Oost-Indisch Huis

For two hundred years the most powerful company on earth was run from this courtyard. It had its own army, its own fleet and the right to make war.

The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, was founded in 1602. The government gave it a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, and with it powers no company has had since: it could sign treaties, build forts, keep soldiers and govern territory in its own name.

It was also something new in another way. Anyone could buy a share in it, and those shares could be sold on to someone else. The trade in VOC shares that grew up in Amsterdam is usually counted as the world’s first stock market.

This building went up four years after the company was founded. The Amsterdam directors met here, and so, for much of the time, did the board that ran the whole enterprise, known as the Gentlemen Seventeen. Sailors and soldiers were signed up at the gate. Many of them never came home.

The wealth that built the canal houses came through these rooms, and it was not made gently. The company took the spice islands by force, and on the Banda Islands in 1621 it killed or drove out almost the entire population to secure its monopoly on nutmeg. It also traded in enslaved people across Asia. The VOC was wound up, bankrupt, in 1799.