Episode Details
Back to EpisodesThe Dutch East India Company — Every Port Has a Price (Part Three)
Description
The VOC was dissolved on the thirty-first of December, 1799. But empires don't simply end. They leave things behind.
In the third and final part of this series, we sail into the aftermath. The ports your ship is passing through, Semarang, Bali, Lombok, Malacca were not merely trading posts. They were the architecture of a system. A system designed to extract, to control, and to profit at any human cost necessary.
What does that legacy look like today? Who inherited the model the Dutch pioneered? And what does it mean to stand in these harbours, two centuries later, knowing what happened here?
From the ruins of Batavia to the rise of the modern corporation, from the islands where nutmeg once cost more than gold to the city-state that turned colonial infrastructure into a miracle of self-invention — this is the story of what the VOC left behind.
Every port has a price. The question is — who paid it?
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