In the seventeenth century the wooden ships of the Dutch sailed almost every European trading route except the Spanish routes on the west coast of the Americas and across the great ocean to Manila. From the Cape of Good Hope to Japan almost all the Dutch ships flew the flag of the state-chartered Dutch East India Company, a centralized, statist creation of the least centralized and statist of the European great powers. In the Netherlands the company’s ultimate authority lay in the hands of a governing board called the Gentlemen Seventeen, on which Amsterdam had eight seats, the province of Zeeland four, and other smaller trading towns a total of five. Amsterdam usually was able to call the tune, but not in the face of unified opposition of the other members. The building of ships and investment in outbound cargoes from the homeland also were in the hands of the “chambers” of the company in Zeeland and the various cities. But Batavia (today Jakarta) was the capital of a systematically centralized empire in which the governor-general and council, meeting in Batavia Castle, appointed the officials who directed all the company’s voyages and trading stations from the Cape of Good Hope to Nagasaki. Batavia received regular reports from the far-flung officials and sent them detailed instructions concerning their purchases, sales, and relations with local powers. No Dutchman resident in Asia was permitted to compete with the company anywhere in its massive web of intra-Asian trade, much less in the shipping of goods to the homeland. In a century when birth and class counted for a great deal everywhere in Europe and in Asia, the company was an island of openness to talent; men who had first signed on as common soldiers, some of them hounded out of the Netherlands by debts, had ended their lives as governors-general, councillors, or commanders of major posts and island realms. In Batavia Castle rows of young clerks sweated and nodded over the reports that came in from outlying posts and expeditions, making copies of everything to be sent home to the Gentlemen Seventeen. In the 1680s fifteen to twenty-five big folio volumes of such copies were sent home every year. They are beautifully preserved in the General State Archives in The Hague, have made my career and those of quite a few other historians who somehow found their way to them, and still have many untapped treasures. These sources, and the web of connections that produced them, make the world of the great company one of the most diverse and accessible facets of the world of 1688.