‘The Best Timber in India’: Shipbuilding Supplies and the Dutch East India Company in Cochin, 1663–1795

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) maintained a presence in the present-day Indian state of Kerala from the 1660s until the British conquest of the Dutch positions in the 1790s. The company maintained a shipyard in the Dutch capital of Cochin (present-day Kochi). This article examines the use of local forest products for shipbuilding and as export products, with a special focus on shipbuilding timbers. The presence of teak in the forests of the Western Ghats had long been a major asset for Cochin as a shipbuilding centre. The Dutch Company tried to use these and other timber resources for its own needs but was reliant upon local suppliers and networks to connect its coastal shipyard to the inland forests where the trees grew. By the late eighteenth century, teak had also become an export product, especially being taken to Muscat on local vessels.