360. Spice Wars: The Battle of the East India Companies (Ep 3)

21:27William:But it is a world where even the servant girls have got pearl earrings.

21:31Anita:Well, I think it was lent. I mean, if you believe the film, which I believe is 100 % true. Movies always are 100 % true. It was the mistress's earring that was pierced into her ear.

21:43William:We can ask Andrew Graham Dixon because we have the great, great art historian. So he's going to be talking to conclude this entire series.

21:53Anita:I'm delighted because that will tell us, you know, how this money, the poor Dutch Calvinists holding their noses and then, you know, spending all their money anyway, which I think people sort of manage, don't they, over time. the governance of this empire though Michael I mean how if you what we see often with empires is if they expand very quickly they are very hard to run how do the Dutch navigate this who's in charge who's in charge is the Lord 17 this is a group of people who govern the VOC at a distance from Amsterdam they come together but you need to think of the VOC as also partly decentralized I mean It's not entirely correct to depict it that way, but it had chambers that had representations in the overall board of government.

22:42So what sat in Amsterdam at the East India House, and for many years I used to have an office in that very building. It's still around. They would come together to decide the cause and direction of the VOC. They would govern it. They would represent the regional stakes as well. So Hora, the city I was born in, I didn't necessarily, I didn't completely grow up there, but I had a stake in this as a regional representative. So there were 17 in total, in contrast with the West India Company that had 19. So the VOC was governed by what we call Heron Lords 17. And so they would issue dismissives to Batavia, which was the headquarters of the VOC in Asia.

23:27William:It sounds rather like the kind of Venetian Republic, which had their council, a similar sort of idea of these noblemen controlling a maritime republic. It's not a bad comparison to make because the Netherlands really was a republic at the time. And this was the other aspect I think that we always need to take into account. We want to understand how all of this was governed. These lords were really also the most powerful people in the Netherlands. There was no king.

23:57Anita:Right. They are also sometimes making decisions which ostensibly might make sense, but in practice are disastrous. I'm just thinking about how capable they are. Batavia that you were talking about, which is the capital of VOC operations, sure, they set up a hospital, but isn't that hospital more or less a death trap? It's a bit of a disaster. They spend a fortune on making some kind of, with their Calvinist principles on their sleeves, making a Malay Bible, which is written by a man who's never been there, doesn't know the language, and is basically the most expensive paperweight in all history because nobody will ever read it.

24:32Anita:So, I mean, are they clever or are they stupid, the people who are doing this? Oh, well, you know, I mean, there were most of all people who existed within the context of the 17th century, right? Probably, as my dear friend Harold, who you've had in an earlier episode, will agree, Batavia itself is an utter death trap.

24:52William:It's famous for incredibly short life expectancy, wasn't it? Famous being awful. Old crews of ships sort of die within a week of arrival. It's that sort of place. And it was, you know, I mean, when the Dutch arrived in Asia in 1596 for the first time, they do so at Bunton, which was a sultanate that existed on the kind of tip end on the western side of Java. Bunton just as much was known for it. But when they move to Batavia and raise the old Jayakatra to the ground, they start building these canals and they kind of sort of envision a Dutch city in the east. But they obviously don't take into account all sorts of diseases that will soon run rampant and make it an astonishingly deadly place to live in.

25:44So the hospital will have been no different.

25:47Anita:So we can't blame them for that because it was just. I wonder if London or Amsterdam had better hospitals at the time. See, that's also interesting in the narratives. I'm sure I've read in a British history of the period. I think I wrote this down. The company that governed a continent also buried a quarter of a million of its own men in tropical soil and described the hospital pretty much as a toilet. You know, it was like they'd spent all this money and it was a dreadful hospital. But you're saying actually that, again, maybe propaganda between the two countries rooted in their rivalry. Well, so much of it, I wouldn't necessarily call it propaganda.

26:20I would really call it marketing. To stay with the idea of companies, all of this was also marketing. They were very busy selling their story at home and abroad. And not just to their own people, obviously, also in Asia. So, you know, the Brits and the Portuguese really didn't leave a moment unused to emphasize that the Dutch did not have a king and a royal house to make sure that no royal or sultan or king in Asia actually understood what the Dutch were about. So there was a lot of kind of sort of marketing. You needed to get your message across. Part of this they understood very clearly was that, you know, this story needed to be told.

27:04Why were they there? What were they coming to do? Were they trustworthy at all? I think this is another aspect which I find astonishing and fascinating and which we often lose in capturing the later phase of colonialism when, you know, the VOC controls the planet or the EIC controls the planet. You know, initially they were usually the weaker party.

27:26William:Before we move on, just quickly need to sketch the fact that while we're focusing today very much on the VOC and the East, there is a whole colonial Dutch world also that encompasses West Africa, the Caribbean, Suriname, the Guyanas. Tell us quickly, very quickly about that. So roughly two decades after the VOC has been established, the Dutch established something called the WIC, the West India Company. And a bit like what the Iberians did with the Treaty of Trodesia, they cut the planet in half. They give the right of one half of the planet to the VOC and the other half they hand over to the WIC to govern.

28:12So this also very quickly involved the transatlantic slave trade. A bit of a puzzle is why they didn't establish this company from the onset, because they were already active in the Americas. And part of this had to do with a 12-year truce. So they broke a peace treaty with the Spanish Habsburgians. The Dutch Republic had emerged out of war, out of revolt with the Spanish Habsburgian rule. They'd established a Protestant nation in its place. and a peace treaty had been concluded. Had the Dutch sailed out onto the Atlantic and onto the Americas, would have brought them again into war with the Spanish and the Portuguese and would have just kind of annulled the treaty.

28:56So they wait for the 12-year truce to expire and then established the West India Company in 1621. And this one is given the monopoly over trade in the Atlantic region. And very swiftly, they establish themselves across West Africa. So at Senegal, at Grouet, the island in front of Dakar. But more importantly, at Ghana and in what is now Angola, various posts there. And this comes to be linked to what they envision for Brazil, which they eventually take over northeastern Brazil from the Portuguese. And for roughly two decades, it's run as Dutch Brazil. So if you look at the transatlantic world, that's really one that exists at two sides of the Atlantic.

29:47Once Dutch Brazil has been lost, they envision a second Dutch Brazil at Suriname. And by the time they've already established a number of colonies adjacent to what is now Suriname. So what is now Guyana used to be British Guyana. Before that, basically were three separate colonies. And then further up, of course, you have all the kind of sprinkling of islands in the Caribbean, what we now call the ABC Islands, Aruba, Borneo and Curnazel. And then further up, the other three, among which St. Astagias, which I believe we'll come to later.

30:23Anita:So, Michael, I mean, you know, you have a monopoly involving that much territory. How do you maintain the monopoly? How do you make sure, and this is to use the parlance at the time, that the natives remain in order, that your shipments are not attacked by particularly jealous British pirates? Because when we did the East India Company, we knew a lot of that was going on. What is the maintenance structure that goes on? Well, you know, I mean, inherently shaky. So, you know, even in Asia, if you think of Batavia as the unquestioned center of power, you start realizing when you read through that history that that was never quite the case.

31:00For one, it takes about six months for any missive from Amsterdam to reach Batavia. So the governor general in Batavia had, you know, he was basically free to do whatever he wanted. I mean, the VOC at home in Amsterdam would regularly complain about this. So when Kuhn brought the Bunda Islands under control in 1621, the next year when Amsterdam learned what had happened, they did say, could you have done this with a little less violence? But, you know, it had already happened. And this was basically throughout the 17th century, the reality of the matter. But at the same time, Batavia wasn't necessarily the only place where decisions were made.

31:43In places like Cochin on the Malabar coast, but also in Colombo, officials and merchants often pursued their own priorities and sometimes markedly diverging from what was decided in Batavia. and even moments for instance when Colombo is imagined as an alternative center of gravity for the VOC not least because nobody liked living in Batavia so they thought maybe Colombo offers better kind of sort of a better place to do that.

32:08Anita:I mean it sounds like when you have different interests and such a lack of communication it is fertile ground for corruption because if you have somebody pursuing their own agenda often that agenda is all about self-enrichment. So all of this monopoly that the Dutch have seems to be based on this wobbly little seed called nutmeg. But that is not a very stable place to be. Join us after the break.

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35:49Anita:Welcome back. So, Michael, by the 1780s, nutmeg, which is the basis for all of this commercial power that the Dutch have, it starts popping up in other places in the world. Yeah, absolutely. The monopoly literally rested on the idea that especially nutmeg only grew on four little islands that they could control. It was always a little different for some of the other spices, but especially nutmeg was only on four islands.

36:18William:It liked this very volcanic soil, didn't it? It was a very needy plant. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the Bandanese had always made sure also to maintain that monopoly. But then in the late 1760s, the French horticulturist Pierre Poivre.

36:33Anita:Which means Peter Pepper. Fantastic. So, yeah, so he's working out of Mauritius, right? And he manages to acquire a couple of these nutmeg plants, seedlings, really, from the Bondi Islands. and he transplants them into French-controlled territories in the Indian Ocean. It's wonderful. You can just see the movie of this,

36:54William:this guy with two little pot plants that are going to change the history of the world. You know, this is, in a sense, part of a broader pattern of generally clandestine botanical transfer through which European powers begin to loosen the Dutch grip on these crops. But by that time, in a sense, already the centrality of these spices has declined to the whole operation. They've been losing value, really. They no longer have the kind of value they had in the beginning. And then you see figures like Joseph Banks facilitate the movement of spice plants into the Caribbean, where they begin to take root in places like Granada.

37:32So suddenly you get this nutmeg everywhere. And the same goes for a lot of these other kind of crops that once were easy to control, but kind of, you know, that momentum is simply gone.

37:44Anita:And if you, you know, just are thinking, oh, I've heard that name, Joseph Banks, before, you did hear him when we did our Captain Cook episode. So we'll stick that episode in our show notes and it'll be in our newsletter as well, which you have to be a member of the club, empirepoduk.com. Empirepoduk.com to get all of that very good stuff. So you've got the Dutch losing their grip on their monopoly, but elsewhere in the world, the other three-letter moniker, EIC, the East India Company is having a very different fortune, Willie. Just remind us what they're up to.

38:15William:I said before how incredibly powerful the Mughals were. They controlled not only almost all of India, they controlled Bangladesh, Pakistan, most of Afghanistan and a slither of Iran. And they keep pretty tight ship. They do not let these trading companies do more than set up undefended factories. They keep a close eye on these guys. They really are very uninterested when the British sent an ambassador, Sir Thomas Rowe, to the court in Agra. All that Chahangia wants to know about is what beer tastes like and how strong it is. He's not interested in giving the British their trading rights. And we see this extraordinary moment of hubris in a very brief Anglo-Mughal war in 1686.

39:04William:And this guy, Josiah Child, who thinks he can take on the Mughals, has a shot. And it's a catastrophe. The Brits are immediately rounded up, shoved in prison, loaded with chains. All their privileges are taken away. And they have to literally go on their knees to beg to continue their operations. And they are allowed to do so out of the benign benevolence of the Mughals. And they have to say thank you and behave themselves. But then in 1707, the emperor Aurangzeb dies and everything changes. Within a decade or two, the Mughal Empire has almost collapsed. It's like a mirror being thrown off the top of a building and shattering into a thousand pieces.

39:45William:And in 1739, we did this on an earlier episode too, Nadir Shah turns up, Luch, the Mughal capital, takes away the Koh-i-Noor, leaving the Mughals unable to pay their civil service, unable to pay their army. So there's a complete turnaround. And the two main beneficiaries of this in the long term are the two rival companies now operating in India, the French and the English. And very quickly, the French and English set themselves up as mercenary organizations. They rent out their new modern armies to people that want to beat up the moguls and take over chunks of their territory and we see a completely different model of operation where they had been uh traders sitting in factories unarmed on the coast just exporting mogul goods now they're actually running military operations lending their troops out and taking over chunks of territory in 1740s you get the carnatic wars which the british see off the French East India Company and then most dramatically of all the Battle of Plassey the East India Company defeats the Mughal governor in 1757 of Bengal.

41:00William:Sirajah Dhal is defeated and the British seize this place which is the equivalent at this point of seizing Silicon Valley. Bengal today isn't considered particularly rich but in the 18th century it is the honeypot It's where all the money is being made, where all the textiles are being milled, a million looms. It's that capital, Bengal, which provides the money for the Brits to begin to take over everything else. So we have a dramatic turnaround, just as the Dutch monopolies giving way and nutmeg plants are turning up and all these spices are becoming widely available. and the price is sinking very quickly as a result from these enormous profits that were being made in the 1600s.

41:44William:The amounts of money to be made in spices goes right down. And the Brits have got a completely different model now. They're just taking over great chunks of territory and being paid by rulers to rent their armies and just taxing great chunks of very rich areas of India.

42:00Anita:Right. But this sort of, you know, I think when you have it in square dancing, isn't it? A dozy do where you sort of just change your positions.

42:07William:I didn't know you did square dancing.

42:10Anita:Well, I'm a woman of great mystery, great mystery wrapped in an enigma. That's me. Michael, from the Dutch perspective, you know, they must have been watching with enormous interest and also pen and paper, quill and paper at the ready, trying to understand what it is that the EIC did wrong and did right and learned from it. I mean, just talk about the kind of conversations that are going on within the VOC while all of this is happening. Well, you know, by that point, I mean, the profits from the spice trade have already lessened. And it's becoming clear to many who are involved in the operations that, you know, what the Dutch are trying to maintain overseas is becoming increasingly more expensive.

42:52And the spices are simply no longer able to pay for all of that. But Europe itself is also changing at the same time. So the position of the Dutch Republic itself is weakening, faced with Anglo-Franco rivalry and all sorts of developments in Europe. So it's coming at them from both sides. If I go back to a little bit what William said about the Battle of Plassey, that was indeed a decisive shift. But it's above all an Indian story, of course. So first, you know, this is happening in India. This isn't really having much consequences for the operations of East Indies. It does resonate with developments in Sri Lanka.

43:37Everybody is noticing the Dutch decline, obviously. You know, the Dutch might has been tested, firmly tested already in Europe itself. You know, there have been a successive wave of Anglo-Dutch wars, the third one, ended disastrously for the Dutch Republic with the invasion of France, testing the borders of the Dutch Republic. You have all these kind of sort of developments at home, which are really taxing on the Republic. And as a result, also taxing on what the Dutch can do abroad and how they can maintain this system. So in a sense, what you see is people are noticing that the rot has set in, that this model cannot be maintained.

44:18William:I have a wonderful quote from my favorite source in the anarchy, which was translated beautifully by my friend Bruce Onell, sadly no longer with us. And he, this is the Comte de Madhav, who was a friend of Voltaire, the most urbane observer of 18th century India. And he writes at this point, exactly at this moment, when everything's beginning to turn in the favour of the Brits and against the Dutch. He says, 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.

44:59William:That's my favourite quote.

45:01Anita:it's not polite but you know look you've got the sort of the the tone of a degenerating relationship where you know the dutch now don't seem unassailable michael you then have a war and it's not the first not second not third it's the fourth anglo-dutch war which starts in 1780 which will rage for four years and this is a product of a really strange series of events you've got a mixture of the American Revolution, Dutch commercial opportunism, and an extraordinary political boldness on a tiny Caribbean island. This is such a good story. Tell us about that. Well, this is St. Eustachius, the Golden Rock.

45:42A little, little talked about, and it's still a tiny island. But at the time, one of these kind of free trade places that had made some people phenomenally wealthy, it was on all sorts of trade routes. So it was pretty important to the Western Indies enterprise. And you have this governor who's the first to kind of acknowledge American independence with a salute to a ship. and this really really pisses off the British at that point because you know they see it as a sign of betrayal and it's absolutely fascinating how much this sense of betrayal has always characterized Anglo-Dutch relations for pretty much two centuries now back and forth kind of the sense like we could have been natural allies but we keep stabbing each other in the back and from both sides Amsterdam and London this was a constant source of discontent but this is really the nail in the cover because i mean

46:42Anita:the americans are so touched by it because nobody's giving them the time of day i mean there is a story that um it was actually washington george washington burst into tears when he hears that they got 11 guns yeah i mean it means so much because it's the start of america's place in the world right absolutely well it's kind of sort of it would have happened anyway i mean if this governor hadn't done it and probably somebody else at some point would i mean these were simply the dynamics in north america at the time i mean these uh you know these these places had you know formed a rebellion and they they were fed up with with british rule i mean they'd had that tea party kind of extravaganza in the harbour and all that um but you know this is kind of sort of symbolic i guess britain britain uses it as cause a spell i like how very dare you So this is the point that Britain declares war on the Dutch.

47:32Anita:Yeah. And this is kind of, you could also read this as kind of revenge for a whole set of other felt betrayals that have been back and forth. Possibly even the Glorious Revolution when the Dutch had decided to invade England and put a Dutch king on the English throne a century earlier.

47:51William:And my Keppel, my mother's family, the Keppels, went at that point from Holland to England and became English. You know, this whole moment starts coming together because the VOC, the way it's run, the people involved, deeply corrupt, the country's hemorrhaging money have been kind of shown that it was unable to defend its territory anymore. So that literally with the VOC, the Dutch Republic also comes to an end. And this is the point, Michael, isn't it? That it turns out that the VOC has been cooking its books. They begin to look at the accounts and they discover that all is not well.

48:32Anita:It's such a corporate story, isn't it? It's such a corporate corruption story. You could run it in today's papers, some of these big companies. Well, basically, I mean, you know, so 1795, French revolutionary forces invade the Netherlands and establish the Batavian Republic. Which is a kind of French puppet, isn't it, really? It really was a French puppet state, but it was on invitation of the Dutch themselves. The Republicans, the ones that were against the House of Orich, had fled to France and, you know, sought information on how to establish a long French model, a different kind of state. So the Batavian Republic is established 1795.

49:14William:And they discover at that period that the VOC has been hiding 85 million guilders of debt. 600 million euros. Yeah, incredible, isn't it? And it all falls to the Dutch state. So it really cripples the Dutch state from the onset, yeah.

49:32Anita:So, okay, so is the Dutch state suddenly realizing the VOC hasn't been honest about its position? does is this now just ultimately insolvency how quickly does it happen and what happens as a as a result to the rest of the netherlands i mean the voc is dissolved as a result very quickly after

49:52William:that extraordinarily and this is one of the nice things of doing the eic and the voc in parallel the voc is dissolved on december the 31st 1799 exactly 200 years after the charter was awarded to the east india company to the day it's the most extraordinary echo across history and by that time by met by means of the letters of q 1795 the stadtholder uh in effect the king although he's not a king in the Netherlands, but he, you know, a member of the House of Orange, flees to England, seeks protection of the British crown and says, you know, will you please take possession of Dutch territories around the world and protect them from French invading forces?

50:44The Brits are completely thrilled by this, of course.

50:47William:Yeah. If you insist, sir. And it's fascinating. We read through the accounts, you know, when the, you know, You know, dismissive receive Colombo, Cochin. All these places they've been coveting and looking jealously at for 200 years. The British courts don't send an email. It's certainly not, you know, a nicely addressed letter. They come with an army because they kind of expect the governors in Colombo, in Cochin, not to be particularly interested in this letter and not even believing that it was in fact written by the stat holders. So, you know, I mean, and then Colombo and all these other places fall to the British.

51:25William:And exactly at the same moment as that is going on, the Brits are discovering a major new source of income for them, which is, of course, we've done a whole series on this, opium. This is the point when suddenly they realise that they can become the biggest narco operators in history. Victorian narcos, as we called it.

51:44Anita:Yeah. Can I just say, there's a producer's note here saying, don't let Willie get into opium right now, which you can take any which way you want. Because it's going to basically take up far too much. No opium for you, Willie. I've always been very keen on opium. So, Michael, once you've got, you know, the implosion of the VOC, what happens to all the territories that it ran with such an iron fist? Well, the British basically take that. All they were handed to them by the letters of, you know, the letters of Q also stipulated that we were going to get them back once the French threat was over.

52:19But that never happens.

52:20William:They give some of them back, but they keep Colombo. They keep the nice ones. So we get, you know, the East Indies basically only Indonesia. That's a bit much. And, you know, sort of the whole kind of model the Dutch then adopt is more in line to what the British have done in India. So it becomes much more territorial than it was before. But indeed, what remains is a sprinkling of islands in the Caribbean, the six islands, which are still normally part of the Netherlands. And then you have Suriname, which became independent in only in 1975, and Indonesia. And that is what remains. But the whole system changes and indeed becomes much more territorial than it was before.

53:06William:And this is the British innovation. They've created something that's not quite a company, not quite a state. It is this terrible, monstrous sort of science fiction creature, a company state, which exists only to suck the resources out of the captured state for the profit of shareholders living an ocean away across the ocean. um and this is this is something you know like again this is where we sort of see into now the power of modern tech companies because the eic the east india company has become this enormous octopus engulfing the globe it goes as far as uh 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 easy to come to tea that got shoved into Boston Harbor, the American Revolution.

54:00William:And this company is making vast sums of money at exactly the moment that its Dutch rival has collapsed and is no more. With every passing years, we see Meta and Apple and X and Elon Musk become more and more powerful with annual turnovers greater than the GDPs of whole swathes of nations put together. It's at this point that you can't help noticing how incredibly pertinent this history is to today.

54:35Anita:Can I just say, I mean, it's so great that you mentioned Elon Musk because we're coming to the end of our time together, but he's often described as a tycoon. That's a Dutch via Japanese word. So tycoon was the title that the shogun used for foreign envoys, the Dutch envoys. and the Dutch brought it back from Degema and it only enters English in the 1850s via the VOC. And then since we're at it, we're just about to close, but no such thing as a free lunch. You know, everyone says, oh, it's a Milton Friedman thing. That's a Dutch thing as well because it was the taverns would offer free lunches to the VOC sailors, but of course they would have to drink a certain amount and then they would get into trouble so they would pay for it one way or the other.

55:20Anita:So no such thing as a free lunch apparently comes from you Dutch. Isn't that great? Yes. And that is the absolute fascinating thing is that things like Dutch courage, Dutch uncle and going Dutch are actually all British inventions. So, yeah. Listen, it's been a delight. You are authentically Dutch. I mean, you know, feel free to write in with green crayon if you think my examples are not right. I know you will.

55:46William:I think we should end with Anita pronouncing the VOC one more time. Oh God, let me get it. Yes, I know.

55:51Anita:I'd be very happy to do it. Right, everyone put your crash helmets on. I'm going to take a run at it. Ready, Michael? With huge apologies. But here we go. Ferenigde Ostindische Compagnia with the marvellous Michael Bass. Thank you so much, Michael.

56:07William:Next week, we've got the wonderful Andrew Graham Dixon on Vermeer for this closing episode. And we're going to go to the girl with the pearl earring next. So look forward to that.

56:18Anita:Till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.

56:23William:And goodbye from me, William Durrampol.

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