Reply #12: First british east india company chartered 1600. Dutch East india company chartered 1602.

[Hannah Bell]

muscovy company 1555:

The Muscovy Company (also called Russian Company or Muscovy Trading Company, Russian: Московская компания), was a trading company chartered in 1555. It was the first major chartered joint stock company, the precursor of the type of business that would soon flourish in England, and became closely associated with such famous names as Henry Hudson and William Baffin. The Muscovy Company had a monopoly on trade between England and Muscovy until 1698 and it survived as a trading company until the Russian Revolution of 1917. Since 1917 the company has operated as a charity, now working within Russia.<1>

The Muscovy Company was given a monopoly charter on whaling by Queen Elizabeth I in 1577. The primary and most profitable whaling grounds of this joint-stock company came to be centered around Spitsbergen in the early 17th Century, and the company's royal charter of 1613 granted a monopoly on whaling in Spitsbergen, based on the (erroneous) claim that Hugh Willoughby had discovered the land in 1553.<2><3> Initially the English tried to drive away competitors; but after a few years, they claimed only the waters south of these Arctic islands.<4>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscovy_Company



The East India Company (also the East India Trading Company, English East India Company,<1> and then the British East India Company)<2> was an early English joint-stock company<3> that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China. The oldest among several similarly formed European East India Companies, the Company was granted an English Royal Charter, under the name Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, by Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600.<4>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company


Statistically, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asia trade. Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the English (later British) East India Company, the VOC’s nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 1600s. <3>

The Dutch East India Company remained an important trading concern for almost two centuries, paying an 18% annual dividend for almost 200 years


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company


hudson's bay company 1670