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The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 248 (257 of 305)
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Acknowledgments and Overview of Literature and Sources
of Oscar Gelderblom and Joost Jonker, in particular, also deserves
recognition. In their article “Completing a Financial Revolution:
The Finance of the Dutch East India Trade and the Rise of the
Amsterdam Capital Market, 1595–1612” (2004) they present a
rigorous analysis of the financing of the precompanies and the
VOC. In “Amsterdam as the Cradle of Modern Futures and Op-
tions Trading, 1550–1650” (2005) they address the advent of op-
tions trading in Amsterdam, first in the grain and herring trades
and later on the stock market. Gelderblom and Jonker, together
with Abe de Jong, recently examined the VOC’s organizational
structure. In “An Admiralty for Asia: Isaac le Maire and Conflict-
ing Conceptions About the Corporate Governance of the VOC”
(2011) they show that the States General, directors, and share-
holders had such different interests that disputes about the VOC
were inevitable.
Others have also written about the VOC’s organizational struc-
ture. I refer here to two recent books on the subject. In De geoc-
trooieerde compagnie: de VOC en de WIC als voorlopers van de
naamloze vennootschap (2005), Henk den Heijer investigates to
what extent the VOC and WIC exhibit similarities to the public
corporation (naamloze vennootschap, NV), the form of enterprise
that listed companies in the Netherlands currently have. In A His-
tory of Corporate Governance, 1602–2002 (2003), Paul Frentrop
places the VOC’s corporate management and the debates about
it that ensued in the seventeenth century at the beginning of a
lengthy development.
Immense amounts have been written about the VOC in a more
general sense. As far as this book is concerned, Femme Gaastra’s
The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline (2003)
and Bewind en beleid bij de VOC: de financiele en commerciele
politiek van de bewindhebbers, 1672–1702 (1989) are the most
worthy of mention. The first gives a clear, concise overview of the
Company’s history and is a good read. The second is an academic
work—the basis for Gaastra’s research degree—about how the
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