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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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The Netherlands is confronting its colonial history. It’s time for India to do the same

The fact remains that the VOC did not introduce debt bondage or human trafficking to the Coromandel Coast. It expanded and exploited existing systems.

The University of Leiden in the Netherlands returning a set of Chola-period copper plates raises an interesting question in India. What, precisely, did the Dutch have to do with India? In the crowded theatre of the subcontinent’s colonial history, the Dutch East India Company—the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC—barely features.

School curricula teach us the British East India Company, Robert Clive and the battles of Plassey and Buxar. Perhaps a side note on Dupleix and the French in Pondicherry. X, meanwhile, gives us never-ending atrocities committed by the Portuguese in Goa. Meanwhile the Dutch, if they appear at all, are a footnote. They appear abruptly, to lose a battle to King Marthanda Varma of Travancore, and immediately disappear.

But for nearly a century, the VOC was the pre-eminent power in Asia, bringing Indian fashions to Europe, Southeast Asian spices to India, and scattering often-enslaved Indians from colonies in South Africa to the farthest reaches of the Indonesian archipelago. The VOC’s networks arguably laid the basis for the British Raj’s iron grip on the Coromandel Coast, which involved the industrial-scale transport of indentured Indians across the planet.

In a statement shared with me, Her Excellency Marisa Gerards, the Netherlands Ambassador to India, said that “An open dialogue on the return of objects that were taken during the colonial era is part of a critical reflection on our past, and the basis for solid cultural cooperation in the present and future.”

If India is to participate in an equally-open and confident dialogue about the colonial era, we need to not only understand the VOC, but to challenge the amnesia that surrounds our own involvement in perpetuating colonial legacies.

Also read: Leiden Plates returned by Netherlands aren’t for ASI storerooms. They belong at Nagapattinam

The merchant-warriors

The VOC was founded in 1602 in the Dutch Republic, granting it a 21-year monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. It was also given the right to wage war, conclude treaties, build fortresses, and administer justice. By this point, both Spain and Portugal had their own colonial empires. Spain, in fact, ruled a chunk of the Netherlands: The independent Dutch Republic had seceded from the Spanish Empire only a few decades prior.

From the outset, the VOC was a joint-stock company—indeed, the world’s first. Historians George Winius and Marcus Vink, in their book The Merchant-Warrior Pacified, describe it as a merchant-warrior apparatus that combined commercial extraction with military coercion. An imperial system by design, owned by citizens of the Dutch Republic, with shares traded on the Amsterdam stock exchange. It was to be the first multinational corporation, and it ran the 17th century’s most profitable colonial operation in Asia for nearly a hundred years.

The VOC’s profits rested on the Indonesian spice trade, which, in turn, centred on Indian cotton textiles. In 1612, VOC navigator Hendrik Brouwer described the Coromandel Coast as “the left arm of the Moluccas” (the spice-producing Indonesian archipelago).

Indonesian producers of nutmeg, cloves, and mace had........

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