Analyzing 21st-Century American Corporate Power through the lens of 18th-Century British Trading Companies

Over the last fifty years, economic inequality has deepened, private prisons have exploded, and the economics of healthcare can kill families faster than disease.  Meanwhile, the U.S. legal system is as complex and opaque as ever, committing white collar crime could not be easier, and profits are soaring. These things are the result of the ever-expanding political influence of Corporate America.  If left unchecked, the power that Corporate America wields threatens supplanting democratic sovereignty. There are few times in history when corporate power has reached such heights, yet the greatest of them is demonstrated by the British Royal Trading Companies of the 17th-,18th-, and 19th-centuries. When the Hudson’s Bay Company and East India Company were at their strongest, their political and military power rivaled that of the British State. Utilizing insights from this earlier era as an analytic lens, my thesis figures the recent rise of Amazon as a modern-day analogue of Hudson's Bay and East India. Through close reading of Amazon's own corporate publications, alongside deep historical context and case-study analysis, I show how and why concentrated corporate power represents a rare danger to the democratic sovereignty of American citizens.