The World's First Corporation

The story of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the world's first multinational corporation and the first company to issue stock. Discover how this 17th-century trading behemoth pioneered corporate finance, global supply chains, and corporate branding, while also wielding quasi-governmental powers that led to immense wealth and brutal colonial expansion.

A New Kind of Company

In the final weeks of summer, 1602, a notice appeared in the bustling port city of Amsterdam. It was an invitation, radical in its simplicity. For the first time, not just merchant princes or clandestine syndicates, but any resident of the new Dutch Republic could buy a piece of an enterprise. There was no minimum investment, no maximum. A maid could invest alongside her master, a baker alongside a banker. The destination for this collective capital was the far side of the world: the spice-rich islands of the East Indies. The venture was the *Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie*, the United East India Company, or VOC. Before this moment, funding a voyage was like betting on a single roll of the dice. A ship might return laden with cloves and nutmeg, making its backers rich, or it might vanish into the sea, taking their entire investment with it. The VOC was different. It was conceived as a permanent entity, a joint-stock company with a charter from the government granting it a 21-year monopoly on all Dutch trade in Asia. The risk was now diffused, spread across an entire fleet, a network of trading posts, and time itself. The reward was a share in the profits of a continuing enterprise. There was no grand hall for this revolutionary offering. Would-be investors made their way to the private home of one of the company's directors, Dirck van Os, to sign the subscription book and deposit their guilders. By the time the books closed, 1,143 individuals had subscribed, raising the immense sum of 3.6 million guilders for the Amsterdam chamber alone. They were buying more than a stake in a voyage; they were becoming owners of the world’s first multinational corporation, a company that would soon have the power to mint its own coins, negotiate treaties, and wage war. They were shareholders in an empire before it was even built.

A New Kind of Company

The Butcher of Banda

Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the fourth Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, saw the world in ledgers of profit and loss, sanctioned by a harsh Calvinist God. Born in Hoorn, trained in Rome, he was a man of cold ambition who believed utterly in the divine right of his enterprise. His goal was not merely trade but absolute control. To Coen, competition was a sin, and the native populations of the Spice Islands were obstacles on a balance sheet. His gaze fell upon a tiny archipelago called the Banda Islands, the only place on Earth where the nutmeg tree grew. For years, the Bandanese had resisted the VOC’s attempts to enforce a monopoly, continuing to trade with English, Portuguese, and Javanese merchants who offered better prices. They had lured a Dutch admiral into an ambush and killed him years earlier. For Coen, this was an affront that could not stand. "Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us," he wrote, capturing the chilling fusion of commerce and crusade that drove him. In February 1621, Coen arrived at the Banda Islands with a fleet of 15 ships and over 1,600 men. What followed was not a negotiation; it was an extermination. The Dutch forces, aided by Japanese mercenaries, swept across the largest island, Lontor. Bandanese towns were put to the torch. Those who fled to the hills were systematically hunted and starved out. Coen ordered his ships to patrol the coast to prevent anyone from escaping by sea. The climax of the horror came in May. Forty-four of the captured village elders, the *orang kaya*, were brought before a Dutch court and accused of treason. They were tortured, then publicly executed by the Japanese swordsmen outside the walls of Fort Nassau. Their bodies were quartered and displayed. Of the 15,000 people who had inhabited the islands, it is estimated that fewer than a thousand survived. Many were killed outright, others starved, and hundreds were enslaved and deported to the company's new headquarters in Batavia. The nutmeg groves were then divided up and leased to former VOC soldiers and employees, worked by imported slaves. Jan Pieterszoon Coen had secured his monopoly. The price of nutmeg would be set in Amsterdam, paid for with the ghost of a nation.

The World's First Corporation

A New Kind of Company

The World's First Corporation

A New Kind of Company

The Butcher of Banda

The Mark of a Titan