20 mars

The States General merged the rival Dutch companies into one, with a monopoly on trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The VOC was the first company to sell shares to the public, and it could make war and treaties.

He was 84, and lay in state before burial in Westminster Abbey. Voltaire, in London, wrote that England had buried him “like a king who had done good to his subjects”. England still began the year on 25 March, so his monument gives the year as 1726; the timeline puts it in 1727, on 31 March by the…

Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, a French naval officer, signed a contract with Colombia, which then ruled Panama, for the sole right to build a canal. The concession ran for 99 years, and Wyse sold it on to de Lesseps’s new company.

Congress let American shippers sign service contracts with ocean carriers, loosening the conferences’ fixed rates. Big retailers began to buy shipping on their own terms.