The first stockever issued.

On 20 March 1602 the States General of the Netherlands folded six rival trading chambers into a single body and handed it a twenty-one year monopoly on everything east of the Cape of Good Hope. The charter went further than commerce. It let the company sign treaties, mint coin, build forts, keep soldiers and wage war. It was a corporation issued the powers of a state.

To pay for it, the directors did something without precedent. Rather than assembling a closed syndicate of merchants, they opened a subscription register at the Amsterdam house of the director Dirck van Os and let the public write itself in. Article 10 of the charter set the terms with almost no ceremony: residents of the United Provinces may buy shares. No minimum. No maximum. No invitation.

The book stayed open for a month. When it closed on 31 August, 1,143 names stood on the Amsterdam register for 3,674,945 guilders — roughly 6.5 million across all six chambers, of which Amsterdam supplied fifty-seven percent. Among the last entries is Neeltgen Cornelis, Van Os’s housemaid, who had watched strangers file through the house for four weeks and put in one hundred guilders of her own.

One clause in that register mattered more than the money. A holding, it said, may be conveyed or transferred through the bookkeeper, with two directors countersigning. Ownership was no longer welded to a single voyage and a single owner. It could move. Within a decade people were trading those entries in the street, and the street became the Amsterdam exchange — the first market in the world built around continuously traded corporate stock.