Dutch East India Company Army

The military forces of the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602 and generally known by its Dutch initials VOC, gave the company powers ordinarily reserved to sovereign states, including the ability to wage war, negotiate treaties, strike its own coinage and found colonies, backed by a private military that by 1669 numbered some 10,000 soldiers alongside a fleet of over 150 merchant ships and 40 warships. VOC forces under governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen stormed Jayakarta in 1619, driving out Banten's defenders and founding Batavia as the company's Asian headquarters, and through the 1620s the VOC waged a brutal campaign to monopolize nutmeg production on the Banda Islands, in which nearly the entire native population was driven away, starved or killed and replaced with Dutch-run plantations. The company's forces went on to defeat Portuguese garrisons in Ceylon between 1640 and 1659 and to establish control over much of the Malabar coast of India, though VOC military technology and tactics were not invincible, as shown by the 1741 Battle of Colachel, in which the south Indian state of Travancore inflicted a defeat regarded as the earliest instance of an organized Asian power overcoming European military methods. VOC military strength declined sharply after 1730 and was dealt a further blow during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780 to 1783, when British attacks cut the company's fleet in half, and the VOC's finances and military position collapsed so completely that the Dutch state nationalized the company and dissolved it outright on December 31, 1799.