Dutch West India Company

Dutch West India Company

Company flag
Native name	Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie
Company type	Chartered company
Founded	3 June 1621 (1621-06-03)
Founder	Joannes de Laet
Defunct	1 January 1792 (1792-01-01)
Headquarters	Dutch Republic
Number of locations	5 (Amsterdam, Hoorn, Rotterdam, Groningen and Middelburg)
Key people	Heeren XIX
Products	Shipping slaves, administrators, farmers and soldiers, and returning with salt, beaver skin, silver, sugar, tobacco, coffee, cochineal, and campeche- and letterwood

The Dutch West India Company or WIC (Dutch: Westindische Compagnie) Dutch pronunciation: [ʋɛstˈɪndisə kɔmpɑˈɲi] was a chartered company of Dutch merchants as well as foreign investors, formally known as GWC (Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie; English: Chartered West India Company). Among its founders were Reynier Pauw, Willem Usselincx (1567–1647) and Jessé de Forest (1576–1624).^[1] On 3 June 1621, it was granted a charter for a trade monopoly in the Dutch West Indies by the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and given jurisdiction over Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.

The area where the company could operate consisted of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and ended east of the Maluku Islands, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas. The intended purpose of the charter was to eliminate competition, particularly Spanish or Portuguese, between the various trading posts established by the merchants. The company became instrumental in the largely ephemeral Dutch colonization of the Americas (including New Netherland) in the seventeenth century.

From 1624 to 1654, in the context of the Dutch–Portuguese War, the GWC held Portuguese territory in northeast Brazil, but they were ousted from Dutch Brazil following fierce resistance.^[2] After several reversals, the GWC reorganized and a new charter was granted in 1675, largely on the strength in the Atlantic slave trade. This "new" version lasted for more than a century, until after the Fourth Anglo–Dutch War, during which it lost most of its assets.