Which megacorp could have become a nation-state?

Which company could have become like a country and survive to now?

  • British East India Company

    Votes: 73 65.2%
  • Dutch East India Company

    Votes: 17 15.2%
  • Hudson's Bay Company

    Votes: 16 14.3%
  • other corporation

    Votes: 6 5.4%

  • Total voters
    112
Hudson's Bay Company and East India Company could work. But only in the sense of, I could see them being the main authority in the area under the aegis of a more ad hoc British Empire.

They would not be sending ministers to parliament, and they would not have governors appointed, but they would have a lot of soft power at home, and British policy would have a lot of soft power over their policies. They probably would not be making deals with Britain's enemies.

You would need some government interference to keep the Hudson's Bay Company going, though. They had the monopoly. A divergence would be required that made them powerful and competitive enough to maintain a virtual monopoly over the area after the government stops enforcing it. If they were interested in investing in and controlling agricultural and industrial (?) development of the Canadian west, rather than opposed to it, that could help.

And perhaps all it would take for the East India Company to last as long as the Raj would be for the Indian Mutiny to not occur, or to be handled quickly and quietly by the East India Company itself.
 
Hudson's Bay Company and East India Company could work. But only in the sense of, I could see them being the main authority in the area under the aegis of a more ad hoc British Empire.

Yeah, this is about as far as I could see something like this going - I don't think there's much of a chance of the Companies getting American-style or even Commonwealth-style independence (well, *maybe* Commonwealth-style is possible).
 
Yeah, this is about as far as I could see something like this going - I don't think there's much of a chance of the Companies getting American-style or even Commonwealth-style independence (well, *maybe* Commonwealth-style is possible).

To further clarify; I mean that the people who live there would probably call themselves whatever nationality they last lived in, mostly British.

Hudson's Bay Company is the one I can see transmogrifying into a traditional state that survives to now, or unites with Canada and the Maritimes, or is possibly incorporated into the US as a Puerto Rico style special case. This would not really be the OP challenge fulfilled, since it would not be special status, except that their civil servants would be called HBC employees, and their head of state/government would be called president or CEO or whatever the HBC called them.

East India Company is always going to have a sell by date, based on Indian Nationalism. The very best they can hope for is that they hold on a bit longer before spawning India. And this India could possibly be more capitalist, inheriting the apparatus of a company rather than a government, or it could be more communist, raging against the machine of a company and so trying to do the opposite.

I don't know nearly enough about the Dutch East India Company to even comment. And my vote was for the Hudson's Bay Company, for reasons I expanded on in this post.
 
IMO, Dutch East India Company is the more likely one.

Simply because British motherland was strong in 18th, 19th century. The one major defeat was American Revolutionary War, and neither Hudson´s Bay Company nor East India Company were in position to side with 13 Colonies. If 13 Colonies did conquer Rupert´s Land, they would have given it to Canada civilian government, not kept the Company around.

Whereas United Provinces were under French occupation between 1795 and 1814. Could you have had VOC that allies with Great Britain after the motherland falls to French, runs as an independent British ally, and when the motherland is liberated in 1814, reunification after 19 years of independence does not work out?
 
East India Company is always going to have a sell by date, based on Indian Nationalism. The very best they can hope for is that they hold on a bit longer before spawning India. And this India could possibly be more capitalist, inheriting the apparatus of a company rather than a government, or it could be more communist, raging against the machine of a company and so trying to do the opposite.

Unless, of course, a charismatic leader of the EIC, potentially an Anglo-Indian, co-opts Indian Nationalism for their own ends as they declare independence from the Empire. You only need to get the elite on board to survive a long time - the peasant masses didn't become a real force until Gandhi, and that could be butterflied away if the EIC became to be seen as India. You could even imagine a peasant movement being painted as leftist and this independent EIC state gets American backing should this timeline have a cold war.
 
Unless, of course, a charismatic leader of the EIC, potentially an Anglo-Indian, co-opts Indian Nationalism for their own ends as they declare independence from the Empire. You only need to get the elite on board to survive a long time - the peasant masses didn't become a real force until Gandhi, and that could be butterflied away if the EIC became to be seen as India. You could even imagine a peasant movement being painted as leftist and this independent EIC state gets American backing should this timeline have a cold war.

I'm struggling to see why foreign corporate overlords would be seen as "Indian" in any way.
 
The British South African Company had a Royal Charter from 1889 to 1923 for the exploitation and later control of Rhodesia (North and South). It was of course backed up by the British government and very much was a London company.

I guess it is possible that the failure to renew the Charter in 1923 could have been butterflied away, but whether or not the BSAC was sustainable economically is another question. Also, the Settlers probably would not have been super happy to remain under Company rule. Nor indeed would the indigenous peoples I imagine
 
Real easy, just have the metropole decapitated. Hard to have Britain cut off from their colonies, but doable with the Netherlands. The Dutch East Indies Company went bankrupt in 1798 and were nationalized... all they need to do is last until 1810 when the Dutch were formally annexed by France(though they'd presumably defacto secede and cooperate with Britain before then) and they'll be autonomous albeit British aligned. Assuming the British don't choose to incorporate them formally under British authority, and assuming the coalition failed to defeat Napoleon and liberate the Netherlands, they could develop into some style of state that could then co-opt nationalism.
 
Interesting proposal to alter the Napoleonic Wars. I would also like random butterflies to allow the Order of Malta to retain control of their territories, so this way there can be more than one weird non-nation-state sovereign entity that administers land in the world besides the Holy See.
 
I think the best time for a corporation to rise would be the late 19th or early 20th century. Perhaps if Rhodes was less of a patriot toward britain? Or if some how some of the huge German corporations decided to buy up land in the Africa.

The Free State of Congo was owned as private property right?

In the US railroad companies certainly owned small countries worth of land.
 
An alternate Scramble for Africa, might end up with a massive Private Company controling a huge amount of land. If you add the Congo to Rhodesia they could later purchase Mozambique and Angola. If that company could survive into the modern world they would have the Uranium to explode a nuclear bomb, and the world's supply of Cobalt.
 
^^

That's a good idea.

Leopolds Congo was definately a private enterprise already, the International African Association was a front for Leopold and the later rubber business of the Compagnie du Congo Belge had Leopold as the sole chairman and shareholder.
 
IMO, Dutch East India Company is the more likely one.

Simply because British motherland was strong in 18th, 19th century. The one major defeat was American Revolutionary War, and neither Hudson´s Bay Company nor East India Company were in position to side with 13 Colonies. If 13 Colonies did conquer Rupert´s Land, they would have given it to Canada civilian government, not kept the Company around.

Whereas United Provinces were under French occupation between 1795 and 1814. Could you have had VOC that allies with Great Britain after the motherland falls to French, runs as an independent British ally, and when the motherland is liberated in 1814, reunification after 19 years of independence does not work out?

VoC no longer existed at the time. IF you manage it to stay around past French Invasion, though, it would be an interesting scenario.
 
The Mughals weren't milking the country and taking the fruits of it's productivity overseas.

Right, but I'm not saying OTL BEIC could become identified with India overnight immediately after a point of difference. I'm just saying its plausible that it could develop in a way in the longer run. Say that Britain has a civil war or a revolution for some reason or another, or that Britain gets invaded by France, the EIC continues to operate for a long time with much autonomy. Eventually, when parliament severely threatens the economic interests of the top members of the EIC they decide to declare independence in the mid-1800s, and cut off British shareholders. Between the 1850s and the early 1900s, the top managers receive the lions share of the profits and bed down in elite mansions in India. They change their name to the India Republic and increasingly recruit from upper class natives. The constantly curse British and Western meddling in India, saying that Westerners do not understand the country. By the time nationalism takes off in the 1930s they can co-opt it for their own uses. Just as criollos have done in Latin America.
 

Typo

Banned
Right, but I'm not saying OTL BEIC could become identified with India overnight immediately after a point of difference. I'm just saying its plausible that it could develop in a way in the longer run. Say that Britain has a civil war or a revolution for some reason or another, or that Britain gets invaded by France, the EIC continues to operate for a long time with much autonomy. Eventually, when parliament severely threatens the economic interests of the top members of the EIC they decide to declare independence in the mid-1800s, and cut off British shareholders. Between the 1850s and the early 1900s, the top managers receive the lions share of the profits and bed down in elite mansions in India. They change their name to the India Republic and increasingly recruit from upper class natives. The constantly curse British and Western meddling in India, saying that Westerners do not understand the country. By the time nationalism takes off in the 1930s they can co-opt it for their own uses. Just as criollos have done in Latin America.
More importantly, the Mughals were not a nation-state, there is not way around the fact that a Nation-State essentially requires the ejection of foreign rulers. This is of course not to say those companies could not establish some sort of a corporatist state, just not a nation-state
 
More importantly, the Mughals were not a nation-state, there is not way around the fact that a Nation-State essentially requires the ejection of foreign rulers. This is of course not to say those companies could not establish some sort of a corporatist state, just not a nation-state

Depends on classification I guess. Is Brazil a nation state?
 
The Hanseatic League was pretty much dominated by mercantile interests. Does it qualify as a nation-state, as it was able to raise fleets and armies, impose tariffs and taxes and generally impose its will on its neighbours if it could get away with it? It certainly wasn't a confederation of one-horse towns. Nah, on mature reflection, it was too loose to qualify but I thought I might throw it into the mix anyhow.
 
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