The archives of the Dutch East India Company ( VOC) and the local institutions in Batavia ( Jakarta)

Of all the trading companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC), which was created in 1602, was indubitably the most success ful. Soon after its incorporation the VOC succeeded in firmly forcing back the Portuguese, who had established their commercial empire in Asia a century earlier, and pretty well eliminating them as competitors in the trade between Europe and Asia. The principal competitor of the VOC, the English East India Company (EIC), which had been founded in London in 1600, initially lacked the financial capacity, the organizational ability and governmental support to offer the Dutch Company any real threat. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that the EIC developed into a potent rival worthy of its steel, which would cut the ground from under the feet of the VOC in various regions in the course of the eighteenth century. None the less, until the end of its existence as a trading company in 1800, the VOC remained the largest of the Asiatic companies