“At noon on Feb. 13, 1788, huge crowds gathered outside Parliament to witness members of the House of Lords process into Westminster Hall,” William Dalrymple, the author of multiple books on the East India Company, writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “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.”
While the original focus of the East India Company “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,” he says. “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.”
“All that made the East India Company the most powerful corporation in history — until now,” he continues. “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.”
“The question today,” William asks, ”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?”
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