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.
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.
