The Dutch West India Company or WIC was a chartered company and joint-stock company of Dutch merchants as well as foreign investors. On 3 June 1621, it was granted a charter for a trade monopoly in the Dutch West Indies by the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and given jurisdiction over Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. he company became instrumental in the largely ephemeral Dutch colonization of the Americas (including New Netherland) in the seventeenth century.