It is impossible to read any scholarly book on the Dutch East India Company’s (voc) trade and colonial history in South Asia after a recent merciless indictment of its policies in South East Asia by the writer and essayist Amitav Ghosh whose recent book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Penguin: Random House India, 2021) decries the unimaginable crimes against humanity committed by some of the same company actors who contributed to the historical fresco of the present volume. Jan Pieterszoon Coen had been a simple officer in South Asia before becoming the governor general of the Dutch East Indies and a founder of Batavia, and before hatching the plan, which was then executed with stunning cruelty: a complete annihilation of the Banda islands’ population. A genocide for the sake of the trade monopoly/ monopsony over the production and sale of nutmeg and mace.

Guido van Meersbergen’s book is much less dramatic, and it does not judge the voc’s actions, but the story it tells is similar and the large quantity of archives he manages speak of the Dutch and, to a small degree (or simply not yet fully developed), English mercantile greed. He focuses on corporate ethnographic (avant la lettre) writings and oppressive political and trade strategies that went too far in the Bandas, while in South Asia, in a very different sociopolitical context, the oppression went as far as the voc was able to get away with it. It is clear from the book that the Dutch company’s goals were the same: to satisfy corporate desire for maximum profit, trade monopoly and violence were employed when they were possible, accommodation when it was necessary. West coast of India, Mughal empire, Sri Lanka and Madras under the English East India Company (eic), are the regions and case studies where both voc and eic tested their political strategies and then engaged—according to their written accounts—in devising appropriate stereotypes to make sense of their “encounters” with local societies. In many ways, encounter has by now become a placeholder in historiography for different types of relations in European mercantile and colonial experience in Asia, and elsewhere. For the voc and the eic in the seventeenth century, the encounter meant one thing: how to extract high profits from the trade in spices, substances and objects that were coveted in Europe by outsmarting Asian trade competitors and other beneficiaries of the commerce (for example, Mughal emperors) and by using and abusing local labor.

In the two chapters of the first part of the book (Corporate Ethnography), Van Meersbergen focuses on travel writing with a wide comparative brush of topics and historiographies and shows that the images of alterity were often rooted in older ethnographic traditions. Civility and barbarity, despotism, tyranny, character, and complexion, even skin color, which was not yet linked to race, but to traditional humoral theories. Jesuit Alessandro Valignano has been singled out as one of the sixteenth-century writers who saw skin color as a measure of civility. This is one of the rare places where Jesuit writers, or any other “religious” specialist, Catholic and Protestant, are mentioned in the book.

The two chapters in the second part (Accommodation and Conflict), a very rich and well researched canvas of mercantile activities of the voc and the eic in Gujarat show how the attitudes to Muslim traders increasingly went from simple caution to active distrust. If other local traders were untrustworthy, Muslims were downright treacherous and tyrannical.

In the third part (Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange), the dealings between the two companies and the Mughal empire is discussed in the context of diplomacy, gift giving and imperial ceremonial culture. The ethnography of what would later be perceived as “Asiatic despotic empire” gradually appears between the lines. The mercantile routines of the Dutch and the British lead them to think of themselves as “just” and “fair” compared to tyrannical corrupt practices of the Mughal administration and other local agents and political actors.

In the fourth part (The Birth of Company Settlements), one chapter is dedicated to the eic in Madras and one to the voc in Sri Lanka. In the second part of the seventeenth century, both companies were engaged in creating fortified settlements and even establishing settler communities on a small scale, and with hesitation since they were following the model of the Portuguese enclaves in Asia, based on marriages with local women. In the end, these enclaves became organized based on separation of various Asian and Indian trade and service communities. Apartheid in the making.

The book is a fascinating read, well written and engaging, based on rich archives. Although it is about two merchant companies, the voc is analyzed in more detail and is presented as the more important of the two in that period. Of course, the book is based on Dutch and English archives and the actors who contributed to them are in sharper focus than the rest of the actors (Indian, Portuguese, French and Armenian) who are only sporadically mentioned. Perhaps for this reader, what is missing is religious dimension. Finally, Jesuits called themselves “merchants of the soul” and were intimately connected with merchants and their networks in the same period. The Dutch and English companies looked at Catholics and Catholic missionaries as misguided and pests, but they themselves were also often zealous in their religious goals. For example, Hendrik Adriaan von Rheede tot Drakenstein, the famous compiler of the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, who does not figure prominently in the book, but also Jan Pieterszoon Coen, both saw their actions divinely sanctioned. Coen’s famous quote from 1618 is the case in point: “Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us.” Given the violence and the appetite to enslave whoever had something they desired in Asia, it would have been interesting to know how they justified this bulimic acquisition-driven sentiments when they communicated spiritually with their Creator and how they managed to persuade themselves that they were honest and frugal, and different from and better than Catholics, Muslims, mestizos, Portuguese, Armenians, Mughals, and all other Indians.