The Company That Outlived Its Captains: Dutch, Danes and the European Scramble

UNIT 1 · PART 2 · ADVENT OF THE EUROPEANS

The Portuguese proved a sea could be owned. Everyone who followed had watched them do it. What arrived next was not a fleet but a new invention — the joint-stock company, which could outlive any captain who ran it.

A different kind of animal

The Portuguese enterprise was the Crown’s. Ships, forts and profits belonged to the king, and the whole apparatus rose and fell with royal attention. The Dutch built something structurally different, and the difference decided the next two centuries.

Cornelis de Houtman reached Sumatra and Bantam in 1596, proving the route was open to anyone with nerve. Rather than let a dozen Dutch ventures bid against each other, in 1602 the States-General of the Netherlands amalgamated them into a single body — the East India Company of the Netherlands.

Read its charter and the ambition is unmistakable. The company was empowered to wage war, conclude treaties, take possession of territory and erect fortresses. This was not a trading firm with an escort. It was a delegated state, funded by shareholders, which could pursue a strategy across decades because no individual’s death ended it.

The Dutch map of India

The first factory came at Masulipatnam in 1605, on the Andhra coast. Then Pulicat in 1609, north of Madras. They took Nagapatam from the Portuguese and made it their southern stronghold, and worked steadily up both coasts — Surat 1616, Bimlipatam 1641, Karaikal 1645, Chinsura 1653, Nagapatam 1658, Cochin 1663 — with Baranagar, Kasimbazar, Balasore and Patna besides.

Notice what they carried: indigo from the Yamuna valley and Central India, textiles and silk from Bengal, Gujarat and the Coromandel, saltpetre from Bihar, opium and rice from the Ganga valley. Much of it never went to Europe at all. The Dutch had grasped that the richest business was the carrying trade — moving Indian goods to the Far East and Far Eastern goods onward, taking a margin at every leg.

India, in the Dutch scheme, was a supplier. The prize was the Spice Islands.

Amboyna, and the bargain that followed

The English were rising in the same waters at the same time, and commercial rivalry curdled fast. In 1623 at Amboyna — an island the Dutch had taken from the Portuguese — they executed ten Englishmen and nine Japanese. The massacre poisoned Anglo-Dutch relations for a generation and was still being cited in English pamphlets fifty years later.

Prolonged fighting ended in a division of the world. By the compromise of 1667, the English abandoned their claims on Indonesia; the Dutch withdrew from India to concentrate on the spice trade they already dominated.

It looked like the Dutch had taken the better half. Pepper and spices were worth more per ton than Bengal silk. But India was large, populous and politically fragmenting, and Indonesia was neither. The Dutch had chosen the richer trade; the English had been left with the bigger country.

The end in India

Conflict resumed in the third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74), when Dutch forces cut communications between Surat and the new English settlement at Bombay and seized three homebound English ships in the Bay of Bengal. The reckoning came much later, at the battle of Hooghly in November 1759, where English retaliation broke Dutch ambitions in India for good.

It is worth being precise about why they lost. The Dutch were not defeated because they were weak — they were the richest commercial power in Europe. They lost India because they were never seriously trying to hold it. Their interest was trade, not territory, and their profits lay elsewhere.

The Danes, briefly

The Danish East India Company was formed in 1616 and founded a factory at Tranquebar, near Tanjore, in 1620. Its principal settlement was Serampore, near Calcutta. The factories were never commercially important and were sold to the British government in 1845.

The Danes matter for a different reason. They are remembered less for commerce than for missionary activity — and Serampore in particular became a centre of printing, translation and education whose influence on Bengal reached well past the trade that paid for it.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the factories of every European company sat in practically the same places, and demand for Indian goods still outran what weavers and artisans could supply. There was room for everyone. That would not last.