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- [00:01]
Anita Anand
If you want access to bonus episodes Reading lists for every series of Empire a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
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William Durimple
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William Durimple
See store online for details. Edwina Mountbatten died in the jungles of Borneo. The year was 1960 and she was all alone. Well alone I say. Except she was surrounded by letters. And they weren't letters as you might think from her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India. No were letters from the man that she truly loved, the scourge of the British Empire, the first Prime Minister of a free India. His name was Jawaharlal Nehru. Now this fascinating love triangle is so pertinent when it comes to pre partition India politics and we're going to be delving right in in a miniseries, a four parter for you. And it's only available to members of our club. So if that isn't you, what you need to do is right away get to empirepoduk.com that's empirepoduk.com and for the price of a coffee, come join our club. And as if you needed any more incentive, let me tell you, our very special guest is the marvellous Alex von Tunzelman, who is the author of Indian Summer. So what are you waiting for? Come on. Hello and welcome to Empire with me,
- [03:11]
Anita Anand
Anita Anand, and me, William Durimple. Now, in the first two episodes of our Dutch East India Company series, we told the parallel story of two companies born like twins almost simultaneously. The English East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, and the Dutch counterpart, which Anita can pronounce, but I can't.
- [03:37]
William Durimple
Have a good chicken. Yeah, big chicken. Okay. Ferenigde Ustindische Companie. It's the voc.
- [03:44]
Anita Anand
It's the voc.
- [03:45]
William Durimple
Okay, so look through both of these episodes. This story is emphatically a Dutch victory. And by the end of episode two, we had the Treaty of Breda in 1667. And that was the closing off of Giles Milton's wonderful account, Nat's Nuts, as he likes to call it.
- [04:05]
Anita Anand
We both, and I will never be able to think of it as anything else ever again.
- [04:09]
William Durimple
Nat's Nuts. The race for nutmeg in the Spice wars between these two huge corporate entities. So the Dutch had apparently won. They held the all important super lucrative Spice Islands in what is now Indonesia. They control the nutmeg monopoly on the Banda Islands, bought with the blood of 15,000 Bandenese. The English, having been driven out of the East Indies by the dreadful massacre at Amboyna, have been left with what everyone at the time thinks is, you know, the booby prize, the dusty bin of consolation prizes, a foothold in India, a cold, muddy island at the mouth of the Hudson River. Who on earth will ever care about Manhattan? Which they then rename New York, named after the English duke whose initials you might remember, D O, Y, the Duke of York, were carved into the chests of enslaved people. So look, that was very much William. And I think. I think we should talk about this with our guest. A story of Dutch bad English heroic Dutch so, so bad English heroic Dutch, so psychopathically bad. Do not pass go, do not collect £200 straight to the flames of hell was what was coming across in the last episode. It's gonna be interesting, this one, don't you think?
- [05:26]
Anita Anand
Well, it is gonna be interesting because we see the game turnaround and this isn't through any brilliant strategy of the British. It isn't through any planning, certainly, because they also regarded their constellation prizes as completely inferior to what they'd lost. But of course, as we know, Manhattan and India are not consolation prizes. They become, in fact, the backbone of the world economy fairly quickly. And the story we're gonna tell today is the story of that turnaround. How the losing, incompetent, underfunded, English East India Company ends up as the most powerful corporation in history. The model to the corporations of our own day, like Exxon Mobil or Meta or Google. To help us with this, we are joined by my great friend, Michael Bass. Michael, hello.
- [06:28]
William Durimple
He's an anthropologist. He is a writer who spent many, many years traveling the four former outposts of the Dutch Empire from Easter island to Manhatt and from Banda Neira to Cape Town. Michael Bass is also a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the author of the book that we have been very lucky to have, a sneak preview of the Ruins of Dutch A Forgotten History. It's going to be out next year, so we are very, very lucky to sneak you in before that deadline. Welcome, Michael. But before we go anywhere, how well did I pronounce the voc Mark's out of ten?
- [07:04]
Anita Anand
Michael, come on.
- [07:05]
Michael Bass
Well, you know, obviously I'll give it 10 out of 10 if you. If you'd been Danish, but I'll. I'll do it for, you know, I'll do it, do it once here.
- [07:19]
William Durimple
That's exactly what I said.
- [07:20]
Anita Anand
That's completely different.
- [07:21]
William Durimple
Thank you. It's kind of sort of right approximate. Michael, before we get into this, can we just ask. Because, you know, I was just saying that very much when we talked about Nat's nuts, Nathaniel's nutmeg, and we were talking to Giles Mill. You lot, the Dutch, seem like psychopaths, the way you behaved. I mean, it was. I think it was even once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that, you know, our colonialism, British colonialism, was bad, but yours was so much worse. Now you're sitting in. Where are you sitting? You're in the Netherlands. Now, which city are you in?
- [07:54]
Michael Bass
Yeah, literally in Amsterdam.
- [07:55]
William Durimple
Yeah, Amsterdam. Okay, so how does that go across with your countrymen, that you guys were worse than British imperialists?
- [08:04]
Michael Bass
Well, let me say first and foremost, I mean, I've been part of advocating the removal the Jan Peterson Kunz statue from the Horen city square for years now. Because I fully agree that we were complete psychopaths, if that's what you want to call it. We were aggressive, deeply violent, genocidal in that whole phase. But the comparison with kind of sort of the more civilized English colonialism is also one that has its roots in Anglo Dutch rivalry of the 17th century. So to think of, you know, any one of them being more civilized or kind or the way. And I must say I absolutely love Charles Milton book, it's a complete page turner. But of course he presents a particular vision.
- [08:49]
Anita Anand
He is a patriotic Englishman and as a Scott, I have to say that there are moments when I bristle at the kind of clean bill of health that he gives to some of those guys. And when I pressed him in the last episode, he did come up with, with one of his British factors who these, you know, he presents as these very plucky Brits holding out against the, the evil Dutch. It turns out one of them is every bit of psychopathic and, and, you know, did a 20 page description of torturing one of the Banda island people that he'd caught. So. Yeah, that said, everywhere in the world was pretty brutal in the 17th century.
- [09:24]
Michael Bass
This is not sure.
- [09:26]
William Durimple
Yeah, but, but how do you, you know, because here. And we're going to get into the meat of this because we need to look at these pivotal years between 1667 and 1799, these sort of, this in commercial history where you've got sort of Dutch supremacy and then Dutch bankruptcy pretty much. But before we get to, I mean, when the Dutch think of their own colonialism, do they talk about it as much as we talk about it in Britain? Are there advocates who say, you know, don't apologise for your imperial past in Netherlands, be proud of it, it's part of your history, Statue wars, all of that kind of thing. Is that going on as much as it's going on here in Britain?
- [10:01]
Michael Bass
Oh, absolutely. I mean, even up to, you know, the King apologizing for the involvement of the Dutch in the trans transatlantic slave trade? Oh, very much. And certainly post George Floyd, I think we've seen kind of also speeding up in that whole process kind of a reckoning with the Dutch colonial past, which I guess Post World War II, when the Netherlands was completely devastated and licking its own war wounds, there was a sense of the colonial past that that's when the Dutch still mattered for the longest time. And that's also pretty much what I grew up with because I grew up in the city of Hoard, which was central to the spice trade. I grew up with this whole idea of the Dutch colonial past being a glorious past. The VOC was always kind of linked to a sense of grandeur. That's when we met it, I think in the last few years this has definitely changed. There have been a lot of TV shows paying attention to kind of brutal tactics that we employed in the East Indies and elsewhere on the planet. And there's slowly also growing awareness that a story is so much bigger than just the East Indies. And that's the one thing I try to capture in my own book.
- [11:14]
Anita Anand
Michael, take us to give us a panorama, if you would, of the Dutch situation in the aftermath of the Treaty of Breda. Let's look first at the Dutch and then compare it to the situation with the East India Company. What's going on with the VOC in 1668, the year after that treaty?
- [11:34]
Michael Bass
Yeah, well, this is an enormously dramatic period that we see right from a moment of incredible successes. Slowly you see that things are changing, but they change rather slowly. So what happens between 1667 and 1799 is probably one of the greatest reversals in commercial history. But if you sit a little bit with these dates, you also realize there's an entire century that we need to cover. A century plus 30 years. And it ends with the VOC becoming insolvent. But meanwhile, what you also described kind of as the hopeless, the hapless English company regarded by its rivals, the Dutch, but also the Portuguese, really, as a bit of a joke, they take off. And so what I find so striking in this is that while we often tell this as a story of commercial rivalry in Asia, it is just as much a story about Europe, about wars, finance and political transformations that reshape what becomes possible across the globe. And to understand, in a sense, to understand the British East India Company and how it eventually eclipses the VOC and other colonial endeavors in the region? You know, it cannot really be understood without taking this into consideration as well.
- [12:53]
Anita Anand
Give us a panorama. Where are the Dutch in control at this point, having kicked the Brits out of the East Indies, what we would call Indonesia. Where are the Dutch at this moment? Where are their forts? Where are their fleets?
- [13:09]
Michael Bass
Well, they're basically everywhere. So they're obviously in the East Indies and a very busy protecting that East India world, that control over monopoly, which wasn't just Natmec, it was also black pepper, which they were sourcing from Java and Sumatra. And it was also very much close. And even at that point when sort of the 1621 genocide on the Banda Islands had. Has taken kind of sort of finish. The Amboyne massacre a couple of years later, which sees the departure of the English from the East Indies. The war is hardly over. It runs for another three decades, through which they try to enforce that monopoly. It's been brilliantly captured by a friend of mine, Tristan Mostert, who is one of the great historians here in the Netherlands, writing about this as we speak. And he really calls this a spice war. And that was a whole half a century spice war that was ongoing, in which they were, of course, constantly fighting back against local parties, but also European parties making the way. But meanwhile, if you look at the whole spectrum where the Dutch were also at, they were also in the south of Japan. And soon the only ones that were allowed onto Japanese soil for close to two centuries, first at Hirado, than at Teshima.
- [14:26]
Anita Anand
Was that a source of great wealth.
- [14:28]
Michael Bass
A lot of this was part of the Inter Asia trade. The Dutch didn't have that much to offer to local parties. This is often forgotten. We wanted their spices, but we didn't really have anything they wanted from us, least of all the Japanese, who didn't even use spices in their food at the time. So the Dutch very quickly in this phase, become part of the Inter Asia trade. And that is part of the success story and part of how they maintain access to the local spice trade. They become intermediaries, they become brokers in Japan. Crucially, they managed to recruit Japanese soldiers to do their aggressive, violent bidding in the East Indies. Probably Milton Giles also spoke about this.
- [15:08]
William Durimple
Samurai swords for sale is what we sort of put it down to last time.
- [15:12]
Michael Bass
Yeah, absolutely. They were kind of. Japan had emerged out of civil war itself. And so there were a lot of unemployed soldier men that were recruited directly to work for the VOC in the East Indies. And they were central to the genocide in the Banda Islands, but also the massacre at Amboa. But otherwise, besides the south of Japan, they were at Ayutthaya in Thailand, they were in Taiwan, they had trade with China. They were obviously in Sri Lanka and India, but also at Malacca, which they had conquered from the Portuguese. And if you then kind of sort of cross into the ocean, they were using Mauritius as a replenishment posts. They were at the Cape, they were at West Africa, at what is now Senegal, but also Angola, which would soon be central to the transatlantic slave trade. And if you then cross across the ocean, they were at Brazil, later Suriname, but also the Caribbean and even New Netherlands, the Dutch colony in North America.
- [16:21]
William Durimple
What you're describing is not just an enormously powerful company entity, but also a coherent commercial world where you've got the tentacles all working together and passing interests one to another. Willi, I don't know if maybe this is a question for you. And Michael. But in comparison, how is the East India Company doing at the same time? Is it coherent? Is it as far spread? Is it as successful?
- [16:50]
Anita Anand
So the East India companies really still getting off the starter's blocks in India in the 1660s. And the ultimate source of its wealth will also be the thing which is keeping it in check at this period, which is the sheer power of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal Empire in 1660 is almost at its peak. Shah Jahan has just built the Taj Mahal. This is the great age of the, you know, the Mughal miniatures. But it's also the astonishing moment in terms of Indian textile production. This is the industry that's generating massive wealth. And I think we often forget that when we think of the Moguls. Particularly when Indians think of the Moguls, they think of sort of fluttering pigeons in palaces and Ashwari Rai dropping mangoes into the mouth of Ritik Roshan and forgetting that there's an enormous economy that's powering all this luxury and that's to do with textiles. And in time, the Brits will set themselves up as the shippers of those textiles abroad and that is the way that the English will make their money. But they're just starting off now. They've set up Madras in 1639. That's just newly founded. It's small. There's virtually no one living around the British fort. It's not a major city yet. Their other bit of luck is that as part of a wedding present, they've been given Bombay by the Portuguese, part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, along with Tangiers, of all places. And when this turns up at the English court of Charles ii, the map which is meant to be attached to it hasn't arrived. So they're all debating where bumby spelled B U M B Y is. And they all. The conclusion is reached it must be in Brazil somewhere. But none of them know. So again, Bombay, which will be such a massive thing. The great thing about Bombay, incidentally, is it's got the greatest harbour on the entire coast, west coast of India. That will be an amazing investment for the British in years to come. But it isn't yet and they haven't really established themselves yet in Calcutta. The Calcutta operation is just about to begin.
- [19:04]
William Durimple
You're looking at sort of quite a mature network compared to. And again, I urge people to go back to our East India Company series, which will hold your hand and take you through this step by step. But we're talking about almost sort of one that's in Its infancy and one that is pretty developed and kicking, the British. But when it comes to trade. Can we, Michael, just talk about, you know, what feels at least to be a Dutch golden age that is funded by pepper and nutmeg more than anything else. When we talk about the golden age, this genuine period of Dutch glory, tell us what that looked like for the people who lived in the Netherlands and for its empire. Just give us a taste of that.
- [19:48]
Michael Bass
There's been lots of studies about that, kind of, sort of trying to understand what. How wealth actually trickled down. Obviously here I live in Amsterdam and I live on an island called Ostenburger Island. This used to be a place where the VC would build its boat. So it was a massive industry itself. At home, money was flowing into the canal belts where people built the most lavish houses for themselves. So that was extraordinary. Well, it becomes a little bit less clear when you. When you look at the rural side. It has been argued that there were quite a few people who actually had stocks in this company. If you look at families like mine, and I've been trying to do a bit of research. I come from a deeply agricultural background. My father grew cauliflower. Cauliflower all his life. So did his father and his father. And all the way down.
- [20:40]
Anita Anand
Nothing wrong with cauliflowers. Michael, do not be ashamed of cauliflower growers and sort of.
- [20:44]
Michael Bass
And I often like to joke, the only reason, you know, families like IO ours ever made use of Nutwerk was to sprinkle it on top of cauliflower. It's a very Dutch way of eating cauliflower. But other than that, I don't see any evidence really, of it, you know, trickling down. But it brought lavish wealth, certainly to cities like Amsterdam, but also to the Hague and other pockets like Haarlem, obviously. Yeah.
- [21:08]
Anita Anand
The Vermeer interiors that we see in all those wonderful portraits. Is that. Is that. Are those the places where people are living at this point?
- [21:16]
Michael Bass
Absolutely. I mean, it gives you a glimpse into. Into that. And I think one of the. The fascinating things is that it's a very different kind of. Well, that you see in these paintings that you would see in similar, for instance, French paintings, which kind of have a more baroque flavor to it, like a more ostentatious flavor. A lot of this will probably come to Simon Schmas. We say schama, probably shama in English. Embarrassment of the riches. There was a certain embarrassment to it as well, because people were at the same time deeply Calvinistic. So this kind of ostentatious Display of world wasn't necessarily appreciated, so it had to be imbalanced to a degree. It needed to look proper.
- [22:00]
Anita Anand
But it is a world where even the servant girls have got pearlier.
- [22:04]
William Durimple
Well, I think it was Lent. I mean, if you believe the film, which I believe is 100% true.
- [22:10]
Michael Bass
Movies always are 100% true.
- [22:12]
William Durimple
100% true. It was the mistress's earring that was pierced into her ear.
- [22:16]
Anita Anand
We can ask Andrew Graham Dixon, because we have the great, great art historian. So he's gonna be talking to conclude this entire series.
- [22:25]
William Durimple
I'm delighted because that will tell us, you know, how this money, the poor Dutch Calvinists who are holding their noses and then, you know, spending all their money anyway, which I think people sort of manage, don't they, over time. The governance of this empire, though, Michael, I mean, what we see often with empires is if they expand very quickly, they are very hard to run. How do the Dutch navigate this? Who's in charge?
- [22:52]
Michael Bass
Who's in charge is Lord 17. This is a group of people who govern the VOC at a distance from Amsterdam. They come together, but you need to think of the VOC as also partly decentralized. I mean, it's not entirely correct to depict it that way, but it had chambers that had representations in the overall board of government. So what sat in Amsterdam at the East India House for many years? I used to have an office in that very building. It's still around. They would come together to decide the course and direction of the voc. They would govern it. They would represent the regional stakes as well. So Holder, the city I was born in, I didn't necessarily. I didn't completely grow up there, but I had a stake in this as a regional representative. So there were 17 in total, in contrast with the West India company that had 19. So the VOC was governed by what we call hedon lords. 17. And so they would issue dismiss to Batavia, which was the headquarters of the VOC in Asia.
- [24:00]
Anita Anand
It sounds rather like the kind of Venetian Republic which had their council. A similar sort of idea of these noblemen controlling a maritime republic.
- [24:11]
Michael Bass
It's not a bad comparison to make because the Netherlands really was a republic at the time. And this was the other aspect, I think, that we always need to take into account if we want to understand how all of this was governed. Governed. These lords were really also the most powerful people in the Netherlands. There was no king.
- [24:29]
William Durimple
Right. They are also sometimes making decisions which ostensibly might make sense, but in practice are disastrous. I mean, I'm just thinking about how capable they are. Because Batavia that you were talking about, which is a capital of VOC operations, I mean they do, sure, they set up a hospital, but isn't that hospital more or less a death trap? It's a bit of a disaster. They spend a fortune on making some kind of, you know, with their, their Calvinist principles on their sleeves, making a Malay Bible which is written by a man who's never been there, doesn't know the language and is basically the most expensive paperweight in all history because nobody will ever read it. So I mean, are they clever or are they stupid, the people who are doing this?
- [25:08]
Michael Bass
Oh well, you know, I mean there were most of all people who existed within the context of the 17th century. Right. Probably, as my dear friends friend Harold, who you've had in an earlier episode will agree, Batavia itself is an utter death trap.
- [25:24]
Anita Anand
It's famous for incredibly short life expectancy, wasn't it?
- [25:27]
Michael Bass
Yeah, famous being awful.
- [25:32]
Anita Anand
Whole cruise of ships sort of die within a sort of week of arrival, is that sort of thing.
- [25:36]
Michael Bass
And it was, you know, I mean when the Dutch arrive in Asia in 1596 for the first time, they do so at Bunten, which was a sultanate that existed on the kind of tip end on the western side of Java. Bunten just as much was known for it. But when they moved to Batavia and razed the old Jayakatra to the ground, they start building these canals and they kind of sort of envision a Dutch city in the east. But they obviously don't take into account all sorts of diseases that will soon run rampant and make it an astonishingly deadly place to live in. So the hospital will have been no different.
- [26:19]
William Durimple
So we can't blame them for that because it was just.
- [26:21]
Michael Bass
I wonder if London or Amsterdam had better hospitals at the time.
- [26:25]
William Durimple
But see that's also interesting in the narratives I'm sure I've read in a British history of the period. I think I wrote this down. The company that governed a continent also buried a quarter of a million of its own men in tropical soil and described the, the hospital pretty much as a toilet. You know, that it was like they'd spent all this money and it was a dreadful hospital. But you're saying actually that again may be propaganda between the two countries rooted in their rivalry.
- [26:49]
Michael Bass
Well, so, so much of it, I wouldn't necessarily call it propaganda, I would really call it marketing. To stay with the idea of companies. All of this was also marketing. They were very busy selling their story at home and abroad and not just to their own people. Obviously also in Asia. So the Brits and the Portuguese really didn't leave a moment unused to emphasize that the Dutch did not have a king and a royal house to make sure that no royal or sultan or king in Asia actually understood what the Dutch were about. So there was a lot of sort of marketing you needed to get your message across. Part of this they understood very clearly was that this story needed to be told. Why were they there? What were they coming to do? Were they trustworthy at all? I think this is another aspect which I find astonishing and fascinating and which we often lose in capturing the later phase of colonialism. When the VOC controls the planet or the EIC controls the planet, initially, they were usually a weaker party.
- [27:59]
Anita Anand
Before we move on, just quickly need to sketch the fact that while we're focusing today very much on the VOC and the east, there is a whole colonial Dutch world also that encompasses West Africa, the Caribbean, Suriname, the Guyanas. Tell us quickly, very quickly about that.
- [28:17]
Michael Bass
So roughly two decades after the VOC has been established, the Dutch established something called the wic, the West India Company. And a bit like what the Iberians did with the Treaty of Trdesia, they cut the planet in half. They give the right of one half of the planet to the VOC and the other half they hand over to the WIC to govern. So this also very quickly involved the transatlantic slave trade. A bit of a puzzle is why they didn't establish this company from the onset, because they were already active in the Americas and part of this had to do with a 12 year truce. So they brokered a peace treaty with the Spanish Habsburgians. The Dutch Republic had emerged out of war, out of revolt with the Spanish Habsburgian rule. They had established a Protestant nation in its place, and a peace treaty had been concluded. Had the Dutch sailed out onto the Atlantic and onto the Americas, would have brought them again into war with the Spanish and the Portuguese and would have just kind of annulled the treaty. So they wait for the 12 year truce to expire and then establish the West India Company in 1621. And this one is given the monopoly over trade in the Atlantic region. And very sweet, swiftly establishes himself across West Africa. So at Senegal, at Grure, the island in front of Dakar, but more importantly at Ghana and in what is now Angola, at various posts there. And this comes to be linked to what they envision for Brazil, which they eventually take over northeastern Brazil from the Portuguese and for roughly two decades is run as the Dutch Brazil. So if you look at the transatlantic World that's really one that existed at two sides of the Atlantic. Once Dutch Brazil has been lost, they envision a second Dutch Brazil at Suriname. And by the time they've already established a number of colonies adjacent to what is now Suriname, so what is now Guiana used to be British Guiana. Before that basically were three separate colonies. And then further up, of course, you have all the kind of spring cling of islands in the Caribbean, what we now call the ABC islands, Aruba, Borneo and Curnacao. And then further up the other three, among which Saint Astagius, which I believe we'll come to later.
- [30:55]
William Durimple
So, Michael, I mean, you know, you have a monopoly involving that much territory. How do you maintain the monopoly? How do you make sure, and this is, to use the parlance of the time, that the natives remain in order that your shipments are not attacked by particularly jealous British pirates? Because when we did the East India Company, we knew that a lot of that was going on. What is the maintenance structure that goes on?
- [31:17]
Michael Bass
Well, you know, I mean, inherently shaky. So, you know, even in Asia, if you think of Batavia as the unquestioned center of power, you start realizing when you read through that history, that was never quite a case. For one, it takes about six months for any missing from Amsterdam to reach Batavia. So the governor general in Batavia had. He was basically free to do whatever he wanted. I mean, the VOC at home in Amsterdam would regularly complain about this. So when Kuhn brought the Banda Islands under control in 1621, the next year, when Amsterdam learned of what had happened, they did say, could you have done this with a little less violence? But, you know, it had already happened. And this was basically throughout the 17th century, the reality of the matter. But at the same time, Batavia wasn't necessarily the only place where decisions were made. In places like Cochin on the Malabar coast, but also in Colombo, officials and merchants often pursue their own priorities and sometimes markedly diverging from what was decided in Batavia. And even moments, for instance, when. When Colombo is imagined as an alternative center of gravity for the voc, not least because nobody liked living in Batavia. So they thought maybe Colombia offers better kind of a better place to do that.
- [32:40]
William Durimple
I mean, it sounds like when you have different interests and such a lack of communication, it is fertile ground for corruption. Because if you have somebody pursuing their own agenda, often that agenda is all about self enrichment. So all of this monopoly that the Dutch have seems to be based on this wobbly little seed called Nutme. But that is not a very stable place to be. Join us after the break. Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep
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William Durimple
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William Durimple
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- [34:09]
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- [34:40]
William Durimple
Welcome back. So, Michael, by the 1780s, nutmeg, which is, you know, the base for all of this commercial power that the Dutch have, it starts popping up in other places in the world.
- [34:53]
Michael Bass
Yeah, absolutely. The monopoly literally rested on the idea that especially nutmeg only grew on four little islands that they could control. It was always a little different for some of the other spices, but especially nutmeg was only on four islands.
- [35:08]
Anita Anand
It liked this very volcanic soil, didn't it? It was a very needy plant.
- [35:12]
Michael Bass
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the Bandinese had always made sure also to maintain that monopoly. But then in the late 1760s, the French horticulturist, Pierre Poivre, which means Peter Pepper.
- [35:27]
William Durimple
Fantastic.
- [35:28]
Michael Bass
So, yeah, so he's working out of Mauritius, right. And he manages to acquire a couple of these nutmeg plants, seedlings really, from the Banda Islands, and he transplants them into French controlled territories in the Indiana Ocean.
- [35:42]
Anita Anand
It's a wonderful. You just see the movie of this, this guy with two little pot plants that are going to change the history of the world. Yeah.
- [35:49]
Michael Bass
You know, this is in a sense part of a broader pattern of generally clandestine botanical transfer through which European powers begin to loosen the Dutch grip on these crops. But by that time, in a sense, already the centrality of these spices has declined to the whole operation They've, they've been losing value, really. They no longer have the kind of value they had in the beginning. Then you see figures like Joseph Banks facilitate the movement of spice plants into the Caribbean, where they begin to take root in places like Granada. So suddenly you get this nutmeg everywhere. And the same goes for a lot of these other kind of crops that once were easy to control, but kind of that momentum is simply gone.
- [36:35]
William Durimple
And if you, you know, just are thinking, oh, I've heard that name Joseph Banks before. You did hear him when we did our Captain Cook episode. So we'll stick that episode in our show notes and it'll be in our newsletter as well. But you have to be a member of the club empirepod uk.com empirepod uk.com to get all of that very good stuff. So you've got the Dutch losing their grip on their monopoly. But elsewhere in the world, the other three letter moniker, eic, the East India Company is having a very different fortune. Willi, just remind us what they're up to.
- [37:06]
Anita Anand
I said before how incredibly powerful the Moguls were. They controlled not only almost all of India, they controlled Bangladesh, Pakistan, most of Afghanistan and a sliver of Iran. And they keep pretty tight ship. They do not let these trading companies do more than set up undefended factories. They keep a close eye on these guys. They really are very uninterested. When the British sent an ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to the court in Agra, all that Jahangir wants to know about is what beer tastes like and how strong it is. He's not interested in giving the British their trading rights. And we see this extraordinary moment of hubris in a very brief Anglo Mughal War in 1686. And this guy, Josiah Child, who thinks he can take on the Mughals, has a shot and it's a catastrophe. The Brits are immediately rounded up, shoved in prison, loaded with chains. All their privileges are taken away and they have to literally go on their knees to beg to continue their operations. And they are allowed to do so out of the, the benign benevolence of the Moguls. And they have to say thank you and, and behave themselves. But then in 1707, the Emperor Aurangzeb dies and everything changes. Within a decade or two, the Mughal Empire has almost collapsed. It's like a mirror being thrown off the top of a building and shattering into a thousand pieces. And in 1739, we did this on an earlier episode too. Nader Shah turns up, loots the Mughal capital, takes away the Koh I noor leaving the Moguls unable to pay their civil service, unable to pay their army. So there's a complete turnaround. And the two main beneficiaries, beneficiaries of this in the long term are the two rival companies now operating in India, the French and the English. And very quickly the French and English set themselves up as mercenary organizations. They rent out their new modern armies to people that want to beat up the Moguls and take over chunks of their territory. And we see a completely different model of operation. Where they had begun traders sitting in factories unarmed on the coast, just exporting Mogul goods. Now they're actually running military operations, lending their troops out and taking over chunks of territory. In 1740s, you get the Carnatic wars, which the British see off the French East India Company. And then most dramatically of all, the Battle of Plassey. The East India Company defeats the the mogul governor in 1757 of Bengal, Surajah Dalla is defeated and the British seize this place, which is the equivalent at this point of seizing Silicon Valley. Bengal today isn't considered particularly rich, but in the 18th century, it is the honey pot. It's where all the money is being made, where all the textiles are being milled. A million looms. It's that capital, Bengal, which provides the money, money for the Brits to begin to take over everything else. So we have a dramatic turnaround just as the Dutch monopoly is giving way and nutmeg plants are turning up and all these spices are becoming widely available and the price is sinking very quickly as a result from these enormous profits that were being made in the 1600s. The amounts of money to be made in spices goes right down. And the Brits have got a completely different, different model now. They're just taking over great chunks of territory and being paid by rulers to rent their armies and just taxing great chunks of very rich areas of India.
- [40:50]
William Durimple
Right, so. But this sort of, you know, I think when you have it in square dancing, isn't it a dozy day where you sort of just change your positions?
- [40:57]
Anita Anand
I didn't know you did square dancing.
- [41:00]
William Durimple
Well, I'm a woman of great mystery. Great mystery wrapped in an enigma. That's me, Michael. From the Dutch perspective, you know, they must have been watching with enormous interest. And also pen and paper at the quill and paper at the ready, trying to understand what it is that the EIC did wrong and did right and learned from it. I mean, just talk about the kind of conversations that are going on within the VOC while All of this is happening.
- [41:22]
Michael Bass
Well, you know, by that point, I mean, the profits from the spice trade have already lessened. And it's becoming clear to many who are involved in the operations that, you know, what the. The Dutch are trying to maintain overseas is becoming increasingly more expensive and the spices are simply no longer able to pay for all of that. But Europe itself is also changing at the same time. So the position of the Dutch Republic itself is weakening. Faced with Anglo Franco rivalry and all sorts of developments in Europe. So it's coming as them from both sides. If I go back to a little bit, what William said about the Battle of Plassey, that was indeed a decisive shift, but it's above all an Indian story, of course. So first, this is happening in India. This isn't really having much consequences for the operations of East Indies. It does resonate with developments in Sri Lanka. Everybody is noticing the Dutch decline. Obviously, the Dutch might has been firmly tested already in Europe itself. There have been a successive wave of Anglo Dutch wars. The third one ended disastrously for the Dutch Republic with the invasion of France, testing the borders of the Dutch Republic. You have all these kind of developments at home which are really taxing on the Republic and as a result, also taxing on what the Dutch can do abroad and how they can maintain this system. So in a sense, what you see is people are noticing that the rot has set in that this model cannot be maintained.
- [43:09]
Anita Anand
I have a wonderful quote from my favorite source in the Anarchy, which was translated beautifully by my friend Bruce Whannell, sadly no longer with us. And this is the Comte de Medave, who was a friend of Voltaire and this the most urbane observer of 18th century India. And he writes at this point, exactly at this moment when everything's beginning to turn in the favor of the Brits and against the Dutch. He says the trade of the Mughal Empire was divided at the time between two national groups, the French and the English, for the Dutch had now degenerated into base, avaricious toads squatting on their heaps of gold and spices. That's my favorite quote.
- [43:51]
William Durimple
It's not polite, but, you know, look, you've got the sort of the tone of a degenerating relationship where the Dutch now don't seem unassailable. Michael, you then have a war. And it's not the first, not second, not third. It's the Fourth Anglo Dutch War, which starts in 1780, which will rage for four years. And this is a product of a really strange series of events. You've got A mixture of the American Revolution, Dutch commercial opportunism, and an extraordinary political boldness on a tiny Caribbean island. This is such a good story. Tell us about that.
- [44:29]
Michael Bass
Well, this is Saint Eustachius, the Golden Rock little talks about. And it's still a tiny island, but at the time, one of these kind of free trade places that had made some people phenomenally wealthy. It was on all sorts of trade routes. So it was pretty important to the Western Indies enterprise. And you have this governor who's the first to kind of acknowledge American independence with a salute to a ship. And this really, really pisses off the British at that point because they see it as a sign of betrayal. It's absolutely fascinating how much this sense of betrayal has always characterized Anglo Dutch relations for pretty much two centuries now, back and forward kind of descends like we could have been natural allies, but we keep stabbing each other in the back. And from both sides, Amsterdam and London, this was a constant source of discontent. But this is really the nail in
- [45:31]
William Durimple
the COVID because, I mean, the Americans are so touched by it because nobody's giving them the time of day. I mean, there is a story that it was actually George Washington bursts into tears when he hears that they got 11 guns. I mean, it means so much because it's the start of America's place in the world, right?
- [45:49]
Michael Bass
Absolutely. Well, it's kind of sort of. It would have happened anyway. I mean, if this governor hadn't done it, probably somebody else at some point would. I mean, these were simply the dynamics in North America at the time. I mean, these places had formed a rebellion and they were fed up with British rule. I mean, they'd had that tea party kind of extravaganza in the harbor and all that. But this is kind of sort of symbolic.
- [46:16]
William Durimple
I guess Britain uses it as causa spell, like, how very dare you. So this is. This is the point that Britain declares war on the Dutch.
- [46:22]
Michael Bass
Yeah, and this is kind of. You could also read this as kind of revenge for a whole set of other felt betrayals that have been back and forth, possibly even the Glorious Revolution, when the Dutch had decided to invade England and put a Dutch king on the English throne a century earlier.
- [46:41]
Anita Anand
And my Keppel, my mother's family, the Keppels, went at that point from Holland to England, became English.
- [46:48]
Michael Bass
You know, this whole moment starts coming together because the voc, the way it's run, the people involved, deeply corrupt, the countries hemorrhaging money, have been kind of shown that it was unable to defend its territory anymore. So that literally with the voc, the Dutch Republic also comes to an end.
- [47:06]
Anita Anand
And this is the point, Michael, is the it that it turns out that the VOC has been cooking its books. They begin to look at the accounts and they discover that all is not well.
- [47:22]
William Durimple
It's such a corporate story, isn't it? It's such a corporate corruption story. You could run it in today's papers. Some of these big companies.
- [47:29]
Michael Bass
Well, basically, I mean, you know, so 1795, French Revolutionary Forces invade the Netherlands and establish the Batavian Republic, which is
- [47:40]
Anita Anand
a kind of French puppet, isn't it, really?
- [47:42]
Michael Bass
It really was a French puppet state, but it was on invitation of the Dutch themselves. The republicans, the ones that were against the House of Orange, had fled to France and, you know, sought information on how to. How to establish a long French model, a different kind of state. So the Batavian Republic is established 1795,
- [48:04]
Anita Anand
and they discover that period that the VOC has been hiding. 85 million guilders of debt, 600 million euros.
- [48:15]
Michael Bass
Yeah. Incredible, isn't it? And it all falls to the Dutch state. So it really cripples the Dutch state from the onset. Yeah.
- [48:22]
William Durimple
So, okay, so is the Dutch state suddenly realizing the VOC hasn't been honest about its position? Is this now just ultimately insolvency? How quickly does it happen and what happens as a result to the rest of the Netherlands?
- [48:38]
Michael Bass
I mean, the VOC is dissolved as a result, very quickly after that, extraordinarily,
- [48:44]
Anita Anand
and this is one of the nice things of doing the EIC and the VOC in parallel. The VOC is dissolved on December 31, 1799, exactly 200 years after the charter was awarded to the East India Company. To the day, it's the most extraordinary echo across history.
- [49:06]
Michael Bass
And by that time, by means of the letters of q. 1795, the stadtholder, in effect, the king, although he's not a king in the Netherlands, but he, member of the House of Orange, flees to England, seeks protection of the British crown, and says, will you please take possession of Dutch territories around the world and protect them from French invasion?
- [49:34]
Anita Anand
The Brits are completely thrilled by this, of course. Yeah, if you insist, sir.
- [49:40]
Michael Bass
And it's. It's fascinating. You read through the accounts, you know, when the, you know, these missive received
- [49:45]
Anita Anand
Colombo, Cochin, all these places they've been coveting and looking jealously at for 200 years.
- [49:51]
Michael Bass
The British, course, don't send an email. It's certainly not, you know, a nicely addressed letter. They come with an army because they kind of expect the governors in Colombo, in Cochin, not to be particularly interested in this letter, not even even believing that it was in fact written by the Stadtholders. So, you know, I mean, and then Colombo and all these other places fall to the British.
- [50:15]
Anita Anand
And exactly at the same moment as that is going on, the Brits are discovering a major new source of income for them, which is, of course, we've done a whole series on this opium. This is the point when suddenly they realize that they could become the biggest narco operation operators in history. Victoria narcos, as we called it.
- [50:34]
William Durimple
Yeah. Can I just say, there's a producer's note here saying, don't let Willy get into APM right now, but you can take any which way you want because it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna basically take up far too much. No opium for you, Willy?
- [50:46]
Anita Anand
I've always been very keen on opium.
- [50:48]
William Durimple
No. So, Michael, once you've got, you know, the implosion of the voc, what happens to all the territories that it ran with such an iron fist?
- [50:58]
Michael Bass
Well, the British basically take that, although handed to them by the matters of, you know, the letters of Q also stipulated that we were going to get them back once the French threat was over, but that never happens.
- [51:10]
Anita Anand
They give some of them back, but they keep Colombo, they keep the nice ones.
- [51:14]
Michael Bass
So we get the East Indies basically, only. Well, only Indonesia. That's a bit much. And, you know, sort of the whole kind of model the Dutch then adopt is more in line to what the British have done in India. So it becomes much more territorial than it was before. But indeed what remains is a sprinkling of islands in the Caribbean, These six islands which are still nominally part of the Netherlands. And then you have Suriname, which became independent only in 1975, and Indonesia, and that is what remains. But the whole system changes and indeed becomes much more territorial than it was was before.
- [51:56]
Anita Anand
And this is the British innovation. They've created something that's not quite a company, not quite a state. It is this terrible, monstrous sort of science fiction creature, a company state which exists only to suck the resources out of the captured state for the profit of shareholders living an ocean away across the ocean. And this is something like, I mean, again, this is where we sort of seek into now the power of modern tech companies. Because the eic, the East India Company, has become this enormous octopus engulfing the globe. It goes as far as China on one way, where it's selling opium, it's buying tea, it's selling tea to India, to Europe, and also, of course, it's this India Company tea that got shoved into Boston harbor, the American Revolution. And this company is making vast sums of money at exactly the moment that its Dutch rival has collapsed and is no more. With every passing year, as we see Meta and Apple and X and Elon Musk become more and more powerful, with annual turnovers greater than the GDPs of. Of whole swathes of nations put together, it's at this point that you can't help noticing how incredibly pertinent this history is to today.
- [53:25]
William Durimple
Can I just say, I mean, it's so great that you mentioned Elon Musk because we're coming to the end of our time together, but, you know, he's often described as a tycoon. That's a Dutch via Japanese word. So tycoon was the title that the shogun used for foreign envoys, the Dutch envoys, and the Dutch brought it back from Dejima, and it only enters English in the 1850s via the VOC. And then since we're at it, we're just about to close. But no such thing as a free lunch. You know, everyone says, oh, it's a Milton Friedman thing. That's a Dutch thing as well, because it was. The taverns would offer free lunches to the VOC sailors, but of course, they would have to drink a certain amount and then they would get into trouble, so they would pay for it one way or the other. So no such thing as a free lunch apparently comes from you. Dutch. Isn't that great?
- [54:16]
Michael Bass
Yes. And that is the absolute fascinating thing, is that things like Dutch courage, Dutch uncle and going Dutch are actually all British inventions. So.
- [54:26]
William Durimple
Yeah, listen, it's been a delight. You are authentically Dutch. I mean, you know, feel free to write in with green crayon if you think my examples are not right. I know you will.
- [54:36]
Anita Anand
I think we should end with Anita pronouncing the VOC one more time.
- [54:41]
William Durimple
Yes, I know. I'd be very happy to do it. Right, everyone, put your crash helmets on. I'm just going to take a run at it. Ready, Michael? With huge apologies, but here we go with the marvelous Michael Bur. Thank you so much, Michael.
- [54:57]
Anita Anand
Next week, we've got the wonderful Andrew Graham Dixon on Vermeer for this closing episode. And we're going to go to the Girl with the Pearl Earring next, so
- [55:07]
William Durimple
look forward to that till the next time we meet. It is goodbye from me, Anita Arnan,
- [55:13]
Anita Anand
and goodbye from me, William Durable. Throughout history, influence has needed scale, but scale only matters when it travels through routes people can trust. Now, empire sits within Goal Hanger, the independent UK network behind the Rest Is Politics, the Rest Is Football, and I believe there's even one called the Rest Is History. Now across the network, there are over 65 million full episode streams every month. But scaly is only the beginning. What matters is whether people stay with the conversation. Goal Hanger audiences do with an average listen time of over 40 minutes, and 68% of GoHanger listeners say they've actually taken action after hearing an ad, nearly double the industry average. For the right partner, Goal Hanger is not just something to be heard, it's a credible route to audiences already listening, watching and crucially, paying attention. To find out more, email partnership ships@gohanger.com did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees. Get ahead of summer with custom window treatments like solar roller shades from blinds.com and save up to 45% off during the Memorial Day Early Access sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you free samples, real design experts and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 45% off site with wide Right now during the Early Access Memorial day sale@blinds.com Rules and restrictions apply.
- [56:53]
Michael Bass
You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that
- [56:58]
Anita Anand
angry ball of fire on mute.
- [57:00]
Michael Bass
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- [57:17]
Anita Anand
You're welcome, Columbia.
- [57:19]
Michael Bass
Engineered for whatever.