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Comment by jotm | Hacker News Reader

They should be better regulated, but companies have been big for centuries, few come close to the power held by companies in various colonies.

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>few come close to the power held by companies in various colonies

any petty despot enjoys the same level of power

Not really. Despots usually have politics to deal with. Not everything is possible.

The companies in question had a massive technological and force advantage over the local populace with free reign when it came to managing dissent with force. Their only political concerns were back in Europe.

Companies have not been big for very long. Stock only dates back 400 years, but try and find 10 giant companies with 100,000 employees from 300 years ago. It’s really better transportation and communication that’s allowed modern giants to be created. With the railroad and telegraph kicking things into high gear.

Would even HBC and the various East India companies reach that size, at that time?

Wouldn't also a better metric be the size of the corporation proportionate to the size of population? I'm thinking of the big banking families were equivalents of the modern day corporation in pooled resources and infrastructure, and social dependence. Privately held, sure, so not 100% the same, but it seems like humans end up with similar concentrated power structures, and even breaking them up, we kinda find our way back to the same type of abstractions, just a bit more sophisticated, but with the same fundamental motivations.

Global population has increased ~10x, but Walmart is sitting at 2.3 million employees and Macdonald’s has 1.5 million so picking ~100k as the benchmark seems reasonable.

Some companies in the past held enormously more power than today's corporations. VOC of The Netherlands owned Indonesia and had a mercenary army of over a hundred thousand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

And they weren't the only ones doing that stuff at the time, the British East India Company had plenty of their own territory.

Some argue that some live in borderline corporatocracies now, but the 17th century was a completely different ball game.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India

Yes, I am not grievously historically illiterate.

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