Henry Hudson

In 2006, the Dutch Prime Minister, Balkenende, had to apologize publicly to Surinamese groups for saying that The Netherlands should be proud of its so-called VOC-mentality, named after the famous Dutch East India Company (VOC), a trading company from the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s. It’s a pity that in this nod toward political correctness, the good has been dispensed along with the bad; we can still learn a great deal – even today – from the VOC, the world’s first multinational.

Henry_Hudson arrived in 1609 in America and founded New York

Luckily, the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in America is being celebrated in both the Netherlands and the US this year. All of the VOC’s power lay in the hands of a collective: the Assembly of the Lords Seventeen. Nobody had the last word and there was no single final authority. It was the start of successful decision-making by consensus, the so-called polder model.

With a worldwide supply chain network, the VOC controlled practically all trade and shipping to Asia for two centuries. It built numerous outposts along the way, including on the Cape Peninsula (now Cape Town) and in Batavia (now Jakarta). The VOC never engaged in colonisation, remaining instead, in the words of Dutch historian Geert Mak, ‘a trading company: powerful and forceful, to be sure, but nevertheless a business, which had just happened to set up operations on the edges of Africa and the Indonesian Archipelago’. The Dutch ability to adapt to the local culture enabled the VOC to become the only trading company to obtain a trading post on the Japanese island of Dejima.

The Dutch were also far ahead of their time from a financial perspective. Amsterdam ship owners held shares in dozens of ships, instead of being sole owners. During the VOC years, Amsterdam was the financial capital of the world. In 1609, two institutions crucial to trade were established there: a commodity exchange, a unique trading place for all merchants, and an exchange bank, which profoundly modernised the international flow of money by converting every conceivable currency into indexed certificates. These financial institutions adeptly served the needs of global trade and shipping: supply chain and finance of which we can be proud.

Martijn Lofvers, Editor-in-Chief & Publisher Supply Chain Magazine
martijn.lofvers@springer.com