Dutch chartered company responsible for trade and colonization in the New World (1621–1792)
Not to be confused with Dutch East India Company.
Dutch West India Company
Company flag
Native name
Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie
Company type
Chartered company
Founded
3 June 1621 (1621-06-03)
Founder
Joannes de Laet
Defunct
1 January 1792 (1792-01-01)
Headquarters
Dutch Republic
Number of locations
5 (Amsterdam, Hoorn, Rotterdam, Groningen and Middelburg)
Key people
Heeren XIX
Products
Shipping slaves, administrators, farmers and soldiers, and returning with salt, beaver skin, silver, sugar, tobacco, coffee, cochineal, and campeche- and letterwood
The Dutch West India Company or WIC (Dutch: Westindische Compagnie) Dutch pronunciation:[ʋɛstˈɪndisəkɔmpɑˈɲi] was a chartered company of Dutch merchants as well as foreign investors, formally known as GWC (Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie; English: Chartered West India Company). Among its founders were Reynier Pauw, Willem Usselincx (1567–1647) and Jessé de Forest (1576–1624).[1] On 3 June 1621, it was granted a charter for a trade monopoly in the Dutch West Indies by the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and given jurisdiction over Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.
The area where the company could operate consisted of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and ended east of the Maluku Islands, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas. The intended purpose of the charter was to eliminate competition, particularly Spanish or Portuguese, between the various trading posts established by the merchants. The company became instrumental in the largely ephemeral Dutch colonization of the Americas (including New Netherland) in the seventeenth century.
From 1624 to 1654, in the context of the Dutch–Portuguese War, the GWC held Portuguese territory in northeast Brazil, but they were ousted from Dutch Brazil following fierce resistance.[2] After several reversals, the GWC reorganized and a new charter was granted in 1675, largely on the strength in the Atlantic slave trade. This "new" version lasted for more than a century, until after the Fourth Anglo–Dutch War, during which it lost most of its assets.
^Franklin J. Jameson (1887). Willem Usselinx, Founder of the Dutch and Swedish West India Companies. Ryan Gregory University, New York.
^Charles R. Boxer, 'The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654'. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1957.
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