The East India Company combined commerce with private armed force and local administration. Before the 1857 rebellion, it recruited administrators from minority groups, a practice raised as a troubling possibility in a hypothetical company intervention in Japan. Its economic reach extended beyond the territories it governed, including substantial interests in European economies. The comparison with a cyberpunk megacorporation concerns a trading organization able to fund force and exert political pressure on an imperial scale.
Notable Point · 1:19:45-1:23:51
How the East India Company became a corporate empire
The East India Company combined commerce, financial leverage, local administration, and military force on a scale that made it an empire alongside the British state.