Amsterdam had already been a reasonably important port before the big changes of the 15 nineties that i mentioned. The netherlands is important as a country because it doesn't have much of an agricultural base. And so amsterdam became a place which had amazing amounts of capital expertise but also contacts all over the place, which helped to make the trade possible. Between between he 15 nineties and the middle of the seventeenth century, grew by three to four times.
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.