 English merchants and chartered companies—such as the East India Company, the Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, and the Levant Company—calculated that global economic primacy could now be wrestled from the Dutch.They reckoned that a combination of naval battles and irregular privateering missions would cripple the Dutch Republic and force the States General to agree to a favourable peace.The plan was for English ships to be replenished, and sailors paid, with booty seized from captured Dutch merchant vessels returning from overseas.