FOR LOVE OF GAIN^143
sumption. A free, efficient market would have reduced profit margins
per unit of merchandise, even while it increased the return to capital.
But the VOC would not have liked that either. What Jan Compagnie
wanted was to exclude competitors, impose prices in the Indies, and
maintain wide differentials between buy and sell. There lay maximum
profits. That was not business; that was power and its uses—what the
economist calls rent-seeking.
Besides, these men of the VOC were pragmatists. They cheered the
prospect of peace with Spain in 1609—finally, after some eighty years
of cold and hot war. The peace accord called for a division of turf on
the basis of the status quo, and the company wanted to alter the sta
tus quo in anticipation. So the directors sent a fast yacht to the Indies
to get the word to its agents ahead of the Spanish in the Philippines:
Plant factories and agencies wherever possible, by way of posing a
claim. Such aggressive spoor-planting was bound to invite clashes, but
this was no time to be timid. The VOC wanted above all to establish
itself in the Spice Islands, the world's only source of nutmeg, cloves,
and mace. Delivered in India, these spices brought profits ten and fif
teen times cost. "The Islands of Banda and the Moluccas are our main
target. We recommend most strongly that you tie these islands to the
Company, if not by treaty then by force!"^6
Those were the early years, the years of dirty diapers. Once the com
pany had stabilized its position, it came to disapprove of muscular en
terprise. But then its agents in the field were there to remind it of the
facts of Asian life, at least as they saw them. Here is Jan Pieterszoon
Coen, the VOC's young and forceful proconsul in Batavia, now
Jakarta—a city he founded to serve as company headquarters in the In
dies (the Dutch Goa) and to control the narrow gateway to the Moluc
cas known as the Sunda Strait:
Your Honors should know by experience that trade in Asia must be dri
ven and maintained under the protection and favor of Your Honors' own
weapons, and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the
trade; so that we cannot carry on trade without war nor war without trade.^7A generation later, it was the same story. The Delft Chamber of the
company deplored the cost in lives and money of the campaigns for
Malacca and Ceylon. "A merchant," they observed, "would do better
honorably to increase his talent and send rich cargoes from Asia to the
Netherlands, instead of carrying out costiy territorial conquests, which
are more suitable to crowned heads and mighty monarchs than to mer-