Pressure, People, Project, Performance: Captains in the Dutch East India Company

Katrina Q. Wang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

What are managers? Are they managers of people, or of projects? So did captains of the Dutch East India Company ask themselves when navigating the unpredictable sea. Captains are ship managers, whose individual-level pressure of job insecurity affects their ship-level trade-off decisions between crew protection (people) and ship speed (project). Leveraging a meticulously collected and unprecedented dataset on ships and employees between 1700 and 1795, I proxy captain’s job insecurity in four ways: (1) Hiring: externally hired captains, those whose first recorded job in the dataset is captain, and internally promoted captains, those whose first recorded job rank is lower than captain; (2) Track: administrative captains, those whose first recorded job rank in the dataset is an administrative position (third mate and higher), and trained captains, those whose first recorded job rank is lower than third mate; (3) Sponsorship: sponsored captains, those whose hometown is the same as the sponsored chamber of the ship, and non-sponsored captains; and (4) Nativity: Dutch captains and non-Dutch captains. The findings suggest that gaps and trade-offs in ship-level performances were caused by the differences in the source of captains. Taken together, this study contributes to the ongoing debate on how micro-level decisions interlock macro-level performance and even the global labor market structure during maritime periods.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 222. The Dutch in the World, 1500–Present: From Small Republic to Global Might, Then Fading Light?