The Dutch East India Company may be the most valuable company in history

Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company — the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC — was chartered to pool money from private investors and finance long, risky voyages to Asia. To raise capital it did something new: it sold shares to the public. Article 10 of its charter let ordinary people buy in, and roughly 1,143 investors subscribed, making the VOC widely regarded as the world’s first publicly traded company.

Its financial innovations ran deeper than the IPO. Shares could be bought and sold continuously on the Amsterdam exchange — the first continuously traded stock — and the company paid the first regular dividends, occasionally distributed in spices rather than cash. A lively secondary market sprang up around it, complete with speculation and some of the earliest recorded short-selling, which authorities tried, and failed, to ban.

At its 17th-century peak the VOC’s shares were valued at tens of millions of guilders — a sum that, scaled to today’s economy, is often estimated in the trillions of dollars.

Those famous $7–8 trillion figures come from scaling its peak market value against modern global GDP, and economists are skeptical: such cross-century comparisons stretch incompatible price levels and economies, so the number is more rhetorical than rigorous.

The VOC was also far more than a business. It operated as a state within a state, empowered to raise armies, wage war, mint coins, and execute people. Pursuing a monopoly on nutmeg, its forces carried out the 1621 Banda Islands massacre, killing or enslaving most of the islands’ inhabitants — a brutal reminder that the world’s first great corporation was built on conquest as much as commerce.