The east india company had with a finger nail on india for my long time. And japan kept them out of japan. They built them a little island, you could say that you couldn't come into japan at all. But china was the big, excuse me, ch China was the big one. That was the big gold and china, i love the disdain of china. We had nothing they wanted at all except gold and silver,. If they had a mind to take it that afternoon. So there was this big thing there that was part of the part of the equation. How did it fit in? Can't be as crudely as i said.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC, known in English as the Dutch East India Company. The VOC dominated the spice trade between Asia and Europe for two hundred years, with the British East India Company a distant second. At its peak, the VOC had a virtual monopoly on nutmeg, mace, cloves and cinnamon, displacing the Portuguese and excluding the British, and were the only European traders allowed access to Japan.
With
Anne Goldgar
Reader in Early Modern European History at King's College London
Chris Nierstrasz
Lecturer in Global History at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, formerly at the University of Warwick
And
Helen Paul
Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton
Producer: Simon Tillotson.