The duches senior company is not the only one with a monopoly, which sounds strange, but they all had a monopoly to sell those acient goods in their own country. So it also returns to the first question that you gave me. These monopolies, they are very much the european thing. And if you move towards asia, you can see that those monopolies don't really make sense. Only in the case of small spices, and to a certain extent, pepper, there's much more control of the europeans. But for the rest,. when we start evolving, so they move beyond spices, and they movei towar in into tea and textiles
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.