A history of the world’s first multinational corporation and its forgotten ties to Bengal
On a March day in 1602, the Dutch Republic tried to solve a problem of commerce with a piece of statecraft. Image: Collected
On a March day in 1602, the Dutch Republic tried to solve a problem of commerce with a piece of statecraft. Rival merchant groups were bidding up the cost of spices in Asia, squeezing profits at home, while the war for independence from Spain made overseas trade inseparable from national security. The answer was the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC: a single chartered company with a monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape, and a mandate to defend it.
Over the next two centuries, the VOC built a network of forts, factories and settlements from southern Africa across the Indian Ocean to Japan. It also created something that looks uncannily familiar: permanent share capital, tradable stock, a central board, regional chambers, layers of overseas management, and a culture that treated distance as a problem to be solved by paperwork. This is why the VOC is often described as the world's first multinational corporation, even if its rise came with an older, darker inheritance of coercion and conquest.
The VOC has rivals for the title of "first". The English East India Company was founded earlier, in 1600. But historians often point to the Dutch firm as the first multinational in a distinctly modern sense: it moved from temporary, single-voyage ventures to a permanent, centralised corporation designed to operate across borders for decades, funded by a broad shareholder base.
Dutch merchants had been pushing into Asian trade since the late 16th century through voyage-specific partnerships. By 1602, a flurry of expeditions had proved the profits were real, but also that competition among Dutch syndicates was self-defeating. The States General backed a merger that brought the pre-companies into one united enterprise, and granted it a renewable 21-year monopoly over Dutch trade in a vast maritime zone. The purpose was commercial and political at once: protect trade routes, squeeze out rivals, and help fund a young republic at war.
The structure mattered as much as the monopoly. The VOC raised capital from the public and locked it into the company rather than tying it to individual voyages. Investors received shares that could be transferred, which helped turn Amsterdam into an early centre of securities trading. The crucial shift was continuity: the company could keep operating even as ownership changed hands.
Early modern trade was hazardous, and investors had good reason to fear that one shipwreck could ruin them. One of the VOC's foundational contributions to corporate practice was to normalise a principle that now underpins modern company law: shareholders' risk was limited to what they had invested. The company, meanwhile, could survive the failure of individual voyages, borrow money, hold assets, and keep trading.
This legal and financial design accelerated a second shift that defines corporate culture today: the separation of ownership from control. Shareholders did not sail the ships or negotiate in Asian ports. They delegated authority to directors and managers, who delegated further to factors, clerks, captains, and soldiers spread across continents. That chain of delegation created scale, but it also created the perennial corporate problem: how to supervise managers who operate far from scrutiny, and how to reassure investors who can see little of what they own.
At home, the VOC was organised into six chambers in Dutch port cities. Their delegates formed the Heeren XVII, the central board that set strategy and tried to supervise a far-flung organisation of warehouses, ships and personnel. This arrangement resembles a modern multinational's mix of powerful regional offices and a central board that controls capital allocation, priorities and policy.
Overseas, the company's answer to distance was bureaucracy. Letters, reports, account books and rules were the tools that turned scattered outposts into something that behaved like a single entity. It was corporate governance by paperwork, and it worked well enough to sustain an empire of trade for generations.
The VOC is widely recognised as the first company to issue publicly tradable shares at scale, a step that helped create the architecture of the modern stock market. It did not merely ask a handful of merchants to underwrite one expedition. It gathered funds from a broad investor base and made ownership liquid.
That liquidity changed the relationship between the company and the shareholders. Shares could be bought and sold, and price movements became a running verdict on confidence, rumour and expectation. Early Amsterdam trading produced practices that feel familiar: speculation, sophisticated contracts, and disputes about whether market activity helped discipline management or destabilised it. Just as today, the existence of shareholders did not guarantee control, only pressure.
One of the most striking reminders of the VOC's global network sits not in the Netherlands, but in Bengal.
A seventeenth-century Dutch trading post at Hooghly Chinsurah became the base of the VOC in Bengal, staffed by dozens of Dutch employees and more than a hundred local workers, and focused on commodities that modern multinationals would recognise as supply chain essentials: silk, textiles, opium and saltpetre.
This matters for two reasons.
First, it underlines the company's multinational character. Bengal was not a marginal stop. It was a managed node in a corporate system that linked European capital to Asian production and global distribution. The VOC did not simply "trade with Asia" as a single market. It operated a network of regional hubs, each with its own specialised procurement role, feeding into wider corporate objectives.
Second, it ties the world's first multinational corporation to Bengal's economic history. The Hooghly lodge, depicted in a well-known painting now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, shows the VOC not just as a maritime trader but as an employer, administrator and armed presence in the region. It also points to the human cost: the museum notes that in the seventeenth century, Bengal was among the places where the VOC and its employees bought large numbers of enslaved people, who were transported to other company outposts around the Indian Ocean.
The VOC's early success did not make it immortal. Over time, it became more deeply entangled in the politics and landholding of its Asian possessions. Costs rose, competition intensified, corruption spread, and the burden of defence and administration grew heavier. By the end of the 18th century, the company was heavily indebted, and in 1799 its charter ended, with its assets and liabilities absorbed by the Dutch state.
Yet the VOC's legacy remains visible in the architecture of modern corporate life. It normalised the idea that a company could be bigger than its founders, with ownership dispersed among large numbers of investors and management delegated to professionals. It embedded the boardroom as a centre of power, balancing regional interests, political pressure and shareholder expectations. It showed how standardised branding and documentation could turn a far-flung trading network into a single corporate identity. It also revealed how monopoly privilege and state support can accelerate corporate growth, and how weak oversight can invite abuses.
Most importantly, the VOC demonstrated that a company could operate as a global system: capital raised in one country, decisions made by a central board, procurement organised through regional directorates, and risk pushed down supply chains spanning continents. That is the multinational corporation as we still recognise it.
The VOC's legacy, in the end, cannot be separated from the methods used to sustain its profits. Monopoly in a world of competing powers often meant coercion. In the Banda Islands, the nutmeg-rich archipelago the company was determined to control, the campaign culminated in 1621 when Jan Pieterszoon Coen ordered the capture of the Banda Archipelago, an episode Cambridge University Press describes as genocide that destroyed Bandanese civilisation and secured a VOC monopoly over nutmeg and mace production.
The costs were profound and not incidental. The same tools that enabled scale, limited liability, delegated authority and monopoly power also enabled exploitation, opacity and violence. The modern corporate world inherited the structures the VOC helped pioneer, and it inherited the moral arguments that follow them.
