The private joint-stock trading company, chartered in 1600, that ended up conquering and governing the Indian subcontinent. It began as a venture seeking spices and textiles and became a corporate state: ruling some 200 million people, fielding a private army larger than Britain's own, collecting taxes, coining money, making war and treaty, and answering ultimately to its shareholders. It financed its conquests with Indian revenue and fought them with Indian soldiers, plundered Bengal, built the Indian opium system that fed the China trade, and governed India for a century before the British Crown took it over in the wake of the Rebellion of 1857.
It was a business, and it conquered a subcontinent. Chartered to trade in pepper and cloth, the British East India Company ended up ruling some two hundred million people, with a private army that by around 1800 was more than twice the size of Britain's own. Its shareholders in London collected dividends while its agents collected the taxes of Bengal. No one had planned this, yet from the start it lived under royal charter and the shelter of state power. A company, accountable to investors, governed India for a hundred years, fought its wars with Indian soldiers paid out of Indian revenue, and grew so powerful that the British government spent decades trying to control the corporation it had created. When people warn that a corporation can grow into a kind of empire, this is the case they have in mind.