As after the 2004 tsunami, I have only to watch the news to be reminded that I am a son of the East India Company. A long-serving Parish Priest here in Lanchester had ties to Goa, and the priests who came to visit him looked like my relatives, in one case startlingly like my grandmother’s brothers. On and off, though far less than I should have been, I have long been around the Dalit cause, and just as Dalits have predominated among South Asian converts to Christianity, so they were found disproportionately among the transported indentured labourers, having had no caste status to lose by crossing the sea; it occurred to me only very recently that in that struggle I had been recognising my own kin, but I have realised it now.
The best Chancellor of the Exchequer that the Conservative Party never had was Sir Peter Tapsell. As Keynesian and as Eurosceptical as Peter Shore, he identified the money markets, the media moguls and the intelligence agencies as the heirs of the nabobs and of the Whig magnates whom past generations of Tories had made it their defining cause to cut down to size and to subject to the sovereignty of Parliament. In that spirit, 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.
It took Britain decades to rein in the East India Company and gain direct control of the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, starting with the attempted impeachment of its boss in India, Warren Hastings. As the British viceroy and foreign secretary George Curzon noted, as long as Britain ruled India (meaning, as long as the state had direct control over the source of its wealth), it was the greatest power in the world.
The question today is: Does America have the appetite and the ability to check the power of the tech companies, or will they increasingly operate without limits or boundaries, just like the East India Company before them?
The East India Company was established in London in 1600, with a monopoly on all British trade to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. By the mid-18th century, the company had begun conquering great chunks of the most prosperous provinces of the Mughal Empire, which encompassed most of what is now India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh and half of Afghanistan. Before long, the East India Company was straddling the globe. Almost single-handedly it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times had led to a drain of Western bullion eastward. Now money flowed toward London, enriching both the government and the nation.
By the 1780s, the East India Company was ferrying opium east to China, and its troops participated in the Opium Wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong. Soon the company had become the largest drug cartel in history; by the 1860s, roughly a sixth of the revenue of British India came from narcotics, one of the largest sources of revenue after the land tax.
By the end of the 18th century, the East India Company had created a vast and sophisticated administration in India and built much of the London Docklands. Its annual spending in Britain — around 8.5 million pounds — equaled about a quarter of the British government’s total annual expenditure. In India it collected taxes, minted coin, administered justice, ran its own courts and diplomatic service, flew its own flag, negotiated treaties and made war on sovereign states, all in pursuit of increased dividends. An international corporation that began trading spices ended up transforming itself into a colonial superpower.
The East India Company operated from its headquarters on Leadenhall Street in London. For much of the 18th century it was staffed with as few as 35 people, in a building five windows wide. Yet in India the East India Company owned a private army that by 1803 numbered some 200,000 men — roughly twice the size of the standing British Army. Its stock was a pillar of British public finance, and its profitability and solvency were matters of state.
The parliamentarian and philosopher Edmund Burke, who led the impeachment of Hastings, saw the problem with perfect clarity: The company was “a state in the disguise of a merchant,” Burke said. “The constitution of the company began in commerce and ended in empire.”
The East India Company is often thought of as having the conquest of India as its primary focus, but in truth it always had two targets. One was the lands where its business was conducted; the other was the country that gave it birth.
Its lawyers and lobbyists and parliamentarian shareholders slowly and subtly worked to use its immense wealth to influence and subvert legislation in its favor. In 1693 the company was discovered to be using its shares to buy influence with prominent members of Parliament and ministers. The following parliamentary investigation, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the East India Company guilty of bribery and insider trading.
After that, the company became more subtle and instead backed candidates favorable to its policies. It arguably invented corporate lobbying, that alchemy by which the interests of a company somehow magically become the policies of the state. Around one in 20 members of Parliament sat on the East India Company’s board, and more than a fifth of the company’s directors sat in Parliament at some point; about 40 percent of members of Parliament were shareholders.
Today’s biggest tech firms spent a combined $36 million on federal lobbying in the first half of 2025 alone and retain roughly one lobbyist for every two members of Congress. Meta has one lobbyist per six members of Congress, Issue One’s reporting has found.
Tech corporations and executives, not including cryptocurrency, gave $35 million toward Mr. Trump’s record $239 million inauguration fund; Mr. Musk alone spent $290 million on U.S. elections in 2024 and was rewarded with a powerful office inside the government. The returns arrived promptly, with an executive order curbing state artificial intelligence regulation and tariff exemptions repaid in investment pledges. David Sacks, a venture capitalist who opposed regulating A.I., was put in charge of the Trump administration’s policy on A.I.
In 2019, when I finished “The Anarchy,” the most recent of my four books about the East India Company, I wrote that today’s companies do not, thankfully, have private armies. Walmart “does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry.” That now feels like a piece of history in itself, the innocent conclusion of a more innocent age.
For while the tech companies do not have standing armies of 200,000 troops, they increasingly have other military capabilities. In Ukraine, after Russian strikes destroyed terrestrial communications networks in 2022, Mr. Musk’s Starlink became the technology binding together the Ukrainian war effort: It controlled drones, artillery correction and frontline communications. Ukraine’s digital minister at the time, later its defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, called it the blood of the country’s communications infrastructure.
It was catastrophic for Ukraine when Mr. Musk declined to enable coverage near Russian-occupied Crimea in 2022, reportedly frustrating a Ukrainian naval drone operation, purely on the strength of his assessment of the risk of escalation. SpaceX has at various points continued to restrict military uses of the network according to Mr. Musk’s whims.
Decisions of war and peace, in other words, are now taken in part by a private proprietor according to his personal judgment, exactly as the East India Company’s Court of Directors once decided from Leadenhall Street whether the nawab of Bengal or the Mughal emperor would be fought or befriended or bribed. When the company’s brass made such decisions, charter and Crown at least stood behind them. Mr. Musk answers only to a share price and his own convictions.
In June 2025 the U.S. Army commissioned the chief technology officers of Palantir and Meta and OpenAI’s chief product officer as lieutenant colonels in a new Reserve unit. The East India Company packed Parliament with retired officers and major shareholders. The new dispensation puts tech executives straight into a position of federal power, which in one way puts them ahead of their 18th-century counterparts. Then, at least, company men were required to buy their way into Parliament through purchasing a compromised seat known as a rotten borough.
The company was a trading business that became, in the course of a century, one of the most powerful military forces on the planet. Silicon Valley is making the same journey, at ever-accelerating speed. Palantir, which draws more than 40 percent of its revenue from the U.S. government and whose valuation has raced past that of every traditional arms maker, holds a $1.3 billion contract for the Pentagon’s A.I. targeting program. It signed an upgraded strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense in January 2024 to supply technology in support of war-related missions.
Last week a clip emerged of Safra Catz, the executive vice chairman of Oracle, boasting that her company made “really profoundly scary technology” available to Israel and remarking that her proudest moment was coming out of Israel Defense Forces headquarters just as five of her employees were entering, in uniform.
Google and Amazon hold a $1.2 billion contract to supply cloud and A.I. services to the Israeli government, reportedly including the Ministry of Defense and the Israel Defense Forces. The Pentagon has handed contracts of up to $200 million each to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. OpenAI has dropped its ban on military work. Google dropped its pledge not to build A.I. for weapons or surveillance.
Then as now, there is no question that great corporations can enrich the state. But they can also drag it down, and that is when the interests of the state and the interests of corporations begin to diverge.
In the summer of 1772, the greatest corporation on earth ran out of money. The East India Company had conquered Bengal, but the conquest had turned ruinous. A famine helped along by company negligence had killed perhaps a fifth of the province’s people, and the company’s share price had collapsed.
On June 8 a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce, having speculated heavily in East India Company stock, disappeared from his office, leaving debts of 550,000 pounds. His bank soon declared bankruptcy, followed by another the next week, initiating a financial crisis that spread across Britain into Europe. By the fall, company directors were asking for a bailout.
Parliament saved the East India Company because it could not afford otherwise. Like Lehman Brothers, the company really was too big to fail. Company stock was a pillar of British public credit and was held by around 40 percent of the members of the House of Commons. In 1773 the state advanced the East India Company £1.4 million, and then, casting about for some way to help it earn the money back, hit on the unsold tea sitting in its London warehouses. The Tea Act let the company ship it directly to America, undercutting the colonial merchants who had handled the trade.
This was legislation written to solve one corporation’s inventory problem. It cost Britain 13 colonies. That December, men in Boston threw tea into the harbor. One of the principal fears of the American patriots in the run-up to the American Revolution was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India.
This “almost bankrupt company,” having been occupied in wreaking “the most unparalleled barbarities, extortions and monopolies” in Bengal, had now “cast their eyes on America, as a new theater, whereon to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression and cruelty,” wrote the American John Dickinson. Within three years, America declared independence.
This is how a corporation crosses the line from doing business with a state to becoming inseparable from it; how the state, once the corporation is large enough, finds itself legislating on the company’s behalf; and how the bill, when it arrives, is paid by the country rather than the shareholders. The government, under Prime Minister Frederick North, did not set out to lose America. It set out to keep a company solvent. The results were catastrophic for the British state and did much to diminish its power.
All this raises the question of what can be done to tame today’s corporations. The British state eventually fought back against its greatest corporate competitor, realizing that it was becoming powerful enough to overcome entire nation-states and to make or break not just their economies but their militaries, too.
Burke spent seven years in Westminster Hall trying to impeach Hastings and lost. It took Britain an additional 63 years and the largest anticolonial uprising of the 19th century, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, to show that only robust legislation can tame corporations.
This happened after the East India Company’s insensitivity provoked a bloody uprising in 1857, the war known in Britain as the Indian Mutiny and in India as the First War of Independence. The Victorian state, alerted to the dangers posed by greed and self-interest, moved to tame history’s most voracious corporation by issuing a raft of legislation that essentially abolished the company and brought its functions under the purview of the Imperial Civil Service.
The company’s navy was disbanded, and its army passed to the Crown. In 1858 the governor general of India announced that the company’s Indian possessions would be nationalized and pass into the control of the British Crown. The monarch, rather than the directors of the company, would henceforth rule India. The East India Company limped on in its amputated form for an additional 15 years, when its charter expired, finally shutting down in 1874, “with less fanfare,” noted one commentator, “than a regional railway bankruptcy.”
This not only broke the company’s economic monopoly with the trade of the East; it also allowed Britain to take control of its most profitable colony, with enormous benefits for the state (though not, it should be said, for India, whose economic exploitation in the service of British interests continued much as before).
China, reverting to its traditionally Communist approach to business, recently did something similar with its big corporations. A decade ago, many believed Alibaba and Tencent were the coming corporate kings. Today, China’s economy may yet overtake that of the United States, but its corporations will not, because President Xi Jinping decided they would not. In October 2020, Jack Ma, a co-founder of Alibaba, criticized China’s financial regulators for their “pawnshop mentality.” Within days, the over $310 billion flotation of Mr. Ma’s financial services unit, Ant Group, which at the time would have been the largest in history, was canceled two days before trading was set to begin.
The most sweeping regulatory assault in the history of corporate China followed. Alibaba was fined $2.75 billion, Ant was forcibly restructured, and parallel campaigns were started against whole sectors of the Chinese economy. Mr. Ma, the highest-profile casualty of the crackdown, largely disappeared from public life in China, resurfacing in February 2025 to shake Mr. Xi’s hand at a televised symposium of chastened entrepreneurs. Whereas Starlink is one man’s company, China’s answer is Guowang, run by a state enterprise reporting directly to Beijing, alongside the Shanghai-backed Qianfan. They plan to have over 27,000 satellites between them.
One recent incident shows that the American state retains the whip hand when it chooses to crack it. Anthropic is the A.I. laboratory that has gone deepest into classified government work while insisting on two restraints: no mass surveillance of Americans and no fully autonomous weapons. It was ordered by the Pentagon last winter to permit its models to be used “for all lawful purposes.” It refused. The president directed every federal agency to stop using its technology, and the Defense Department branded Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — in other words, a major security threat, a designation never before publicly applied to an American company. (Anthropic has sued the Pentagon over the designation; litigation is ongoing.)
The East India Company’s directors faced something similar in 1773 when Parliament passed the Regulating Act, an early attempt at state control. In Parliament’s case, it intervened to restrain a corporation’s violence. Mr. Trump’s administration intervened to strip out a corporation’s self-imposed restraints on violence.
There are the first stirrings of something like popular resistance. As the East India Company’s excesses eventually provoked a reaction not just in Parliament but also in the country at large, so too a broad and strikingly bipartisan hostility to Big Tech is taking shape across America.
Gallup found that nearly four in 10 Americans said A.I. did more harm than good, up sharply from a year earlier, and nearly eight in 10 expected it to reduce the number of American jobs. The anger has found its most tangible target in the data centers that are the physical embodiment of the A.I. boom. In the first three months of 2026 alone, organized local opposition blocked or delayed 75 major projects worth some $130 billion, and the same Gallup poll found that more than seven in 10 voters, including large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, said they wanted no such facility built near their homes.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a national moratorium on new data centers. Students have booed A.I. executives at commencement ceremonies. And rising utility bills, driven in part by the tech companies’ voracious demand for power, helped carry Democrats to victory in Virginia, Georgia and New Jersey. Just this week, Meta settled a lawsuit from 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories by agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to how its platforms work.
Whether any of this can be marshaled into the kind of legislation that in the end tamed the East India Company is another question, especially when a major corporate mogul occupies the presidency, one who treats his family business and that of the Republic as a single concern.
The lesson of the East India Company is not only that corporations can behave monstrously abroad. It is that they can flex their powers at home, too. Like the East India Company before them, today’s giants are using their lobbying dollars and closeness to power to warp our politics and our economy as they take on the powers and functions of a nation-state. Burke understood this in the 1780s. His greatest anxiety was not what the company was doing in Bengal but what its money would do to Britain.
History shows that when a company starts acquiring the attributes of a state — the revenues, the courts, the treaties, the capacity to make war and peace — its transformation can damage the parent country at least as much as the territories it exploits. Its lobbying corrupts the legislature. It captures the treasury, because the corporation’s solvency becomes a public interest. It converts foreign policy into an extension of a balance sheet. And it shows that the threshold, once crossed, is astonishingly hard to recross. The window in which any of this can be undone closes fast.
States can master corporations. The taming of the mighty East India Company proves it, as does Beijing’s recent muscle flexing. Because of the power of the company’s corporate lobby, the British Parliament took 85 years, three parliamentary interventions, a famine, a bankruptcy and the bloodiest colonial uprising of the century to get it back under control, and by then, the damage in India was done.
The instruments still exist. What is lacking is the political nerve to use them.
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