On April 7, the Royal United Services Institute (patron: King Charles III) chastised the big corporations of today for not taking geopolitical matters seriously; “Corporations Must Relearn How To Be Geopolitical Actors,” it argued.
How do they propose that lack be remedied? The corporations of today should study the key historical precedents when corporations did not just follow events, they intervened to shape geopolitics to their advantage. The Dutch East India Company, for example, is a great model. It had “powers approaching those of a sovereign state: the authority to wage war, negotiate treaties, establish colonies and mint currency. By the middle of the 17th century, it maintained 150 merchant ships, 50,000 employees and a private army of 10,000 soldiers. Its headquarters at Batavia served as the nerve center of an extensive intelligence and diplomatic apparatus,” the RUSI piece enthusiastically reminds its readers.
That was the model on which the British East India Company was then built, thereby “ultimately governing the Indian subcontinent with military forces exceeding those of most contemporary European states and an intelligence apparatus with no sovereign state peer.”
