Amsterdam: The First Multinational and the Price of Nutmeg

You are on Herenmarkt, facing the West-Indisch Huis. It looks like a quiet building, all brick and white windows. This was the headquarters of the West India Company, founded in 1621. It was the younger sister of the VOC, and it handled the Atlantic. Decisions taken in this building still show on a map. The colony of New Amsterdam, for instance, on an island called Manhattan. But this company's big business was not New York. It was trafficking people. Dutch ships carried more than half a million enslaved Africans across the ocean. Much of that trade was organized from offices like this one…

Look up. The Westerkerk tower is the tallest of Amsterdam's churches. At the very top sits an imperial crown painted blue and gold. The church was built between 1620 and 1631. Those were the years when VOC money began to flow through the city. Amsterdam was growing at full speed. New canals were dug, whole districts went up. A church to match was needed. It is a Protestant church, sober inside. No saints, no gold. Wealth was shown elsewhere: in size, and in the tower. Rembrandt is buried inside, the painter who portrayed this city's merchants. He died poor in 1669. Nobody knows exactly whe…

You are on Dam Square, facing the Royal Palace. Look up at the very top of the rear facade: a figure of Atlas carries the world on his shoulders. It was not built as a palace. It was built as a town hall, between 1648 and 1665. The city wanted a building that told the world who was in charge. It rests on more than thirteen thousand wooden piles driven into the mud. All of Amsterdam is built this way, on a buried forest. Inside, in the great hall, maps of the world are inlaid in the marble floor. Citizens literally walked across the planet. Contemporaries called it the eighth wonder of the …

You are facing the Beurs van Berlage, a brick building from 1903. But the story that matters began three centuries earlier, a few steps from here. In March 1602, the government of the United Provinces merged several trading companies into one: the Dutch East India Company. The VOC. What was new was how it was funded. Anyone could buy a share. Maids, carpenters, ministers and big merchants signed the same register. Those shares could be sold on to others. That was the birth of the stock market. At first they were traded in the open air, on a bridge. In 1611 the city opened the first exchange…

You are facing the Schreierstoren, a round brick tower from the late fifteenth century. It was part of the city wall, at the edge of the old harbor. Ships set sail from here. Popular lore turned it into the tower of the weeping women: the wives who waved the sailors off. The legend is probably false, but the sadness was real. A voyage to Asia took about eight months one way. Over two centuries, nearly a million people sailed on VOC ships. Many never came back. Scurvy, fevers and shipwrecks took a huge share. Most were not Dutch. They were Germans, Scandinavians, poor people from all over E…

You are facing the Oost-Indisch Huis, the East India House. It was the VOC's headquarters. Today it belongs to the university. This is where the Heeren XVII met, the Seventeen Gentlemen. They were the board that ran the company. From these rooms they decided how many ships would sail, what to buy in Asia and what price to sell at in Europe. Wars were decided here too. The star product was nutmeg. It grew only on a handful of tiny islands, the Banda Islands, in what is now Indonesia. In Europe it was worth a fortune. The VOC wanted all of it, with no competitors. In 1621, Governor Jan Piet…

Look at the huge facade across the canal. It is the Trippenhuis, built around 1660. It is really two houses behind a single front. One for each brother: Lodewijk and Hendrick Trip. The Trips were arms dealers. Cannons, gunpowder, iron. They sold to the VOC, to the state and to several European kingdoms. Now look up at the roof. The chimneys are shaped like artillery mortars. They did not hide where the money came from. They celebrated it. The VOC needed a lot of what they sold. Every ship sailed armed. Every fort in Asia needed cannons. There is a story about the narrow little house oppos…

You have entered the courtyard of the Amsterdam Museum. Before it was a museum, this place was the city orphanage for almost four centuries. Look at the numbered wooden lockers in the courtyard. That is where the orphans kept their belongings. They are still here. Amsterdam produced many orphans. One reason lay in the harbor: fathers who sailed and never came back. The city's orphanages were also a source of labor. Many boys left institutions like this one to work on the company's ships. The museum tells the story of the whole city. And in recent decades it chose to tell it differently. I…

You are on the Herengracht, the Gentlemen's Canal, on the stretch known as the Golden Bend. Look at the houses. Almost every house in Amsterdam is narrow, because taxes and plots were calculated by the width of the front. Not here. These are double houses, with stoops, stone facades and gardens hidden behind. The canal ring was planned from 1613 on. It was one of the first large urban expansions designed in advance in Europe. The best plots went to VOC directors, bankers and burgomasters. Often they were the same people. Notice the hooks jutting from the tops of the facades. They were use…

You are facing the Rijksmuseum, the national museum. The building dates from 1885, and bicycles ride through the passage in the middle. Inside are the jewels of the Golden Age. Rembrandt's Night Watch. Vermeer's silent kitchens. There are also VOC ship models, bronze cannons, Chinese porcelain and furniture made of tropical woods. If you go in, look for Petronella Oortman's dolls' house. It is a perfect miniature of a canal house. It is said to have cost as much as a real one. That is the level of wealth we are talking about. Toys priced like buildings. The museum has also started showing…

You are on Uilenburg, an island in the old Jewish quarter. Look at the big brick building: it was a diamond factory, opened in 1879. The story of diamonds in Amsterdam begins with refugees. Sephardic Jews, expelled from Portugal and Spain, arrived at the end of the sixteenth century. In Amsterdam they found something rare in the Europe of the time: they could practice their religion without hiding. Many guilds were closed to them. But diamond cutting was a new trade, with no guild. There, they could work. The stones came from India, many aboard VOC ships. Here they were cut and polished fo…

You are in the Hortus Botanicus, one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world. It was founded in 1638 as a medicinal herb garden. It soon became something else. VOC ships brought seeds, bulbs and cuttings from Asia and Africa. Here they were studied. Plants were not curiosities. They were money. Knowing how to grow something away from its homeland could break a monopoly. The most famous story is about coffee. In the early eighteenth century, a coffee plant brought from Java reached this garden. In 1714, the city gave a specimen to King Louis XIV of France. From that plant, or its offsp…

You have reached the Maritime Museum. A huge three-masted ship is moored at the quay. It is a replica of the Amsterdam, a VOC vessel. The original sailed in 1749 on her maiden voyage to Asia. She carried silver, supplies and about three hundred people. She never got past the English Channel. A storm drove her onto the English coast near Hastings, where she ran aground in the sand. The wreck is still there, sunk into the beach. At very low tide it can still be seen. Go on deck if you can and climb down to the lower levels. See how low the ceiling is. Hundreds of men lived there for months. …