Penn Calendar Penn A-Z School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania
India in Transition
  
Joshua Ehrlich & Rohan Venkat
November 25, 2024

In recent years, the East India Company (EIC)—which conquered and ruled large parts of India over the 18th and 19th centuries—has been compared to companies like Google and Meta. Both today’s Big Tech firms as well as the EIC were profit-hungry corporations, not sovereign entities, that nevertheless had immense influence at a global scale and often wielded their powers in deeply exploitative ways.