The European trading companies: exports from Europe and the generation of purchasing power in Asia

Abstract

The early years of the seventeenth century mark the value of the seaborne trade between Asia and Europe. The major company engaged in the Euro-Asian trade was the English East India Company. The only other East India Company to be constituted in the first half of the seventeenth century was the Genoese Compagnia Genovese delle Indie Orientali founded in 1647. The French East India Company was of importance only between about 1725 and 1770 and the Danish Asiatic Company over the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first few years of the nineteenth century. In fact, from the early years of the seventeenth century the Dutch were the undoubted masters of the European bullion trade and Amsterdam the leading world centre of the trade in precious metals. The Dutch pattern of involvement in intra-Asian trade, on the other hand, had a logic involving the forging of important new commercial links across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.