ABSTRACT
As is well known, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded in a bewildering variety of goods. With Batavia as its Asian entrepôt an extensive trading system was set up, in which hundreds of ships were engaged in shipping an enormous variety of Asian and European products to the most profitable markets. My aim here is not to give an endless list of all the different trade goods, their places of origin and their destinations. The object of this paper is much more limited: I will concentrate mostly on one type of merchandise, i.e. cotton goods, and on one trading area — the north-western part of the Indian Ocean. Both the VOC and a large group of Gujarati traders were active in this trade, making comparison between these two types of traders possible.
