Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

> The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or Dutch East India Company, is often considered the be the world's first multinational corporation. ...

Ah, trivia time! The VOC also had the world's first entirely privatized army. The "monopoly" cited in the README basically included a license to kill. Think "Google Armed Forces", but then scarier. The army was mostly used to keep a grumpy unpaid workforce "motivated", to keep the spice coming, and thus to keep that lovely 18% annual dividend payout reality.

Basically, the VOC made current evil multinational corps (e.g. the oil companies, monsanto, blackwater, etc) look like cute cuddly charities.

That said, it's been centuries, not sure getting worked up about the name makes sense now. It's a compiler, not a guidebook about how to traffic humans. I just thought the README section made the VOC seem a "little" awesomer than they were.

I absolutely agree. The VOC was a very bad company. Basically, they took the blood of the native people in the spice countries and made money from it.

The enslaved the people and killed many, when they did not cooperate.

When the VOC is seen as basic example of corporations, it is a real gruesome heritage!

> "Basically, the VOC made current evil multinational corps (e.g. the oil companies, monsanto, blackwater, etc) look like cute cuddly charities."

DeBeers[1] and the United Fruit Company (Chiquita)[2] would be much more comparable to a modern day VOC and also still exist. Both just seem to be better at staying off the radar since the advent of the Internet compared to Monsanto and the others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiquita_Brands_International

Britain had an East India Company first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_%28disambig...

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2014/04/worlds...

It's up for debate who was the first multinational. No doubt both set the bar very high for those to follow, but I do think blackwater spinoff dyncorp with child sex slaves will take some beating, particularly with respect to the prevailing moral climate of the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp#Bosnia_incidents

> Britain had an East India Company first:

Actually the Portuguese one was founded in 1549, but I will leave out the usual type of "products" that were traded in those days.

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