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

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

What caused the mighty Dutch East India Company to plummet from immense Golden Age wealth to total bankruptcy? Who was ‘Peter Pepper’, and how did his stolen plants end the VOC's spice monopoly? And how did a tiny Caribbean island spark the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War simply by saluting the American flag? Get the entire Dutch Empire miniseries early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at ⁠⁠empirepoduk.com⁠ ⁠ In Episode 3 of our series on the VOC, William and Anita are joined by Dutch anthropologist and historian Michiel Baas to explore the staggering collapse of the Dutch East India Company. They discuss the greatest commercial reversal in history, as the English East India Company transformed into a powerful corporate state, while the mighty VOC went completely bankrupt. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com.⁠ Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. This episode is brought to you by my favourite London review of books. In our journey to unpick the complexities of the past, it's clear that history is not a straight line. It's a vast, intricate and complex tapestry. To truly understand a political revolution or the fall of a dynasty, you have to build up the picture piece by piece.

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forward slash trial to try three months of the London Review of Books for free. Just do it. It's the most wonderful journal in the country and you will never regret it. Hello, mid-sized business. We see your big ambitions. But how do you achieve the wins you want when your technology is holding you back? SAP grow. is built to grow with your business, no matter its size.

With AI embedded at its core, working across every system, all ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow. AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Edwina Matt Batton died in the jungles of Borneo. The year was 1960 and she was all alone. Well, alone, I say, except she was surrounded by letters. And they weren't letters, as you might think, from her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the last

viceroy of India. No, these were letters from the man that she truly loved. The scourge of the British Empire, the first Prime Minister of a free India. His name was Jawar Lal Nairu. Now, this fascinating love triangle is so pertinent when it comes to pre-partition India politics. And we're going to be delving right in in a mini-series, a four-year-series, a four-year-old. parter for you. And it's only available to members of our club. So if that isn't you, what you need to do is right away. Get to Empirepoduk.com. That's Empirepoduk.com. And for the

price of a coffee, come join our club. And as if you needed any more incentive, let me tell you, our very special guest is the marvellous Alex von Tunselman, who is the author of Indian Summer. So what are you waiting for? Come on. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arndt. And me, William Derrimple. Now, in the first two episodes of our Dutch East India Company series, we told the parallel story of two companies born like twins, almost simultaneously. The English East India Company chartered by Elizabeth I first in 1600 and the Dutch counterpart,

which Anita can pronounce, but I can't have a good. You chicken? Yeah, big chicken. Okay. Ferreinigde Ostendishe It's the VOC. It's the VOC. Okay.

So look, through both of these episodes, this story is emphatically a Dutch victory. And by the end of episode two, we had the Treaty of Breeder in 1667. And that was the closing off of Charles Milton's wonderful account. Nats, nuts, as he likes to call it. Both and I will never be able to think of it as anything else. ever again.

Nats, nuts. The race for nutmeg and the spice wars between these two huge corporate entities. So the Dutch had apparently won. They held the all-important super lucrative spice islands

in what is now Indonesia. They control the nutmeg monopoly on the Banda Islands, bought with the blood of 15,000 Bandonese. The English, having been driven out of the East Indies by the dreadful massacre

at Amboyna have been left with whatever everyone at the time thinks is, you know, the booby prize, the dusty bin of consolation prizes, a foothold in India, a cold, muddy island at the mouth of the Hudson River, who on earth will ever care about Manhattan, which they then rename New York, named after the English Duke, who's initials you might remember, D-O-Y, the Duke of York, were carved into the chests of enslaved people. So, look, that was very much, William, and I think we should talk about

this with our guest, a story of Dutch, bad, English heroic, Dutch so, so bad, English heroic, Dutch so psychopathically bad. Do not pass go, do not collect £200 straight to the flames of hell was what was coming across in the last episode. It's going to be interesting this one, don't you think? Well, it is going to be interesting because we see the game turnaround. And this isn't through any brilliant strategy of the British. It isn't through any planning, certainly, because they also regarded their consolation prizes as completely inferior to what they'd lost. But of course, as we know, Manhattan and India are not consolation prizes. They become, in fact, the backbone of the world economy fairly quickly. And the story we're going

to tell today is the story of that turnaround, how the losing, incompetent, underfunded English East India Company ends up as the most powerful corporation in history, the model to the corporations of our own day like ExxonMobil or Meta or Google to help us with this. We are joined by my great friend Michael Bass. Michael, hello. He's an anthropologist. He is a writer who spent many, many years traveling the former outposts of the Dutch Empire from Easter Island. Island to Manhattan from Banderer to Cape Town. Michael Bass is also a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

The author of the book that we have been very lucky to have a sneak preview of, The Ruins of Dutch colonialism are forgotten history. It's going to be out next year. So we are very, very lucky to sneak you in before that deadline. Welcome, Michael. But before we go anywhere, how well did I pronounce the VOC? Mark's out of time, Michael. Come on.

Well, you know, obviously I'll give it 10 out of 10 if you... If you'd been Danish, but I'll do it for... You know, I'll do it once here. Vereneged Oast-Indieser company. That's exactly what I said. That's completely different to what he said. Thank you, it's kind of sort of right approximate. My God, before we get into this, can we just ask?

Because, you know, I was just saying that very much when we talked about Nats Nats, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, And we were talking to Charles Milton. You, like the Dutch, seem like psychopaths, the way you behaved. I mean, I think it was even once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that, you know, our colonialism, British colonialism was bad, but yours was so much worse. Now, you're sitting in, where are you sitting? You're in the Netherlands now. Which city are you in?

Yeah, I'm literally in Amsterdam, yeah. Amsterdam. Okay. So how does that go across with your countrymen that you guys were worse than British imperialists? Well, let me say first and foremost, I mean, I've been part of advocating the removal of the young Pete's son Coon statue from the Horan City Square for years now, because I fully agreed. We were complete psychopaths, if that's what you want to call it. We were aggressive, deeply violent, genocidal in that whole face. But the comparison with kind of sort of the more civilized English colonialism is also one that has its roots in Anglo-Dutch rival. of the 17th century. So to think of, you know, any one of them being more civilised or kind or the way, and I must say I absolutely love Charles Milton book, it's a complete page turner.

But of course, he presents a particular vision. He is a patriotic Englishman. And as a Scot, I have to say, that there are moments when I bristle at the kind of Clean Bill of Hill health that he gives to some of those guys. And when I pressed him in the last episode, he did. come up with one of his British factors who these, you know, he presents as these very plucky Brits holding out against the evil Dutch. It turns out one of them is every bit of psychopathic and, you know, did a 20-page description of torturing one of the Banda Island

people that he'd caught. So, yeah, that said, everywhere in the world was pretty brutal in the 17th century. Of course. But how do, you know, because here, and we're going to get into the meat of this, because we need to look at these pivotal years between 1667 and 179. these sort of this reversal in commercial history where you've got sort of Dutch supremacy and then Dutch bankruptcy pretty much. But before we get to, I mean, when the Dutch think of their own colonialism, do they talk about it as much as we talk about it in Britain? Are there advocates who say, you know, don't apologise for your imperial past in Netherlands?

Be proud of it. It's part of your history, statue wars, all of that kind of thing. Is that going on as much as it's going on here in Britain? Oh, absolutely. I mean, even up to, you know, the king apologizing for the involvement of the Dutch in the transatlantic slave trade. So, all very much. And certainly post-George Floyd, I think we've seen kind of also speeding up in that whole process, kind of a reckoning with the Dutch colonial past, which I guess post-World War II,

when, you know, the Netherlands was completely devastated and licking its own war wounds. There was a sense of the colonial past that that's when, you know, the Netherlands, the Dutch still mattered. So for the longest time, and that's also pretty much what I grew up with, because I grew up in the city of horror, which was central to the spice trade. I grew up with this whole idea of the Dutch colonial past,

being a glorious past. The VOC was always kind of linked to a sense of grandeur. That's when we met it. I think in the last few years, this has definitely changed. There have been a lot of TV shows paying attention to, you know, kind of brutal tactics.

that we employed in the East Indies and elsewhere on the planet. And they're slowly also growing awareness that a story is so much bigger than just the East Indies. And that's the one thing I try to capture in my own book. Michael, take us to the – give us a panorama, if you would, of the Dutch situation in the aftermath of the Treaty of Breda. Let's look first at the Dutch and then compare it to the situation with the East India Company. What's going on with the VOC in 1668 the year after that treaty? Yeah, well, this is an enormously dramatic period that we see, right? From a moment of incredible successes, slowly you see that things are changing.

But there are things, they change rather slowly. So what happens between 1667 and 1799 is probably one of the greatest reversals in commercial history. But if you sit a little bit with these dates, you also realize there's an entire state. century that we need to cover, century plus 30 years. And it ends with the VEOC becoming insolvent. But meanwhile, what you also described kind of as the hopeless, the hapless English company regarded by its rivals, the Dutch, but also the Portuguese really as a bit of a joke. They take off. And so what I find so striking in this is that, well, we often tell this as a story of commercial rivalry in Asia. It is just so much a story about Europe, about wars, finance,

and political transformations that reshape what becomes possible across the globe. And to understand, in a sense, to understand the British East India Company and how it eventually eclipses the VOC and other colonial endeavors in the region, you know, you cannot really be understood without taking this into consideration as well. Give us a panorama. Where are the Dutch in control? at this point, having kicked the Brits out of the East Indies, what we would call Indonesia. Where are the Dutch at this moment? Where are their forts? Where are their fleets? Well, they're basically everywhere. So they're obviously in the East Indies and a very busy protecting that East India world, that control over monopoly, which wasn't just nutmeg. It was also

black pepper, which they were sourcing from Java and Sumantra, and it was also very much close. And even at that point when you know sort of the 1621 genocide on the Banda Islands has taken kind of sort of finished the Emboyne massacre a couple of years later which sees the departure

of the English from the East Indies, the war is hardly over. It runs for another three decades and through which they try to enforce that monopoly. It's been brilliantly captured by a friend of mine, Tristan Moster, who is one of the great historians here in the Nellons,

about this as we speak. And he really calls this a spice war. And that was a half a century spice war. That was ongoing. And in which they were of course constantly fighting back against local parties, but also European parties making the way.

But meanwhile, if you look at the whole spectrum where the Dutch were also at, they were also in the south of Japan. And soon the only ones that were allowed onto Japanese soil for close to two centuries. First at Hirado than at Deschima. Was that a source of great wealth? A lot of this was part of the

intra-Asia trade. The Dutch didn't have that much to offer to local parties. This is often forgotten. We wanted their spices, but we didn't really have anything they wanted from us, least of all the Japanese who didn't even use spices in their food at the time. So the Dutch very quickly in this phase become part of the inter-Asia trade, and that is part of the success story and part of how they maintain access to the local spice trade. They become intermediaries, they become brokers. In Japan, crucially, they managed to recruit Japanese soldiers to do their aggressive violent bidding in the East Indies. Probably Milton, Giles also spoke about this. Samurai swords for sale is what, you know, we sort of put it down to last time. Yeah, absolutely.

They were, they were kind of, Japan had emerged out of civil war itself and sort of were a lot of, you know, unemployed soldier men that were recruited directly to work for the VOC in the East Indies. And they were central to the genocide in the Banda Islands, but also the massacre at Amboa. But otherwise, I mean, besides the south of Japan, they were at Ayutaya in Thailand. They were in Taiwan. They had trade with China. They were obviously in Sri Lanka and India, but also at Malibu. Laca, which they had conquered from the Portuguese. And if you didn't kind of cross into the ocean,

they were using Mauritius as a replenishment post. They were at the Cape. They were at West Africa, what is now Senegal, but also Angola, which would soon be central to the transatlantic slave trade. And if you then cross across the ocean, they were at Brazil, later Suriname, but also the Caribbean, and even New Netherlands, the Dutch colony in North America. What you're describing is not just an enormously powerful company entity, but also a coherent commercial world where you've got the tentacles all working together and passing interests one to another. Willie, I don't know if maybe this is a question for you and Michael,

but in comparison, how is the East India Company doing at the same time? Is it coherent? Is it as far spread? Is it as successful? So these Sydney companies really still getting off the starters blocks in India in the 1660s.

And the ultimate source of its wealth will also be the thing which is keeping it in check at this period, which is the sheer power of the Mogul Empire. The Mogul Empire in 1660 is almost at its peak. Shah Jahan has just built the Taj Mahal.

This is the Great Age. of the, you know, the mogul miniatures, but it's also the astonishing moment in terms of Indian textile production. This is the industry that's generating massive wealth. And I think we often forget that when we think of the moguls, particularly when Indians think of the moguls, they think of sort of fluttering pigeons in, in palaces and Ashwariari, dropping mangoes into the mouth of Ritic Rocheon and forgetting that, you know, there's an enormous economy that's powering all this luxury. And that's to do with textiles.

And in time, the Brits will set themselves up as the shippers of those textiles abroad. And that is the way that the English will make their money. But they're just starting off now. They've set up Madras in 1639. That's just newly founded. It's small. There's virtually no one living around the British fort.

It's not a major city yet. There are other bit of luck is that, as part of a wedding present, they've been given Bombay by the Portuguese, part of the Dowery of Catherine of Braganza, along with Tangiers of all places. And when this turns up at the English Court of Charles II, the map, which is meant to be attached to it, hasn't arrived. So they're all debating where Bombay, spelled B-U-M-B-Y, is. And they all, the conclusion is reached. It must be in Brazil somewhere, but none of them know. So again, Bombay, which will be such a massive thing. The great thing about

Bombay, incidentally, is it's got the greatest harbour on the entire coast, west coast of India. That will be an amazing investment for the British in years to come, but it isn't yet. And they haven't really established themselves yet in Calcutta.

The Calcutta operation is just about to begin. You're looking at quite a mature network compared to, you know, and again, I urge people to go back to our East India Company series, which will hold your hand and take you through this step by step, but we're talking about almost sort of one that's in its infancy

and one that is pretty developed and kicking the British butt when it comes to trade. Can we, Michael, just talk about, you know, what feels at least to be a Dutch golden age that is funded by

pepper and nutmeg more than anything else. When we talk about the golden age, this genuine period of Dutch glory, tell us what that looked like. for the people who lived in the Netherlands and for its empire. Just give us a taste of that.

There's been lots of studies about that, kind of sort of trying to understand how wealth actually trickled down. Obviously, I live in Amsterdam, and I live on an island called Ostenberger Island. This used to be a place where the VSEC would build its boat, so it was a massive industry itself at home. Money was flowing into the canal belts

where people built the most lavish houses for themselves. So there was extraordinary, well, it becomes a little less clear when you look at the rural side. It has been argued that there were quite a few people who actually had stocks in this company. If you look at families like mine and I've been trying to do a bit of research, I come from a deeply agricultural background. My father grew cauliflower all his life so that his father and his father and all the way down. Nothing wrong with cauliflower, Michael. Do not be ashamed of cauliflower growers.

And I often like to joke, the only reason, you know, families like I was ever made use of netwack was to sprinkle it on top of cauliflower. It's a very Dutch way of eating cauliflower. But other than that, I don't see any evidence really of it, you know, trickling down. But it brought lavish wealth, certainly to cities like Amsterdam, but also to the Hague and other pockets like Harlem, obviously, yeah. The Vermeer interiors that we see in all those wonderful portraits, are those the places where people are living at this point? Absolutely. I mean, it gives you a glimpse into that. And I think one of the fascinating things is that it's a very different kind of well that you see in these paintings.

That you would see similar, for instance, French paintings, which kind of have a more baroque flavor to it, like a more ostentatious flavor. A lot of this will probably come to Simon Schama, so we say Schama. and probably shamah in English. Embarrassment of the riches. There was a certain embarrassment to it as well because people were at the same time deeply Calvinistic. So this kind of sentacious display world wasn't necessarily appreciated.

So it had to be in balance to a degree. It needed to look proper. But it is a world where even the servant girls have got pearl earrings. Well, I think it was lent. I mean, if you believe the film, which I believe is 100% true. Movies always are a hundred percent true.

It was the mistress's earring that was pierced into area. We can ask Andrew Graham Dixon because we have the great, great artist story. So he's going to be talking to conclude this entire series. I'm delighted because that will tell us how this money, the poor Dutch Calvinists

holding their noses and then spending all their money anyway, which I think people sort of manage, don't they? 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. So 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 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 a West India company that had 19. So the VEOC was governed by what we call Heeren, Lords, 17. And so they would issue dismissives to Batavia, which was the headquarters of the VOC in Asia. It sounds rather like the kind of Venetian Republic, which had their council, a similar sort of idea of these nobleman 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 key. 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.

Because Batavia that you were talking about, which is a capital of VOC operations. I mean, they do, 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, you know, 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. 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, yes, my dear friend Harold, who you've had in an earlier episode, will agree. But Tavi itself was an utter death trap.

It's famous for incredibly short life expectancy, wasn't it? Famous being awful. Oh, cruise of ships sort of die within a sort of. week of arrival is that sort of place. And it was, you know, I mean, when the Dutch arrived in Asia in 1790s, 1596 for the first time, they do so at Bunton, which is a, was a sultan that existed on the kind of tip end on the western side of Java. A bunton just as much was known for it. But when they moved to Batavia and raised the old Jayukatra 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. So the hospital will have been no different. So we can't blame them for that because it was just... I wonder if London or Amsterdam had better hospitals at the time. So, 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 on, 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, that 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 in their rivalry. Well, so much of it, I wouldn't necessarily call it propaganda. I 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. Why 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. 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, what the Iberians did with the Treaty of Tradesia, 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. So this also very quickly involved the transatlantic slave trade. A bit of a puzzle is why they didn't establish its company from the answer, because they were already active in the Americas.

And part of this had to do with the 12-year truce. So they broke a pre-year pre-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. So 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 established himself across West Africa, so at Senebal, at Grouret, the island in front of Dakar.

But more importantly, at Ghana and in what is now Angola, at 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 is run as Dutch Brazil. So if you look at the transatlantic world, that's really one that exists at two sides of the Atlantic. Once Dutch Brazil has been lost, they envision a second Dutch Brazil at Suriname. and by the time they've already established the number of colonies adjacent to what is now Suriname.

So what is now, Guyana, used to be British Guiana, 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 Kurnasel, and then further up the other three, among which Saint Ostrastas, which I believe will come to later. 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 that 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 I was never quite a case. For 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 you wanted. I mean, the VOC at home and Amsterdam would regularly complain about this. So when Kuhn brought the Banda 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. In places like Cochin on the Malabar Coast, but also in Colombo, officials and merchants. often pursue their own priorities and sometimes markedly diverging from what was decided in Batavia. And even moment, 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 a better place to do that. 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. This episode is brought to you by the National Archives. It's Tom Holland here from Goldhangers. The Rest is history. Now, American Independence is often painted as a quest for freedom, a triumph of democratic ideals. But it was also a period of immense risk and violence, which turned the colonial world upside down. So if you want to go beyond the familiar tales of the Boston Tea Party and red-coated battalions, I have some marvellous news for you. The National Archives is holding a free exhibition. Revolution 250. America's Independent Story, 1763 to 1783. It's not just

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Offer ends June 21st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. Welcome back. So Michael, by the 1780s, Nutmeg, which is, you know, the basis for all of this commercial power that the Dutch has. 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. It liked this very volcanic soil, didn't it? It was a very needy plan.

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the Bandonese had always made sure also to maintain that monopoly. But then in the late 1760s, the French horticulturist Pierre Puevre. Which means Peter Pepper. It's fantastic. So, yeah, so he's working out of Mauritius, right? And he manages to inquire a couple of these nutmeg plants, seedlings, really, from the Banda Islands. And he transplants them into France-controlled territories in the Indian Ocean.

It's a wonderful. You just see the movie of this, this guy with two little pot plants that are going to change the history. You know, this is, in a sense, part of a broader pattern of generally clandesigned botanical transfer, through which European powers begin to loosen the Dutch grip on these crops. But by the 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.

So 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. 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, Empapoduk.com. Empapoduk.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. I said before how incredibly powerful the moguls 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're really very uninterested when the British sent an ambassador, Sir Thomas Rowe, to the court in Agra. All that Jahangir 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. And this guy, Josiah Child, who thinks he can take on the moguls, 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. operations and they are allowed to do so out of the benign benevolence of the moguls, and they have to say thank you and behave themselves. But then in 1707, the emperor Orangzeb dies and everything changes. Within a decade or two, the Mongol Empire has almost collapsed.

It's like a mirror being thrown off the top of a building and shattering into a thousand pieces. And in 1739, we did this on an earlier episode two. Nadir Shah turns up. luch the mogul capital takes away the Kohinor, leaving the moguls 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 the 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 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 is the British sea off the French East India Company. And then most dramatically of all the battle of Plassy, the East India Company defeats the Mughal governor in 1757 of Bengal.

Saraj Dahlia 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 prices sinking very quickly as a result from these enormous profits that were being made in the 1600s. 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. Right. But this sort of, you know, I think when you have it in square dancing, isn't it, a dozy day where you sort of just change your positions? I didn't know you did square dancing.

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 at the quill and paper at the ready, trying to understand what it is that the EIC did wrong and did right and learn 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. And 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 development. 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 Placie, 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. Everybody 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, and the disastrously for the Dutch Republic with the invasion of France testing, you know, 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. I have a wonderful quote from my favourite source in the anarchy, which was translated beautifully by my friend Bruce Wernel, sadly no longer with us. And this is the Comte de Madav, who was a friend of Voltaire, the most urbane observer of 18th century India.

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. That's my favourite quote. it's not polite

but you know look you've got the sort of the tone of a degenerating relationship where you know the Dutch now don't seem unassadable 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 Saint O'Sagius the Golden Rock little talks 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 West 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 forward 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 Longer this was a constant source of discontent but this is really the nail in the cover because I mean the Americans are so touched by it because nobody's

giving them the time of day I mean there is a story that it was actually Washington George Washington burst into tears when he hears that they got 11 guns I mean it means so much because it's a 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, you know, these places had, you know, formed a rebellion and they were fed up with British rule. I mean, they'd had that Tea Party kind of extravagance in the harbor and all that.

But, you know, this is kind of symbolic, I guess. Britain uses it as cause a spell. like how very dare you? So this is the point that Britain declares war on the Dutch. 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. And my Keppel, my mother's family, the Keppels, went at that point from Holland to England, became English.

You know, this whole moment starts coming together because the VOC, the way it's thrown, the people involved deeply corrupt, the country's hammering 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. And 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.

And they discover 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 So okay so is the Dutch state Suddenly realizing the VOC hasn't been

Honest about its position Is this now Just ultimately insolvency How quickly does it happen And what happens as a result To the rest of the Netherlands I mean the VOC is dissolved As a result very quickly after 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 Indy Company to the day. It's the most extraordinary echo across history. And by that time, by means of the letters of Q, 1795, the Stott Holber, And in fact, 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? The Brits are completely thrilled by this, of course, yeah. If you insist, sir. And it's fascinating.

We read through the accounts, you know, when the, you know, these miss have received Colombo, Cochin, all these places they've been coveting and looking jealously at for 200 years. The British course 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 and Cochin not to be particularly interested in this letter and not even believing that it was, in fact, written by the Sotholder. So, you know, I mean, and then Colombo and all these other places fall to the British. 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 realised that they can become the biggest narco operators in history. Victorian narcos, as we called it. Yeah, can I just say, there's a producer's note here saying, don't let Willie get into APM right now, which you can take any which way you want. Because it's going to basically take up to far too much. No opium for you, Willie. I've always been very keen on opium.

No. 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. Well, they were handed to them, but the matters of, you know, the letters of Q also stipulated that we were going to get them back once the French threat was over. But that never happens. They give some of them back, but they keep Colombo, they keep the nice ones, don't they?

So we get the East Indies basically only, well, 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. 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.

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. And this is something, you know, like, again, this is where we sort of seek 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 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 these Sydney company tea that got shoved into Boston Harbor, the American Revolution. 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. 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. 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, you know, he's often described as a tycoon. That's a Dutch via Japanese word. So tycoon was the title that the Shogun used for the... for foreign envoys, the Dutch envoys.

And the Dutch brought it back from Degimer, 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 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. 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. I think we should end with it.

With Anita pronouncing the VOC one more time. Oh, God, let me get it. Yes, 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. Ferreineigde Ostendisha, Compania,

with the marvellous Michael Bass. Thank you so much, Michael. 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. Until the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnhann. And goodbye from me, William Durabult. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets?

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