Chartered joint-stock trading company that built and administered a territorial empire across maritime Southeast Asia from its Asian headquarters at Batavia — the dominant naval and commercial power of the Indonesian archipelago through most of the 17th and 18th centuries, fighting wars against Aceh, Gowa/Makassar, Mataram, Bantam, and rival European powers.
Chronic corruption, mounting debt, and losses in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War led the Dutch government to let the VOC charter expire on 31 December 1799, nationalizing its assets; those territories were reorganized as the Dutch East Indies in 1800.
Polity-specific: Gaastra's standard scholarly history of the VOC's expansion, administration, and decline, verified on Open Library.