By the end of the sixteenth century the Asian trade was dominated by Portugal and Spain, which made it both an opportunity and a threat for the cities of northern Europe. Dutch merchants had been organising voyages to Asia in the 1590s, but each expedition was a separate partnership wound up on return — capital was scattered, prices undercut each other, and risk was poorly pooled. In 1602 the lândadvokat of the United Provinces, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, merged the rival Dutch companies into a single entity, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie. In England, Elizabeth I had granted London merchants a charter for the East Indies trade a year earlier, on 31 December 1600. Both companies were raising money not for one voyage but for a permanent institution.

The innovation was not only one of scale. The VOC was Europe's first genuinely 'permanent-capital' joint-stock company: shareholders did not get their money back at the end of a voyage but could sell their shares to someone else on the Amsterdam Exchange. This is the birth certificate of the modern public corporation and of the securities market. The charter (octrooi) also granted the company the right to wage war in its own name, sign treaties, build forts, mint coins, and administer justice. It was a semi-sovereign body — not legally a state, but a state in practice.

The consequences in Asia were brutal. The VOC subdued Bantam and Makassar, and in 1621, to secure a monopoly on nutmeg, massacred or enslaved most of the population of the Banda Islands. In the eighteenth century the EIC turned itself from a merchant body into a land-tax-collecting state in Bengal: after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 it acquired the diwani — civil revenue administration — of Bengal. A company governor was administering India on behalf of a private joint-stock corporation. The Bengal famine of 1770, in which perhaps ten million died, took place under this regime.

In 1858, after the Indian Rebellion, the British government dissolved the EIC and took India under direct Crown rule; the VOC had already gone bankrupt in 1799, its debts assumed by the Dutch state. But the two companies left behind a deep institutional inheritance: corporate personhood, limited liability, transferable shares, permanent capital, layered management — the entire anatomy of the modern multinational. And politically they left a template: a private corporation that waged war to run trade, and could be governed for profit. The twenty-first-century arguments over global corporations are still being held in the shadow of this seventeenth-century model.