"A Way for Nation States to Outsource Their Colonialist Ambitions"

"It was a very enlightened era, where there were discussions about responsible government, and in the case of the Dutch, struggling against the tyrannical rule of the Spanish Empire. At the same time there were also your more militaristic, narrow-minded people aligned with the hard-core philosophy of Calvinist Protestantism. They found their outlet in people like Jan Coen from the Dutch East India Company. They weren’t getting respect in their own country, but when they got overseas....After a time, news reports began trickling back, people coming back and saying, hey, this is quite foul. That’s why eventually the corporations were stripped of some of their powers, how the colonial outposts actually began—they didn’t necessarily want that, but small incremental steps eventually led to the Dutch having control over all of Indonesia. Who would have thought that when the first ships set out to collect some nutmegs?"

In The Boston Globe, J. Gabriel Boylan interviews Stephen R. Bown, author of Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900.