Four centuries ago, within 15 months of each other, the English and the Dutch set up rival East India companies. In 1826 a British foreign minister sent his country's ambassador in The Hague a (coded) message: "In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch is offering too little and asking too much." But business is business: why compete when you can combine? The two East India companies soon found it easier to trade in separate bits of Asia. A century ago, the countries' rival oil companies agreed, as their joint history now puts it, that they "would do better working together", and in 1907 created Royal Dutch/Shell. In the 1920s, Margarine Unie, a Dutch-led quasi-cartel, saw Lever Brothers extending from soap into food. In 1930 the pair became Unilever.
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