A blue-and-white Japanese porcelain plate made for the Dutch East India Company, with its VOC monogram
Plate with Monogram of the Dutch East India Company, ca. 1660
Marked Amsterdam

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The East India Companies

English and Dutch trading companies, founded in 1600 and 1602, sent ships to Asia for spices, cotton, tea and silk. The Dutch company ruled much of Indonesia; the English one came to rule much of India with its own army.

Place
Amsterdam · London · Batavia (Jakarta) · The Banda Islands · CalcuttaEurope, Asia
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Amsterdam
  2. London
  3. Batavia (Jakarta)
  4. The Banda Islands
  5. Calcutta
  1. IShares and ships
  2. IISpices and violence in the Banda Islands
  3. IIIBatavia
  4. IVCalico and cotton
  5. VPlassey and a company that ruled
  6. VIThe end of the companies

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Jan Pieterszoon Coen
  • Robert Clive
  • Siraj ud-Daulah

Objects

  • VOC share certificates
  • Chintz textiles
  • The Batavia shipwreck

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1600 to 1874. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?