There's still a lot of concern about the east india trades, draining europe of gold and silver at a time of commodity money. As the ships get bigger and bigger, it makes more and more sense to go by sea. I mean, it's more likely that yo're goig to get the carriage trade a bit like the cargo ships of to day. You can take an awful lot by sea. And so there's that. What the overland trade? The overland trade the silk road and so on. It's not commensuratey t those routes, because the it's, there's only so much you can take on poor roads, really. So certainly,
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.