Een strijd om erkenning: de onderhandelingen over de Oostendse Compagnie (1713-1723)

This article argues that the Ostend Company (Generale Indische Compagnie,
GIC , 1722–1727) was a deliberate attempt to challenge the established chartered companies, by simultaneously responding and adapting to the organizational problems that companies such as the English East India Company and
the Dutch East India Company faced. As such, the Ostend Company was not a
Company-State, as some historians have argued, but a specific new kind of lean
organization. Moreover, this article traces the very specific circumstances that
led to the establishment of the GIC: first, the need to limit competition in the
profitable tea trade; second, the wishes of foreign investors for a company that
was able to trade effectively in the Bengal textile trade and the African slave
trade; third, the wishes of the Habsburg authorities to consolidate and expand
their authority in the Southern Netherlands; and fourth, the failure of both
the Dutch Republic and England to act militarily against the trade in Ostend,
against the wishes of the respective chartered companies. The article argues that
especially the role of Ghent merchant Jacobus Maelcamp and the high-ranking civil servant Patrice MacNeny should be emphasized, as they were most
effective in lobbying the Habsburg administration in Vienna to perform a U-turn
on the Ostend Company: only after their work, the Habsburg Emperor Charles
VI and the Governor of the Southern Netherlands, Eugène de Savoie, started the
process of chartering the company. The result was a highly successful but shortlived company whose business model would be copied by other chartered companies in eighteenth-century Europe, such as the Swedish East India Compan