Around 1600, two companies were set up in early modern Europe expressly to trade with and ship goods to and from Europe and Asia. They were the English East India Company (EIC) in 1600 and the Dutch (United) East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, abbreviated to VOC) two years later in 1602. Both companies eventually grew into enormous businesses. Most of the growth in the English Company was in the eighteenth century. In contrast, the Dutch Company grew exponentially almost immediately after its foundation in the seventeenth century. Both Companies have attracted considerable attention in modern historiography. By and large, historians of the Dutch Company have concentrated on the seventeenth century as this was the period in which the Dutch Republic played a prominent role in both Europe and the rest of the world. Naturally, in their work, historians have not neglected the all-important maritime history of this century. The VOC or the Company – as the Dutch Company will be referred to throughout the rest of this book – falls into this category. The gradual establishment of a huge overseas business in Asia and South Africa throughout the course of the century is a spectacular story, thrown into even sharper relief when the triumphs of the VOC are compared to the activities of the EIC and other East India companies in France, Sweden and Denmark.

Despite its spectacular growth and power in the seventeenth century, the VOC only really reached its peak as a trading and shipping company in the following century. During the eighteenth century, a total of 2,957 outward-bound voyages to Asia were made against 2,369 homeward-bound voyages to the Dutch Republic. Many hundreds of different commanders were put in charge of these voyages. In the eighteenth century the quantities of gold and silver dispatched to Asia for the purchase of wares tripled and the value of the Asian goods bought for the European market rose by 250 per cent. The conspicuous growth in the shipping sector would have been obvious to any contemporary inhabitant of the port cities. Although at most twenty ships sailed to Asia per year in the seventeenth century, in the period 1720–1740 this number rose to as many as thirty-seven or thirty-eight, almost double that in the seventeenth century.