War, Bureaucracy, and Divine Commerce

The Dutch East India Company in images

Dec 22, 2024

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Back in the ancient world, the line between the gods and humans was a little thinner.

Myths and legends told of people who crossed that barrier, or at least straddled it. The Greeks believed in demigods — literally, half-gods — like Heracles, the offspring of Zeus and a mortal woman, and Orpheus, whose father was Apollo and whose mother was the muse Calliope. They also believed that mere humans could ascend to divine status both before and after death. Alexander the Great, for example, was worshipped posthumously as a god in Egypt. Roman emperors were later considered to be living gods.

The process of becoming a god was called apotheosis.

Once Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, people stopped believing that ordinary people could become gods. There was only one God (or three, or one in three — it was complicated), and ordinary people couldn’t cross the line between the mortal and the divine. But the Christians hung onto the concept in their art. Beginning during the Baroque period, artists glorified impressive people by portraying them in the process of becoming a classical god or resting in the heavens among the divine. These paintings were full of symbolism that communicated the essence of the great person they depicted.

Sometimes, artists even gave this honor to organizations or concepts. In at least one circumstance, they portrayed the apotheosis of a corporation (imagine trying to glorify General Motors or Kraft Foods by showing it as a divine figure). Which brings us to this:

It’s the apotheosis of the Dutch East India Company, painted in the early 1700s. You can tell because you see the company's initials, VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) above the head of the female personification of the company, who is perched on an ornate throne. What is the artist, Nikolaas Verkolje, trying to tell us about the VOC?

In a darkened corner, we see Poseidon guiding a ship out to sea. Two putti, or cherubs, seen with a cornucopia and a dove, symbolize peace and prosperity:

A woman sits on the left with a key, perhaps ready to unlock the world’s markets for the Dutch. She is accompanied by my favorite part of the painting, an excellent dog:

We see Hermes with his Cadeucus, a symbol of ambassadors and traders.

And a woman at the feet of the main figure, accompanied by nautical technology and a map to symbolize the navigational skill the company possessed.

And then the symbol of the company herself. She sits on an ornate throne, wearing armor and holding a sword adorned with laurels. She symbolizes military victory. But in her other hand is paperwork — ledgers and account books. Oh, and there’s a tortoise crawling out from under her gown for some reason:

Verkolje is telling us that the Dutch East India Company is a great institution — worthy of being portrayed as a classical goddess. But he’s also telling us something about the company itself. It’s an engine of wealth built on state-of-the-art technology. It brings peace and prosperity to its sponsors in the Netherlands. And it has two modes of conquest: war and bureaucracy.

Let’s start with the bureaucracy.

In the late 1500s, merchants in the Netherlands wanted, like merchants all over Europe, to get rich through trading spices. These spices came from Southeast Asia and could make traders astounding profits — a successful voyage’s cargo could sell for 30 times the initial investment. The problem was that the Portuguese controlled the trade routes, and they didn’t want to share.

Dutch merchants formed several companies, including Cornelis de Houtman’s Compagnie van Verre, which advertised its voyages on colorful flyers:

The company sent a fleet of four ships to Java and they successfully purchased a shipment of pepper. But on the return journey, the expedition lost a ship and almost two-thirds of its men. At one point, de Houtman was held captive by the prince of Bantam and the Dutch ships bombarded the town to get him released, as depicted in the illustration below.

The investors didn’t make much money, but they did prove that it would be possible to break the Portuguese spice monopoly. The voyages continued.

One of these early voyages landed on Mauritius. This engraving from 1601 shows the sort of thing the Dutch got up to in these places — building boats, collecting food, and cataloging the local wildlife. Their impact was often quite destructive.

On the left, you can see the oldest image of a dodo bird, a species that the Dutch would drive to extinction (along with most of the other large animals on the island) by 1662.

The problem was that the Dutch companies were competing against each other while fending off the Portuguese. The Dutch States General decided that, if the Dutch were to have a chance, they would need to be united. So, in 1602, the six existing companies were forced to merge into one — the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Vereenigde means united). The merger was formalized in this contract:

Paperwork — symbolized by the book resting under victory’s arm in the apotheosis above — was one of the company’s great strengths. It has left behind all sorts of paper. Some of it is unexpectedly beautiful, likr this bond dating to 1622:

The documents often incorporated local languages, like this credit letter, issued in modern-day Indonesia, dating to 1799:

And check out this incredibly well-used banknote from Sri Lanka. It was first issued in 1795, and the handwritten notes show it being swapped as late as 1912, more than a century after the company ceased to exist:

The company issued its own currency:

Including this coin with firefighting equipment on the reverse:

The VOC employed an innovative structure, selling stock to the general public so that anyone with the cash could share in the risks and rewards of these voyages.

At first, the operations of the company were pretty straightforward. Its various divisions (the remnants of the six companies that had merged in 1602) mounted voyages and then used their profits to find new ones. This meant that the company’s continued operation relied on successful expeditions. Too many sunken ships or pirate encounters meant that the company might go under.

So one of the directors, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, proposed taking a more muscular approach. The VOC should not just import luxury goods into Europe; it should control as much of the Indian Ocean trade system as it could, taking territory and building forts. Coen wrote the company’s directors, arguing that:

Your Honours know by experience that trade in Asia must be driven and maintained under the protection and favour of Your Honours' own weapons, and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the trade; so that we cannot carry on trade without war nor war without trade.

The directors agreed. The company would be armed. It would act as a colonial power as well as a commercial organization.

The VOC set out to build or capture forts along its trade routes. They took the Portuguese fort at Cananor (modern Kannur, Kerala, India):

And conquered Cochin, a bit further south along the coast:

Though the paintings above show placid trading posts, the VOC often engaged in shocking violence. Coen led the conquest of the Banda Islands in modern-day Indonesia. His troops enslaved or deported almost all of the local population, often working the slaves to death, all so that the VOC could ship the nutmeg growing on the islands back to Europe. The VOC built an imposing fort there to maintain their control:

Here we see VOC troops mounting a punitive expedition against the city of Palembang, in modern-day Indonesia. It was one of the oldest and largest cities in the region, having served as the capital of the Srivijaya Kingdom. The Dutch burned it to the ground.

In the places they conquered, the VOC built fortified trade posts (this one’s in Bengal). The painting below shows a procession of Indian dignitaries, some riding elephants, coming to meet the Dutch.

Back in Amsterdam, there wasn’t much evidence of the company’s cruelties, just its wealth. The VOC used its often ill-gotten profits to build the headquarters from which it ran its empire:

And their customers back in the Netherlands got to eat their well-spiced food off of VOC-monogrammed plates, unaware of the true cost of the luxuries they enjoyed.

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Looking Through the Past

War, Bureaucracy, and Divine Commerce

The Dutch East India Company in images

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