The World полностью

London in 1606 was unexpectedly cosmopolitan. The voyages of English slavers had brought a few hundred Africans to London, where Africa was on people’s minds. Elizabeth had ordered their deportation, but it had never been enforced. Londoners had been fascinated by the visit of a Moroccan ambassador. Shakespeare had written love sonnets to a ‘dark lady’: she may simply have been a brunette, but she may well have been African,^* while his play Othello, premiered in 1604, starred a Moorish general. On Twelfth Night the next year, Anne presided over Jonson’s Masque of Blackness in which the queen and her ladies, wearing blackface and costumes by Inigo Jones, played the daughters of the god Niger who wished to have their skins whitened by the god Oceanus.

Self-confident, scholarly and a jouster, tennis player and early golfer, Prince Henry asked his father to let him study with the imprisoned Raleigh. The swashbuckler, locked in the Tower, was happy to receive Henry, for whom he probably started writing his History of the World. Henry was so inspired by Raleigh’s tales of a gold-rich kingdom in South America, Eldorado, that he funded his own adventurer, Thomas Roe, on an expedition to Guiana. Raleigh was the authority since it was his Roanoke colony in America and his capture in 1592 of a majestic Portuguese carrack, stacked with east Asian delicacies – gold, ambergris, cloves, cinnamon and cochineal – that inspired the founding of two companies: an East India Company (EIC), set up in 1600 to trade Asian spices and backed by James, who knighted the captain of its first voyage, and a Virginia Company, chartered in 1606 to found a colony on the American coast.^* The latter company’s expedition hit land which they named Cape Henry and founded a settlement, Jamestown. Even though the Native American peoples around the site, the Powhatan confederacy, were initially friendly, the settlers died in droves of disease and starvation. These disastrous voyages inspired Shakespeare’s last single-authored play, The Tempest.

As for the EIC, it dispatched only three ships annually in its first decade. The real dynamos were the Dutch, way ahead of the English. When Philip II closed his ports to Dutch seamen in 1598, he unconsciously opened the world to Dutch ambition. Between 1595 and 1602, the Dutch sent fifty ships to attack Habsburg shipping. In 1602, the Heeren XVII – the Seventeen Gentlemen, many of them members of the interrelated merchant dynasties of Bickers and de Graeffs that dominated Dutch politics – founded their own East India Company (VOC), chartered by the ruling States-General with military and government powers to conquer and maintain trading posts in Asia. The Amsterdam stock exchange – the first – was founded to trade in its stocks. The VOC fitted easily into the pluralistic structure of the Netherlands with its seven provinces, powerful cities and guilds, but it became the first multinational company, the first publicly owned, the first war corporation. Its ruling families reflected the changes in society, fostering modern organization, industrious values and artistic patronage, as well as technical innovation and vicious competition.

The VOC based its trading on violence. ‘We can’t conduct trade without war,’ Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the VOC director-general, told the Seventeen, ‘nor war without trade.’ The profits were bounteous, the rivalries with Portuguese, English and Chinese merchants brutally pursued.^* In 1607, Coen joined an expedition to the Banda Islands – richest of the Moluccas – where the local Indonesians massacred most of the Dutch. Coen, a severe conquistador and fanatical Calvinist, deployed eyewatering violence to establish VOC factories (trading posts), playing local rulers against one another and striking at Portuguese and English rivals. Convinced he was doing God’s work, his style – ‘Don’t despair, don’t spare your enemies, God is with us!’ – was harsh even with his own men. When he found a Dutch officer in bed with a girl, he had him beheaded. The VOC competed with the English, Spanish–Portuguese and Chinese to control the Moluccas, seizing Ambon from the Portuguese. One of its earliest successes was penetrating Japan.