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.