The Dutch East India Company

3 Mar, 2016 380 Commerce, communications and transportation

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC, known in English as the Dutch East India Company. The VOC dominated the spice trade between Asia and Europe for two hundred years, with the British East India Company a distant second. At its peak, the VOC had a virtual monopoly on nutmeg, mace, cloves and cinnamon, displacing the Portuguese and excluding the British, and were the only European traders allowed access to Japan.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Anne Goldgar No other episodes
    Reader in Early Modern European History at King's College London
  • Chris Nierstrasz No other episodes
    Lecturer in Global History at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, formerly at the University of Warwick
  • Helen Paul 8 episodes
    Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton

Reading list

  • Bitter Bonds. A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century
    Leonard Blusse (Markus Wiener Publishing, 2002) Google Books →
  • Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company
    Huw Bowen, Robert J. Blyth and John McAleer (Scala Publishers, 2011) Google Books →
  • The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800
    C. R. Boxer (Hutchinson, 1965) Google Books →
  • The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660-1760
    K. N. Chaudhuri (Cambridge University Press, 2008) Google Books →
  • The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan
    Adam Clulow (Columbia University Press, 2014) Google Books →
  • The Dutch East India Company
    Femme S. Gaastra (Walburg Pers, 2003) Google Books →
  • The Political Economy of the Dutch Republic
    Oscar Gelderblom (ed.) (Routledge, 2009) Google Books →
  • Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740
    Jonathan Israel (Oxford University Press, 1989) Google Books →
  • The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806
    Jonathan Israel (Clarendon Press, 1995) Google Books →
  • In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea: The Story of the Dutch East India Company
    Els M. Jacobs (Walburg Pers, 1991) Google Books →
  • Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles. The English and Dutch East India Companies (1700-1800)
    Chris Nierstrasz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Google Books →
  • Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660
    Robert Parthesius (Amsterdam University Press, 2010) Google Books →
  • The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century
    Maarten Prak (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Google Books →
  • The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century
    J. L. Price (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) Google Books →
  • The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
    Simon Schama (HarperCollins, 1987) Google Books →
  • The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750
    James D. Tracy (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1990) Google Books →
  • The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815
    Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude (Cambridge University Press, 1997) Google Books →

Related episodes

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

Programme ID: b071vl2l

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071vl2l

Auto-category: 382 (International commerce and commercial policy)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was the largest global corporation in the 17th century and, more than any other East India Company of the time, transformed the relationship between Europe and Southeast Asia.