1602
A replica of the VOC ship Amsterdam, lost on her maiden voyage in 1749, at the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.Image: Martinvl · CC BY-SA 4.0world · Asia
The Dutch East India Company is founded
On 20 March 1602 the States General of the Dutch Republic granted a charter to the United East India Company, the VOC, giving it a 21-year monopoly on Dutch trade in Asia. It could also make treaties, build forts and wage war, almost like a state. Anyone could buy shares, and more than a thousand people did. The VOC is often called the first multinational company. For two centuries it dominated the spice trade from its base at Batavia, now Jakarta, often by force, until it was dissolved in 1799.
Source: Nationaal Archief (National Archives of the Netherlands): Octrooi voor de VOC (1602) ↗
One of Volta’s piles, kept at the Tempio Voltiano in Como.Image: 
Napoleon leaving Elba, painted by Joseph Beaume in 1836.Image: 
The title-page illustration from the first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852.Image: 
The Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, 2012.Image: 
The ruins of the church of San Francisco in Mendoza, destroyed in the earthquake of 1861, photographed around 1900.Image: 
A map of the Paris Convention’s member states in 2012.Image: 
Albert Einstein in the study of his friend Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden, 1916.Image: 
The monument on the platform at Terowie railway station, South Australia, where MacArthur spoke, 2013.Image: 
Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first prime minister and later its president, in 1960.Image: 
The Marunouchi Line platform at Kasumigaseki Station in Tokyo, 2022.Image: 
The US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld answers questions about the air strikes on Baghdad, 21 March 2003.Image: