Blowing Bubbles: The Company You Keep (part I)

Behind the ornate baroque façade of Venice's San Moise church, literally under the feet of the tens of thousands of tourists who visit the church each year, there is a remarkable but seldom noticed inscription:

HONORI ET MEMORIAL JOANNIS LAW EDINBURGENSES REGII
GALLIARUM AERARII PREFECTI CLARISSIMA

'To the honour and memory of John Law of Edinburgh. Most distinguished controller of the treasury of the kings of the French.' It is a rather unlikely resting place for the man who invented the stock market bubble.

An ambitious Scot, a convicted murderer, a compulsive gambler and a flawed financial genius, John Law was not only responsible for the first true boom and bust in asset prices. He also may be said to have caused, indirectly, the French Revolution by comprehensively blowing the best chance that the ancien régime monarchy had to reform its finances. His story is one of the most astonishing yet least well understood tales of adventure in all financial history. It is also very much a story for our times.


Born in Edinburgh in 1671 , Law was the son of a successful goldsmith and the heir to Lauriston Castle, overlooking the Firth of Forth. He went to London in 1692, but quickly began to fritter away his patrimony in a variety of business ventures and gambling escapades. Two years later he fought a duel with his neighbour, who objected to sharing the same building as the dissolute Law and his mistress, and killed him. He was tried for duelling and sentenced to death, but escaped from prison and fled to Amsterdam.

Law could not have picked a better town in which to lie low. By the 1690s Amsterdam was the world capital of financial innovation. To finance their fight for independence against Spain in the late sixteenth century, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Dutch had improved on the Italian system of public debt (introducing, among other things, lottery loans which allowed people to gamble as they invested their savings in government debt). They had also reformed their currency by creating what was arguably the world's first central bank, the Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank), which solved the problem of debased coinage by creating a reliable form of bank money (see Chapter 1). But perhaps the single greatest Dutch invention of all was the joint-stock company.

The story of the company had begun a century before Law's arrival and had its origins in the efforts of Dutch merchants to wrest control of the lucrative Asian spice trade from Portugal and Spain. Europeans craved spices like cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg and pepper not merely to flavour their food but also to preserve it. For centuries, these commodities had come overland from Asia to Europe along the Spice Road. But with the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope, new and irresistibly attractive business opportunities opened up. The Amsterdam Historical Museum is full of paintings that depict Dutch ships en route to and from the East Indies. One early example of the genre bears the inscription: Tour ships sailed to go and get the spices towards Bantam and also established trading posts. And came back richly laden to . . . Amsterdam.

Departed May 1 , 1598. Returned July 19, 1599. 'As that suggests, however, the round trip was a very long one (fourteen months was in fact well below the average). It was also hazardous: of twenty-two ships that set sail in 1598, only a dozen returned safely. For these reasons, it made sense for merchants to pool their resources. By 1600 there were around six fledgling East India companies operating out of the major Dutch ports. However, in each case the entities had a limited term that was specified in advance - usually the expected duration of a voyage - after which the capital was repaid to investors. This business model could
not suffice to build the permanent bases and fortifications that were clearly necessary if the Portuguese and their Spanish allies* were to be supplanted.

[NB: * Between 1580 and 1640 the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united].

Actuated as much by strategic calculations as by the profit motive, the Dutch States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, therefore proposed to merge the existing companies into a single entity. The result was the United East India Company - the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie (United Dutch Chartered East India Company, or VOC for short), formally chartered in 1602 to enjoy a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.

The structure of the VOC was novel in a number of respects. True, like its predecessors, it was supposed to last for a fixed period, in this case twenty-one years; indeed, Article 7 of its charter stated that investors would be entitled to withdraw their money at the end of just ten years, when the first general balance was drawn up. But the scale of the enterprise was unprecedented. Subscription to the Company's capital was open to all residents of the United Provinces and the charter set no upper limit on how much might be raised. Merchants, artisans and even servants rushed to acquire shares; in Amsterdam alone there were 1,143 subscribers, only eighty of whom invested more than 10,000 guilders, and 445 of whom invested less than 1,000. The amount raised, 6.45 million guilders, made the VOC much the biggest corporation of the era. The capital of its English rival, the East India Company, founded two years earlier, was just £68,373 - around 820,000 guilders - shared between a mere 219 subscribers. Because the VOC was a government-sponsored enterprise, every effort was made to overcome the rivalry between the different provinces (and particularly between Holland, the richest province, and Zeeland). The capital of the Company was divided (albeit unequally) between six regional chambers (Amsterdam, Zeeland, Enkhuizen, Delft, Hoorn and Rotterdam). The seventy directors (bewindhebbers), who were each substantial investors, were also distributed between these chambers. One of their roles was to appoint seventeen people to act as the Heeren XVII - the Seventeen Lords - as a kind of company board. Although Amsterdam accounted for 57.4 per cent of the VOC's total capital, it nominated only eight out of the Seventeen Lords. Among the founding directors was Dirck Bas, a profit-oriented paterfamilias who (to judge by his portrait) was far from embarrassed by his riches.

The oldest share: share no. 6 of the Dutch East India Company
(not strictly speaking a share certificate but a receipt for part
payment of share, issued by the Camere Amsterdam on 27 September
I606, and signed by Arent ten Grotenhuys and Dirck van Os)

Ownership of the Company was thus divided into multiple parti j en or actien, literally actions (as in 'a piece of the action'). Payment for the shares was in instalments, due in 1603, 1605, 1606 and 1607. The certificates issued were not quite share certificates in the modern sense, but more like receipts; the key document in law was the VOC stock ledger, where all stockholders' names were entered at the time of purchase. The principle of limited liability was implied: shareholders stood to lose only their investment in the company and no other assets in the event that it failed. There was, on the other hand, no guarantee of returns; Article 17 of the VOC charter merely stated that a payment would be made to shareholders as soon as profits equivalent to 5 per cent of the initial capital had been made.

The VOC was not in fact an immediate commercial success. Trade networks had to be set up, the mode of operation established and secure bases established. Between 1603 and 1607, a total of twenty-two ships were fitted out and sent to Asia, at a cost of just under 3.7 million guilders. The initial aim was to establish a number of factories (saltpetre refineries, textile facilities and warehouses), the produce of which would then be exchanged for spices. Early successes against the Portuguese saw footholds established at Masulipatnam in the Bay of Bengal and Amboyna (today Ambon) in the Moluccas (Malukus), but in 1606 Admiral  Matelief failed to capture Malacca (Melaka) on the Malay Peninsula and an attack on Makian (another Moluccan island) was successfully repulsed by a Spanish fleet. An attempt to build a fort on Banda Neira, the biggest of the nutmeg-producing Banda islands, also failed. By the time a twelve-year truce was signed with Spain in 1608, the VOC had made more money from capturing enemy vessels than from trade. One major investor, the Mennonite Pieter Lijntjens, was so dismayed by the Company's warlike conduct that he withdrew from the Company in 1605. Another early director, Isaac le Maire, resigned in protest at what he regarded as the mismanagement of the Company's affairs.