Super interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia article: "...the company traded with Indianised Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted i

Super interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia article: "...the company traded with Indianised Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted it a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade." It's a dumb comparison, I know, but it strikes me as similar to how Amazon wound up with a pseudo-monopoly on many goods during the pandemic as brick-and-mortars were shuttered. And a quote in a quote from the article: "The Dutch, it seems, more than anyone in the West since the palmy days of ancient Rome, had more money than they knew what to do with. They discovered, unlike the Romans, that the best use of money was to make more money." Weirdly apropos.