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The Dutch West India Company was a chartered company of Dutch merchants as well as foreign investors. Among its founders was Willem Usselincx (1567–1647) and Jessé de Forest (1576–1624). 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 and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and the eastern part of New Guinea. 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 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.
The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company, was a megacorporation founded by a government-directed amalgamation of several rival Dutch trading companies (voorcompagnieën) in the early 17th century. It was established on 20 March 1602, as a chartered company to trade with Mughal India during the period of proto-industrialization, from which 50% of textiles and 80% of silks were imported, chiefly from its most developed region known as Bengal Subah. In addition, the company traded with Indianised Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted it a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade. It has been often labelled a trading company or sometimes a shipping company. However, the VOC was in fact a proto-conglomerate, diversifying into multiple commercial and industrial activities such as international trade, shipbuilding, and both production and trade of East Indian spices, Indonesian coffee, Formosan sugarcane, and South African wine. The company was a transcontinental employer and a corporate pioneer of outward foreign direct investment at the dawn of modern capitalism. In the early 1600s, by widely issuing bonds and shares of stock to the general public, VOC became the world's first formally listed public company.
The East India Company (EIC), also known as the Honourable East India Company (HEIC), East India Trading Company (EITC), the English East India Company or the British East India Company, and informally known as John Company, Company Bahadur, or simply The Company, was an English and later British joint-stock company. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies, and later with Qing China. The company ended up seizing control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent, colonised parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong after the First Opium War, and maintained trading posts and colonies in the Middle Eastern Gulf called Persian Gulf Residencies.
The asiento was a short-term loan or debt contract, of about one to four years, signed between the Spanish crown and a banker or a small group of bankers ("asentistas") against future crown revenues. Between the early 16th and the mid-18th century, asientos were used by the Spanish treasurer to adjust short-term imbalances between revenues and expenditures. The sovereign promised to repay the principal of the loan plus interest. The participant bankers in Seville, Lisbon, Genoa and Amsterdam, in turn, drew on the profits and direct investments obtained from a large number of Atlantic merchants. In exchange for a set of scheduled payments, merchants and financiers were given the right to collect relevant taxes or oversee the trade in those commodities that fell under the monarch's prerogative and included after peace treaties were signed. In this way a set of merchants received the monopoly on tobacco, salt, sugar and cacao on a trade route from the West Indies, accompanied by licenses to export silver from Spain to Northern Europe. A new asiento was the safest means to get their money back and cash their arrears.
The Royal African Company (RAC) was an English mercantile (trading) company set up in 1660 by the royal Stuart family and City of London merchants to trade along the west coast of Africa. It was led by the Duke of York, who was the brother of Charles II and later took the throne as James II. It shipped more African slaves to the Americas than any other institution in the history of the Atlantic slave trade.
Cape Coast Castle is one of about forty "slave castles", or large commercial forts, built on the Gold Coast of West Africa by European traders. It was originally a Portuguese "feitoria" or trading post, established in 1555. However, in 1653 the Swedish Africa Company constructed a timber fort there. It originally was a centre for the trade in timber and gold. It was later used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Other Ghanaian slave castles include Elmina Castle and Fort Christiansborg. They were used to hold slaves before they were loaded onto ships and sold in the Americas, especially the Caribbean. This "gate of no return" was the last stop before crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
Sherbro Island is in the Atlantic Ocean, and is included within Bonthe District, Southern Province, Sierra Leone. The island is separated from the African mainland by the Sherbro River in the north and Sherbro Strait in the east. It is 32 miles (51 km) long and up to 15 miles (24 km) wide, covering an area of approximately 230 square miles (600 km2). The western extremity is Cape St. Ann. Bonthe, on the eastern end, is the chief port and commercial centre.
Adventure Galley, also known as Adventure, was an English sailing ship captained by William Kidd, the notorious privateer. She was a type of hybrid ship that combined square rigged sails with oars to give her manoeuvrability in both windy and calm conditions. The vessel was launched at the end of 1695 and was acquired by Kidd the following year to serve in his privateering venture. Between April 1696 and April 1698, she travelled thousands of miles across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in search of pirates but failed to find any until nearly the end of her travels. Instead, Kidd himself turned pirate in desperation at not having obtained any prizes. Adventure Galley succeeded in capturing two vessels off India and brought them back to Madagascar, but by the spring of 1698 the ship's hull had become so rotten and leaky that she was no longer seaworthy. She was stripped of anything movable and sunk off the north-eastern coast of Madagascar. Her remains have not yet been located.
Slave ships were large cargo ships specially built or converted from the 17th to the 19th century for transporting slaves. Such ships were also known as "Guineamen" because the trade involved human trafficking to and from the Guinea coast in West Africa.
Henry Every, also known as Henry Avery, sometimes erroneously given as Jack Avery or John Avery, was an English pirate who operated in the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the mid-1690s. He probably used several aliases throughout his career, including Benjamin Bridgeman, and was known as Long Ben to his crewmen and associates.
Captain Samuel Burgess was a member of Captain William Kidd's crew in 1690 when the Blessed William was seized by Robert Culliford and some of the crew, with William May named as captain.
Adam Baldridge was an English pirate and one of the early founders of the pirate settlements in Madagascar.
Sir William Hedges was an English merchant and the first governor of the East India Company (EIC) in Bengal.
Anomabu, also spelled Anomabo and formerly as Annamaboe, is a town on the coast of the Mfantsiman Municipal District of the Central Region of Ghana. Anomabu has a settlement population of 14,389 people.
The Pirate Round was a sailing route followed by certain, mainly English, pirates, during the late 17th century and early 18th century. The course led from the western Atlantic, parallel to the Cape Route around the southern tip of Africa, stopping at Madagascar, then on to targets such as the coast of Yemen and India. The Pirate Round was briefly used again during the early 1720s. Pirates who followed the route are sometimes referred to as Roundsmen. The Pirate Round was largely co-extensive with the routes of the East India Company ships, of Britain and other nations.
The Company of Adventurers of London Trading to the Ports of Africa, more commonly known as "The Guinea Company" was a private joint stock company founded to trade in Africa for profit. It was a trading company trading in slaves, and redwood from the western Africa. At its height, the Guinea Company owned and operated fifteen cargo ships.
Slavery on the Barbary Coast was a form of unfree labour which existed between the 16th and 18th centuries in the Barbary Coast area of North Africa.
Slavery in Southern Africa existed until the abolition of slavery in the Cape Colony on 1 January 1834.
The East Indies theatre of the French Revolutionary Wars was a series of campaigns related to the major European conflict known as the French Revolutionary Wars, fought between 1793 and 1801 between the new French Republic and its allies and a shifting alliance of rival powers. Although the Indian Ocean was separated by vast distance from the principal theatre of the conflict in Western Europe, it played a significant role due to the economic importance of the region to Great Britain, France's most constant opponent, of its colonies in India and the Far Eastern trade.
Sir Edward Michelborne, sometimes written Michelbourn, was an English soldier, adventurer and explorer. After a military career in the 1590s he tried to be appointed 'principal commander' for the first voyage of the East India Company (EIC), but was rebuffed. He subsequently became an interloper with the personal approval of King James I and set out to the far east in December 1604. Indulging in plunder as well as seeking out trade, his activities upset the EIC who complained to the Privy Council about his interloping, following his return to England in 1606.
References
- ↑ Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2019). The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13754-4.
- ↑ Hazlitt, William Carew (1892). The livery companies of the city of London; their origin, character, development, and social and political importance. London S. Sonnenschein.
- ↑ Epstein, Mordechai (1908). The Early History of the Levant Company (PDF). London: George Routledge & Son.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Platt, Virginia Bever (1969). "The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade". The William and Mary Quarterly. 26 (4): 548–577. doi:10.2307/1917131. ISSN 0043-5597. JSTOR 1917131.
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