<Li> <P> Natives of Arakan sell slaves to the Dutch East India Company, c. 1663 CE . </P> </Li> <P> Natives of Arakan sell slaves to the Dutch East India Company, c. 1663 CE . </P> <P> Around 1670, two events caused the growth of VOC trade to stall . In the first place, the highly profitable trade with Japan started to decline . The loss of the outpost on Formosa to Koxinga in the 1662 Siege of Fort Zeelandia and related internal turmoil in China (where the Ming dynasty was being replaced with the Qing dynasty) brought an end to the silk trade after 1666 . Though the VOC substituted Bengali for Chinese silk other forces affected the supply of Japanese silver and gold . The shogunate enacted a number of measures to limit the export of these precious metals, in the process limiting VOC opportunities for trade, and severely worsening the terms of trade . Therefore, Japan ceased to function as the lynchpin of the intra-Asiatic trade of the VOC by 1685 . </P> <P> Even more importantly, the Third Anglo - Dutch War temporarily interrupted VOC trade with Europe . This caused a spike in the price of pepper, which enticed the English East India Company (EIC) to enter this market aggressively in the years after 1672 . Previously, one of the tenets of the VOC pricing policy was to slightly over-supply the pepper market, so as to depress prices below the level where interlopers were encouraged to enter the market (instead of striving for short - term profit maximisation). The wisdom of such a policy was illustrated when a fierce price war with the EIC ensued, as that company flooded the market with new supplies from India . In this struggle for market share, the VOC (which had much larger financial resources) could wait out the EIC . Indeed, by 1683, the latter came close to bankruptcy; its share price plummeted from 600 to 250; and its president Josiah Child was temporarily forced from office . </P>

By the end of the seventeenth century who was most successful at using diplomacy to secure land