William Dalrymple writes:

At noon on Feb. 13, 1788, huge crowds gathered outside Parliament to witness members of the House of Lords process into Westminster Hall. They were there to impeach the man who ran much of India as the East India Company’s governor general of Bengal. This was the moment when the British state finally flexed its muscles to take on the greatest corporate oligarch of his day, the Elon Musk of 18th-century London.

In addition to about 170 lords in attendance, there were judges, lawyers and numerous members of the House of Commons. According to a celebrated account of the opening, the queen was “dressed in fawn colored satin, her headdress plain, with a very slender sprinkling of diamonds,” and took her place in the audience along with three of her children. Edward Thurlow, who presided over the trial, summed up the proceedings with a statement that is as true today as it was then: “Corporations,” he said, “have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like.”

We still speak of the British conquering India. In reality, the conquest of the Indian subcontinent between 1756 and 1803 was the work not of a nation-state but of a private company, the East India Company. Headquartered in a small office in London, it was answerable to nobody but its shareholders.

While its original focus was the spice trade and then the export of Indian textiles, it was authorized from the start by its charter to found and run colonies and wage war. From its maiden voyage in 1601, it used violence to conduct its business and enhance its profits. By 1788, it was not just Britain’s biggest corporation and largest employer; it was the company that had conquered what was then the richest country on earth: Mughal India, whose bejeweled loot helped power Britain into the Industrial Revolution.

Here, as in so much of imperial history, commerce, colonization and brute corporate power walked in lock step. As Tolstoy later wrote in a letter published by Gandhi, “A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising 200 million people.” All that made the East India Company the most powerful corporation in history — until now. For in the past decade, Big Tech has, too, begun to take on the attributes of sovereign states, and in many ways is now as powerful as the East India Company at its height.

Nvidia, a chip maker with some 42,000 employees, is valued at over $5 trillion, roughly the gross domestic product of Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, with a population of 84 million. Only the United States and China have gross domestic products larger than this one company’s market capitalization. Apple is valued above the annual output of Britain, Alphabet above that of France.

The way these companies control crucial global choke points echoes the political and economic power of the East India Company and its European siblings at the apex of their power. Just as the Dutch East India Company in the 1710s controlled about 72 percent of seaborne trade around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and the British East India Company at its height in the 1820s controlled about three-quarters of the tonnage transported between Europe and Asia, so SpaceX’s share of everything humanity puts into orbit has risen from below 10 percent in 2014 to around three-quarters last year. It has over 10,000 satellites in orbit — almost two out of every three functioning spacecraft circling the planet.

As the history of the East India Company shows, there can come a point when a corporation stops being just a company and begins seizing for itself the powers and trappings typically associated with a nation-state. True, today’s tech giants don’t have standing armies, nor have they conquered territory. Nevertheless, like the East India Company, they are increasingly integrated with their country’s military and have swayed events on the battlefield, particularly in Ukraine.

The East India Company used its political spending to purchase decision-making power in the most powerful legislature of its day. The tech giants are on a similar trajectory. Mr. Musk, after spending millions of dollars to help elect President Trump, arrogated to himself powers usually vested in the Congress during his stint running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The largest of the tech companies have grown powerful in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. History can help us untangle what’s happening — both the dangers we face and the options available to a democracy for finding a way out. [Continue reading…]