March 20th

On this day - March 20th 1602 - The Dutch East India Company was founded 

The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 when the Dutch government helped establish a company and granted it a 21-year long monopoly in Dutch spice-trade and Asian trade. The background for the monopoly was to limit price-risks for traders, mainly in the spice industry. The company was also granted the rights to build forts, maintain armies and conclude treaties with Asian rulers. The English East Indian Company had been established for the same reason two years earlier. The Dutch East India company grew into a huge and very successful firm. It grew into a multinational company (the first in the world), they sent almost a million Europeans to work in Asia and traded over 2.5 million ton Asian goods. The first of many foreign port was acquired in Jakarta in 1619. The native inhabitants in Jakarta was either driven away, killed or starved to death.

The firm went bankrupt and was dissolved in 1799, almost 200 years after it was first established.