This episode of Empire: World History explores the dramatic reversal of fortune between the Dutch and English East India Companies after 1667. The Dutch VOC, initially dominant with a brutal monopoly on the nutmeg trade, eventually collapses from corruption, debt, and loss of the spice monopoly, while the English EIC transforms from a weak underdog into the most powerful corporation in history by seizing territorial control in India and pivoting to opium.
Summarized by Podsumo
The Dutch VOC maintained a brutal monopoly on nutmeg, enforced through genocide and violence, but the monopoly was broken when French horticulturist Pierre Poivre smuggled seedlings out of the Banda Islands in the 1760s.
The English EIC's fortunes changed dramatically after the death of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 and the Battle of Plassey in 1757, when they seized Bengal—the 18th-century equivalent of Silicon Valley.
The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780-1784) was partly triggered by a Dutch governor on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Eustatius saluting an American ship, which infuriated Britain.
The VOC was dissolved on December 31, 1799—exactly 200 years after its founding—revealing 85 million guilders of hidden debt (equivalent to 600 million euros today).
"The trade of the Mughal Empire was divided at the time between two national groups, the French and the English, for the Dutch had now degenerated into base, avaricious toads squatting on their heaps of gold and spices."
"The EIC has become this enormous octopus engulfing the globe. It goes as far as China on one way where it's selling opium, it's buying tea, it's selling tea to India, to Europe and also, of course it's in the company that got shoved into Boston Harbor, the American Revolution."
"No such thing as a free lunch apparently comes from you Dutch... because it was the taverns would offer free lunches to the VOC sailors but of course they would have to drink a certain amount."