The Company
The VOC, founded in 1602, was for a century the largest commercial enterprise in the world, and India was a component of a system centred on the spice islands of Indonesia. Indian cotton textiles were the currency with which spices were bought in the archipelago, and the Dutch settlements on the Coromandel coast and in Bengal existed chiefly to secure that cloth.
The Dutch took Cochin from the Portuguese in 1663 and held the Malabar pepper coast, and their factories at Pulicat, Nagapattinam, Chinsurah and Surat handled textiles, saltpetre, indigo and opium.
Decline
The reverse at Colachel in 1741, where Marthanda Varma of Travancore defeated a Dutch expedition and captured its commander, ended Dutch ambitions in Kerala. The wider decline was structural: the VOC was overextended, corrupt in its later decades, and outcompeted by the British and French in India. It went bankrupt in 1799.
The remaining Indian settlements passed to Britain under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, in which the Dutch exchanged their Indian holdings for British claims in Sumatra.
The Dutch left less on the ground in India than the Portuguese or French — a cemetery at Pulicat, a fort at Sadras, the Dutch Palace at Mattancherry — but their archives are one of the richest sources for the economic history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India, recording prices, weaving villages, harvests and shipping in detail no Indian source matches.
Further reading
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.