailing winds, currents, shoals and landmarks. The VOC also produced its own charts.

In the context of the Dutch-Portuguese War the company established its headquarters in Batavia, Java (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Other colonial outposts were also established in the East Indies, such as on the Maluku Islands, which include the Banda Islands, where the VOC forcibly maintained a monopoly over nutmeg and mace. Methods used to maintain the monopoly involved extortion and the violent suppression of the native population, including mass murder. In addition, VOC representatives sometimes used the tactic of burning spice trees to force indigenous populations to grow other crops, thus artificially cutting the supply of spices like nutmeg and cloves.

Shareholder activism and governance issues

The seventeenth-century Dutch businessmen, especially the VOC investors, were possibly history's first recorded investors to seriously consider the corporate governance's problems. Isaac Le Maire, who is known as history's first recorded short seller, was also a sizeable shareholder of the VOC. In 1609, he complained of the VOC's shoddy corporate governance. On 24 January 1609, Le Maire filed a petition against the VOC, marking the first recorded expression of shareholder activism. In what is the first recorded corporate governance dispute, Le Maire formally charged that the VOC's board of directors (the Heeren XVII) sought to "retain another's money for longer or use it ways other than the latter wishes" and petitioned for the liquidation of the VOC in accordance with standard business practice. Initially the largest single shareholder in the VOC and a ''bewindhebber'' sitting on the board of governors, Le Maire apparently attempted to divert the firm's profits to himself by undertaking 14 expeditions under his own accounts instead of those of the company. Since his large shareholdings were not accompanied by greater voting power, Le Maire was soon ousted by other governors in 1605 on charges of embezzlement, and was forced to sign an agreement not to compete with the VOC. Having retained stock in the company following this incident, in 1609 Le Maire would become the author of what is celebrated as "first recorded expression of shareholder advocacy at a publicly traded company".

In 1622, the history's first recorded shareholder revolt also happened among the VOC investors who complained that the company account books had been "smeared with bacon" so that they might be "eaten by dogs." The investors demanded a "reeckeninge," a proper financial audit. The 1622 campaign by the shareholders of the VOC is a testimony of genesis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in which shareholders staged protests by distributing pamphlets and complaining about management self enrichment and secrecy.

Main trading posts, settlements, and colonies

Europe

Netherlands

*Amsterdam (global headquarters)
*Delft
*Enkhuizen
*Hoorn
* Middelburg
*Rotterdam

Africa

Mauritius

*Dutch Mauritius (1638–1658; 1664–1710)

South Africa

*Dutch Cape Colony (1652–1806)

Asia

Indonesia

*Batavia, Dutch East Indies

Indian subcontinent

*Dutch Coromandel (1608–1825)
* Dutch Suratte (1616–1825)
*Dutch Bengal (1627–1825)
* Dutch Ceylon (1640–1796)
*Dutch Malabar (1661–1795)

Japan

*Hirado, Nagasaki (1609–1641)
*Dejima, Nagasaki (1641–1853)

Taiwan

* Anping ( Fort Zeelandia)
*Tainan (Fort Provincia)
* Wang-an, Penghu, Pescadores Islands (Fort Vlissingen; 1620–1624)
*Keelung ( Fort Noord-Holland, Fort Victoria)
*Tamsui ( Fort Antonio)

Malaysia

*Dutch Malacca (1641–1795; 1818–1825)

Thailand

* Ayutthaya (1608–1767)

Vietnam

* Thǎng Long/Tonkin (1636–1699)
*Hội An (1636–1741)

Conflicts and wars involving the VOC

The history of VOC commercial conflict, for example with the British East India Company (EIC), was at times closely connected to Dutch military conflicts. The commercial interests of the VOC (and more generally the Netherlands) were reflected in military objectives and the settlements agreed by treaty. In the Treaty of Breda (1667) ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch were finally able to secure a VOC monopoly for nutmeg trade, ceding the island of Manhattan to the British while gaining the last non-VOC controlled source of nutmeg, the island of Rhun in the Banda islands. The Dutch later re-captured Manhattan, but returned it along with the colony of New Netherland in the Treaty of Westminster (1674) ending the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The British also gave up claims on Suriname as part of the Treaty of Westminster. There was also an effort to compensate the war-related losses of the Dutch West India Company in the mid-17th century by the profits of the VOC, though this was ultimately blocked.

''VOC mentality''

The VOC's history (and especially its dark side) has always been a potential source of controversy. In 2006 when the Dutch Prime Minister Jan Pieter Balkenende referred to the pioneering entrepreneurial spirit and work ethics of the Dutch people and Dutch Republic in their Golden Age, he coined the term "VOC mentality" ('' VOC-mentaliteit'' in Dutch). For Balkenende, the VOC represented Dutch business acumen, entrepreneurship, adventurous spirit, and decisiveness. However, it unleashed a wave of criticism, since such romantic views about the Dutch Golden Age ignores the inherent historical associations with colonialism, exploitation and violence. Balkenende later stressed that "it had not been his intention to refer to that at all". But in spite of criticisms, the "VOC-mentality", as a characteristic of the selective historical perspective on the Dutch Golden Age, has been considered a key feature of Dutch cultural policy for many years.

International relations

The VOC existed for almost 200 years from its founding in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly over Dutch operations in Asia until its demise in 1796. During those two centuries (between 1602 and 1796), the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the English (later British) East India Company, the VOC's nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 17th century. By 1669, the VOC was the richest company the world had ever seen, with over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a private army of 10,000 soldiers, and a dividend payment of 40% on the original investment.

In terms of military-political history, the VOC, along with the Dutch West India Company (WIC/GWC), was seen as the international arm of the Dutch Republic and the symbolic power of the Dutch Empire. The VOC was historically a military-political-economic complex rather than a pure trading company (or shipping company). The government-backed but privately financed company was effectively a state in its own right, or a state within another state. For almost 200 years of its existence, the VOC was a key non-state geopolitical player in Eurasia. The company was much an unofficial representative of the States General of the United Provinces in foreign relations of the Dutch Republic with many states, especially Dutch-Asian relations. The company's territories were even larger than some countries.

File:VOC Trade Cloth with Mughal design.png, VOC Trade Cloth, 1675–1725, with Mughal tent hanging / summer carpet motif. Made in India for the Indonesian market. Fine textiles from India were a popular luxury import into Indonesia, and some still survive as treasured heirlooms.
File:The arrival of King Charles II of England in Rotterdam, may 24 1660 (Lieve Pietersz. Verschuier, 1665).jpg, ''The arrival of King Charles II of England in Rotterdam, 24 May 1660'' by Lieve Verschuier. King Charles II of England sailed from Breda to Delft in May 1660 in a yacht owned by the VOC. '' HMY Mary'' and '' HMY Bezan'' (both were built by the VOC) were given to Charles II, on the restoration of the monarchy, as part of the Dutch Gift.
File:Kopi luwak 090910-0075 lamb.JPG, Kopi luwak, coffee seeds from faeces of palm civet, Lampung, Indonesia. Coffee cultivation in Indonesia began in the late 1600s and early 1700s, in the VOC period. Indonesia was the fourth-largest producer of coffee in the world in 2014.

Arts and culture

As information and knowledge exchange network

During the Dutch Golden Age, the Dutch – using their expertise in doing business, cartography, shipbuilding, seafaring and navigation – traveled to the far corners of the world, leaving their language embedded in the names of many places. Dutch exploratory voyages revealed largely unknown landmasses to the civilised world and put their names on the world map. During the Golden Age of Dutch exploration (c. 1590s–1720s) and the Golden Age of Netherlandish cartography (c. 1570s–1670s), Dutch-speaking navigators, explorers, and cartographers were the undisputed firsts to chart/map many hitherto largely unknown regions of the earth and the sky. The Dutch came to dominate the map-making and map printing industry by virtue of their own travels, trade ventures, and widespread commercial networks. As Dutch ships reached into the unknown corners of the globe, Dutch cartographers incorporated new geographical discoveries into their work. Instead of using the information themselves secretly, they published it, so the maps multiplied freely. For almost 200 years, the Dutch dominated world trade. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch transnational companies, Dutch transnational companies, e.g. the VOC and West India Company (WIC/GWC), provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. The VOC's bookkeeper Hendrick Hamel was the first known European/Westerner to experience first-hand and write about Joseon-era Korea. In his report (published in the Dutch Republic) in 1666 Hendrick Hamel described his adventures on the Korean Peninsula and gave the first accurate description of daily life of Koreans to the western world. The VOC trade post on Dejima, an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki, was for more than two hundred years the only place where Europeans were permitted to trade with Japan. Rangaku (literally 'Dutch Learning', and by extension 'Western Learning') is a body of knowledge developed by Japan through its contacts with the Dutch enclave of Dejima, which allowed Japan to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine in the period when the country was closed to foreigners, 1641–1853, because of the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of national isolation (sakoku).

File:JoanNieuhof.jpg, Johan Nieuhof's '' An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces'' (1665).
File:HortusMalabaricus.jpg, The cover of the '' Hortus Malabaricus'' by Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein.
File:Herbarium Amboinense page titre.jpg, Title page of Rumphius's ''Herbarium Amboinense'' (1741–1750)
File:Hortus Cliffortianus 1737.jpg, Title page of '' Hortus Cliffortianus'' (1737). The work was a collaboration between Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) and Georg Dionysius Ehret, financed by George Clifford III, one of the directors of the VOC.
File:Musa Cliffortiana 1736.jpg, Title page of '' Musa Cliffortiana'' (1736), Carl Linnaeus's first botanical monograph.
File:Carl Peter Thunberg x Jacob Fredrik Ek.jpg, Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg was a VOC physician and an apostle of Linnaeus.
File:Swan River,Perth,Western Australia.jpg, Black swans on the shore of the Swan River (Western Australia), with the Perth skyline in the background. The thousand-year-old conclusion "all swans are white" was disproved by the VOC navigator Willem de Vlamingh's 1697 discovery.

Influences on Dutch Golden Age art

From 1609 the VOC had a trading post in Japan (Hirado, Nagasaki), which used local paper for its own administration. However, the paper was also traded to the VOC's other trading posts and even the Dutch Republic. Many impressions of the Dutch Golden Age artist Rembrandt's prints were done on Japanese paper. From about 1647 Rembrandt sought increasingly to introduce variation into his prints by using different sorts of paper, and printed most of his plates regularly on Japanese paper. He also used the paper for his drawings. The Japanese paper types – which was actually imported from Japan by the VOC – attracted Rembrandt with its warm, yellowish colour. They are often smooth and shiny, whilst Western paper has a more rough and matt surface. Moreover, the VOC's imported Chinese export porcelain and Japanese export porcelain wares are often depicted in many Dutch Golden Age genre paintings, especially in Jan Vermeer's paintings.

File:Hansken.rembrandt.1637.jpg, Hansken, a young female Asian elephant from Dutch Ceylon, was brought to Amsterdam in 1637, aboard a VOC ship. Rembrandt's Hansken drawing is believed to be an early portrait of one of the first Asian elephants described by science.
File:Rembrandtselfportraitweb.jpg, Rembrandt's self-portrait as an oriental potentate with a kris/keris, a Javanese blade weapon from the VOC era (etching, c. 1634). Also, he was one of the first known western printmakers to extensively use (the VOC-imported) Japanese paper. It's important to note that some major figures of Dutch Golden Age art like Rembrandt and Vermeer never went abroad during their lifetime. More than just a for-profit corporation of the early modern world, the VOC was instrumental in 'bringing' the East (Orient) to the West (Occident), and vice versa.
File:Willem Kalf - Still-Life with a Late Ming Ginger Jar - WGA12080.jpg, '' Still Life with a Chinese Porcelain Jar'', by Dutch Golden Age painter Willem Kalf (c. 1660s). 17th-century Chinese export porcelain wares (imported by the VOC) are often depicted in many Dutch Golden Age genre and still-life paintings.
File:Delftware display.JPG, Shop window display of Delftware in the market place, Delft. East Asian–inspired Delftware, a lasting cultural and economic legacy of the VOC era.

Contributions in the Age of Exploration

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was also a major force behind the Golden Age of Dutch exploration and discovery (c. 1590s–1720s). The VOC-funded exploratory voyages such as those led by Willem Janszoon ('' Duyfken''), Henry Hudson (''Halve Maen'') and Abel Tasman revealed largely unknown landmasses to the civilised world.

File:Nova et Accuratissima Terrarum Orbis Tabula (J.Blaeu, 1664).jpg, Blaeu's ''Atlas Maior'' (1662–1672), a monumental multi-volume world atlas from the Golden Age of Dutch/Netherlandish cartography (c. 1570s–1670s) and a widely recognized masterpiece in the history of mapmaking. Willem Blaeu and his son Joan Blaeu were both official cartographers to the VOC.
File:Tasmanroutes.PNG, Abel Tasman's routes of the first and second voyage

''Halve Maen''s exploratory voyage and role in the formation of New Netherland

In 1609, English sea captain and explorer Henry Hudson was hired by the VOC émigrés running the VOC located in Amsterdam to find a north-east passage to Asia, sailing around Scandinavia and Russia. He was turned back by the ice of the Arctic in his second attempt, so he sailed west to seek a north-west passage rather than return home. He ended up exploring the waters off the east coast of North America aboard the '' vlieboot'' ''Halve Maen''. His first landfall was at Newfoundland and the second at Cape Cod.

Hudson believed that the passage to the Pacific Ocean was between the St. Lawrence River and Chesapeake Bay, so he sailed south to the Bay then turned northward, traveling close along the shore. He first discovered Delaware Bay and began to sail upriver looking for the passage. This effort was foiled by sandy shoals, and the ''Halve Maen'' continued north. After passing Sandy Hook, Hudson and his crew entered the narrows into the Upper New York Bay. (Unbeknownst to Hudson, the narrows had already been discovered in 1524 by explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano; today, the bridge spanning them is named after him.) Hudson believed that he had found the continental water route, so he sailed up the major river which later bore his name: the Hudson. He found the water too shallow to proceed several days later, at the site of present-day Troy, New York.''Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, uit veelerhande Schriften ende Aen-teekeningen van verscheyden Natien (Leiden, Bonaventure & Abraham Elseviers, 1625)''
p. 84.

Upon returning to the Netherlands, Hudson reported that he had found a fertile land and an amicable people willing to engage his crew in small-scale bartering of furs, trinkets, clothes, and small manufactured goods. His report was first published in 1611 by Emanuel Van Meteren, an Antwerp émigré and the Dutch Consul at London. This stimulated interest in exploiting this new trade resource, and it was the catalyst for Dutch merchant-traders to fund more expeditions.

In 1611–12, the Admiralty of Amsterdam sent two covert expeditions to find a passage to China with the yachts ''Craen'' and ''Vos'', captained by Jan Cornelisz Mey and Symon Willemsz Cat, respectively. In four voyages made between 1611 and 1614, the area between present-day Maryland and Massachusetts was explored, surveyed, and charted by Adriaen Block, Hendrick Christiaensen, and Cornelius Jacobsen Mey. The results of these explorations, surveys, and charts made from 1609 through 1614 were consolidated in Block's map, which used the name ''New Netherland'' for the first time.

VOC-sponsored Dutch discovery, exploration, and mapping of mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and various islands

In terms of world history of geography and exploration, the VOC can be credited with putting most of Australia's coast (then Hollandia Nova and other names) on the world map, between 1606 and 1756.
While Australia's territory (originally known as New Holland) never became an actual Dutch settlement or colony, Dutch navigators were the first to undisputedly explore and map Australian coastline. In the 17th century, the VOC's navigators and explorers charted almost three-quarters of Australia's coastline, except its east coast. The Dutch ship, '' Duyfken'', led by Willem Janszoon, made the first documented European landing in Australia in 1606. Although a theory of Portuguese discovery in the 1520s exists, it lacks definitive evidence. Precedence of discovery has also been claimed for China, France,Credit for the discovery of Australia was given to Frenchman Binot Paulmier de Gonneville (1504) in Spain,In the early 20th century, Lawrence Hargrave argued from archaeological evidence that Spain had established a colony in Botany Bay in the 16th century. India,.

Hendrik Brouwer's discovery of the Brouwer Route, that sailing east from the Cape of Good Hope until land was sighted and then sailing north along the west coast of Australia was a much quicker route than around the coast of the Indian Ocean, made Dutch landfalls on the west coast inevitable. The first such landfall was in 1616, when Dirk Hartog landed at Cape Inscription on what is now known as Dirk Hartog Island, off the coast of Western Australia, and left behind an inscription on a pewter plate. In 1697 the Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh landed on the island and discovered Hartog's plate. He replaced it with one of his own, which included a copy of Hartog's inscription, and took the original plate home to Amsterdam, where it is still kept in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

In 1627, the VOC's explorers François Thijssen and Pieter Nuyts discovered the south coast of Australia and charted about of it between Cape Leeuwin and the Nuyts Archipelago.Garden 1977, p.8. François Thijssen, captain of the ship '' 't Gulden Zeepaert'' (The Golden Seahorse), sailed to the east as far as Ceduna in South Australia. The first known ship to have visited the area is the ''Leeuwin'' ("Lioness"), a Dutch vessel that charted some of the nearby coastline in 1622. The log of the ''Leeuwin'' has been lost, so very little is known of the voyage. However, the land discovered by the ''Leeuwin'' was recorded on a 1627 map by Hessel Gerritsz: Caert van't Landt van d'Eendracht ("Chart of the Land of Eendracht"), which appears to show the coast between present-day Hamelin Bay and Point D'Entrecasteaux. Part of Thijssen's map shows the islands St Francis and St Peter, now known collectively with their respective groups as the Nuyts Archipelago. Thijssen's observations were included as soon as 1628 by the VOC cartographer Hessel Gerritsz in a chart of the Indies and New Holland. This voyage defined most of the southern coast of Australia and discouraged the notion that " New Holland" as it was then known, was linked to Antarctica.

In 1642, Abel Tasman sailed from Mauritius and on 24 November, sighted Tasmania. He named Tasmania Anthoonij van Diemenslandt (Anglicised as Van Diemen's Land), after Anthony van Diemen, the VOC's governor-general, who had commissioned his voyage. It was officially renamed Tasmania in honour of its first European discoverer on 1 January 1856.

In 1642, during the same expedition, Tasman's crew discovered and charted New Zealand's coastline. They were the first Europeans known to reach New Zealand. Tasman anchored at the northern end of the South Island in Golden Bay / Mohua (he named it Murderers' Bay) in December 1642 and sailed northward to Tonga following a clash with local Māori. Tasman sketched sections of the two main islands' west coasts. Tasman called them ''Staten Landt'', after the ''States General of the Netherlands'', and that name appeared on his first maps of the country. In 1645 Dutch cartographers changed the name to '' Nova Zeelandia'' in Latin, from ''Nieuw Zeeland'', after the Dutch province of ''Zeeland''. It was subsequently Anglicised as ''New Zealand'' by James Cook. Various claims have been made that New Zealand was reached by other non-Polynesian voyagers before Tasman, but these are not widely accepted.

Criticism

The company has been criticised for its quasi-absolute commercial monopoly, colonialism, exploitation (including use of slave labour), slave trade, use of violence, environmental destruction (including deforestation), and for its overly bureaucratic organisational structure. Shorto, Russell (2013). ''Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City''.

Batavia, corresponding to present day Jakarta, was the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, and had a strict social hierarchy in the colony. According to Marsely L. Kahoe in ''The Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art'', "it is misleading to understand Batavia, as some scholars have, as representing a pragmatic and egalitarian order that was later corrupted by the colonial situation. In fact, the social stratification and segregation of Batavia derived in certain ways directly from its Dutch plan."

There was an extraordinarily high mortality rate among employees of the VOC. Between 1602 and 1795, about one million seamen and craftsmen departed from Holland, but only 340,000 returned. J.L. van Zanden writes "the VOC 'consumed' approximately 4,000 people per year."

Colonialism, monopoly and violence

The VOC charter allowed it to act as a quasi-sovereign state, and engaged in brutal conquests. One example is the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands, between 1609 and 1621, after the islands resisted the nutmeg monopoly. The Dutch launched punitive expeditions that resulted in the near destruction of Bandanese society. They invaded the main Bandanese island of Lontor in 1621. 2,800 Bandanese were killed, mostly from famine, and 1,700 were enslaved during the attack. The total population of the islands is estimated at 15,000 people before the conquest. Although the exact number remains uncertain, it is estimated that around 14,000 people were killed, enslaved or fled elsewhere, with only 1,000 Bandanese surviving in the islands, and were spread throughout the nutmeg groves as forced labourers. The treatment of slaves was severe—the native Bandanese population dropped to 1,000 by 1681. 200 slaves were imported annually to sustain the slave population at a total of 4,000.

Dutch slave trade and slavery under the VOC colonial rule

By the time the settlement was established at the Cape in 1652, the VOC already had a long experience of practicing slavery in the East Indies. Jan van Riebeeck concluded within two months of the establishment of the Cape settlement that slave labor would be needed for the hardest and dirtiest work. Initially, the VOC considered enslaving men from the indigenous Khoikhoi population, but the idea was rejected on the grounds that such a policy would be both costly and dangerous. Most Khoikhoi had chosen not to labor for the Dutch because of low wages and harsh conditions. In the beginning, the settlers traded with the Khoikhoi but the harsh working conditions and low wages imposed by the Dutch led to a series of wars. The European population remained under 200 during the settlement's first five years, and war against neighbors numbering more than 20,000 would have been foolhardy. Moreover, the Dutch feared that Khoikhoi people, if enslaved, could always escape into the local community, whereas foreigners would find it much more difficult to elude their "masters."

Between 1652 and 1657, a number of unsuccessful attempts were made to obtain men from the Dutch East Indies and from Mauritius. In 1658, however, the VOC landed two shiploads of slaves at the Cape, one containing more than 200 people brought from Dahomey (later Benin), the second with almost 200 people, most of them children, captured from a Portuguese slaver off the coast of Angola. Except for a few individuals, these were to be the only slaves ever brought to the Cape from West Africa. From 1658 to the end of the company's rule, many more slaves were brought regularly to the Cape in various ways, chiefly by Company-sponsored slaving voyages and slaves brought to the Cape by its return fleets. From these sources and by natural growth, the slave population increased from zero in 1652 to about 1,000 by 1700. During the 18th century, the slave population increased dramatically to 16,839 by 1795. After the slave trade was initiated, all of the slaves imported into the Cape until the British stopped the trade in 1807 were from East Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, and South and Southeast Asia. Large numbers were brought from Ceylon and the Indonesian archipelago. Prisoners from other countries in the VOC's empire were also enslaved. The slave population, which exceeded that of the European settlers until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was overwhelmingly male and was thus dependent on constant imports of new slaves to maintain and to augment its size.

By the 1660s the Cape settlement was importing slaves from Ceylon, Malaya (Malaysia), and Madagascar to work on the farms. Conflict between Dutch farmers and Khoikhoi broke out once it became clear to the latter that the Dutch were there to stay and that they intended to encroach on the lands of the pastoralists. In 1659 Doman, a Khoikhoi who had worked as a translator for the Dutch and had even traveled to Java, led an armed attempt to expel the Dutch from the Cape peninsula. The attempt was a failure, although warfare dragged on until an inconclusive peace was established a year later. During the following decade, pressure on the Khoikhoi grew as more of the Dutch became free burghers, expanded their landholdings, and sought pastureland for their growing herds. War broke out again in 1673 and continued until 1677, when Khoikhoi resistance was destroyed by a combination of superior European weapons and Dutch manipulation of divisions among the local people. Thereafter, Khoikhoi society in the western Cape disintegrated. Some people found jobs as shepherds on European farms; others rejected foreign rule and moved away from the Cape. The final blow for most came in 1713 when a Dutch ship brought smallpox to the Cape. Hitherto unknown locally, the disease ravaged the remaining Khoikhoi, killing 90 percent of the population. Throughout the eighteenth century, the settlement continued to expand through internal growth of the European population and the continued importation of slaves. The approximately 3,000 Europeans and slaves at the Cape in 1700 had increased by the end of the century to nearly 20,000 Europeans, and approximately 25,000 slaves.

Cultural depictions

*'' Batavia'': a shipwreck on the Houtman Abrolhos in 1629, made famous by the subsequent mutiny and massacre that took place among the survivors
*''Flying Dutchman'': a legendary ghost ship in several maritime myths, likely to have originated from the 17th-century golden age of the VOC.
*''Hansken'': a female Asian elephant from Dutch Ceylon. The young elephant ''Hansken'' was brought to Amsterdam in 1637, aboard a VOC ship. Dutch Golden Age artist Rembrandt made some historical drawings of ''Hansken''.
*''Batavia, Dutch East Indies'': 1650s/1660s paintings of scenes from everyday life by Dutch Golden Age painter Andries Beeckman, one of the few painters who travelled to the Dutch East Indies in the 17th century.
*'' Cosmos: A Personal Voyage'': in the 6th episode ''Travellers' Tales'' of the popular documentary TV series ''Cosmos'' (1980), American astronomer Carl Sagan, who also served as host, took a look at the voyage to Jupiter and Saturn, and compared these events with the adventuring spirit of the Dutch Golden Age explorers (including the VOC's navigators).
*'' The Sino-Dutch War 1661'': 2000 Chinese historical drama film. The film is loosely based on the life of Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) and focuses on his battle with the VOC for control of Dutch Formosa at the Siege of Fort Zeelandia.
*''Ocean's Twelve'': a 2004 American comedy heist film inspired by the historical story from the VOC's IPO and the first shares of stock ever traded publicly in history. The VOC's stock certificate is the focused heist by the burglars in the movie.
*'' The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet'', 2010 historical novel by British author David Mitchell.
*''My Father's Islands: Abel Tasman's Heroic Voyages'': a 2012 juvenile fiction by Christobel Mattingley, written from the perspective of Tasman's young daughter, Claesgen. The fictional story was inspired by a 1637 painting of the Tasman family by the Dutch Golden Age painter Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp, one of the treasures of the National Library of Australia.
*'' The Tsar-Carpenter'': a cultural depiction of Tsar Peter the Great ( Peter I of Russia) in his undercover visit to the Dutch Republic as part of the Grand Embassy mission (1697–1698). When Peter the Great wanted to learn more about the Dutch Republic's sea power, he came to study seamanship, shipbuilding industry and carpentry in Amsterdam and Zaandam (Saardam). Through the agency of Nicolaas Witsen, mayor of Amsterdam and an expert on Russia, Tsar Peter I worked as a ship's carpenter in the VOC's shipyards in Holland.
*''