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Everyone knows America was named after Amerigo Vespucci. The Italian explorer. The New World. The map. Case closed.

Except it isn't.

Current research points to someone else entirely. Someone hiding in plain sight for five hundred years. Someone the history books never mention.

The answer, when it comes, is not what you'd expect. And once you hear it — you won't easily unhear it.

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The VOC was dissolved on the thirty-first of December, 1799. But empires don't simply end. They leave things behind.

In the third and final part of this series, we sail into the aftermath. The ports your ship is passing through, Semarang, Bali, Lombok, Malacca were not merely trading posts. They were the architecture of a system. A system designed to extract, to control, and to profit at any human cost necessary.

What does that legacy look like today? Who inherited the model the Dutch pioneered? And what does it mean to stand in these harbours, two centuries later, knowing what happened here?

From the ruins of Batavia to the rise of the modern corporation, from the islands where nutmeg once cost more than gold to the city-state that turned colonial infrastructure into a miracle of self-invention — this is the story of what the VOC left behind.

Every port has a price. The question is — who paid it?

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For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com

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What if the most valuable commodity on earth — more precious than gold, more coveted than silk — grew in just one place? Six tiny volcanic islands in the middle of the Indonesian sea, surrounded by reefs, monsoons, and men willing to kill to keep it that way.

This is the story of nutmeg. The spice in your kitchen cupboard that once drove empires to war, sent Samuel Pepys to the docks at midnight to buy from black-market sailors, and inspired the Dutch East India Company to commit atrocities so complete they nearly wiped an entire people from the earth.

And at the end of it all? The English walked away with one small island. The Dutch handed them something else in return — a modest patch of land on the eastern seaboard of North America. You may have heard of it. They called it Manhattan.

Support the show

For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com