The East India Company

Founded at the dawn of the seventeenth century as European nations were establishing global empires, the English East India Company would become a vital part of burgeoning British supremacy. Begun as a joint-stock company for trade with the East Indies, this organization would evolve into one of the world’s first capitalistic corporations.

Inside you will read about...

✓ The English in the Atlantic Era and the Founding of the East India Company
✓ The 17th Century: Struggling, Building, and Growing with Violence
✓ The East India Company Enters the 18th Century
✓ The British Government Steps In
✓ China and the Opium Trade
✓ Growing British Involvement in the 19th Century
✓ The End of the East India Company
And much more!

Over the course of their 250+ years, the East India Company had built a global trading empire, raised an army and waged war, and conquered vast territory, including the entire subcontinent of India. Without their involvement, the British presence in India would look very different in the historical record. Though the company was dissolved by 1874, their influence on world history cannot be overstated.

The Dutch East India Company

Once valued at close to seven trillion dollars by today’s standards, the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, became the world’s first multinational corporation. In the nearly 200-year reign of their empire at sea, the Dutch East India Company amassed unfathomable fortunes, laid the foundation of the modern globalized world, and built monopolies that controlled the economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and the East Indies. 

Inside you will read about...

✓ The Superstructure of the VOC
✓ The Growth of VOC’s Colonies and Trade Routes
✓ The Golden Age
✓ Reorientation and the Expansion Age
✓ The Great Wars and Conquests of the VOC
✓ Decline and Fall
And much more!

The rich history of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie commonly referred to as the VOC, and its titanic exploits are as astonishing as the twelve labors of Hercules. Uncover the organization that in no small part built the world we live in from the ground up.