The Scottish historian William Dalrymple recently argued that Big Tech has become the 21st-century equivalent of Britain’s famous East India Company.

It’s a comparison less fanciful than it might sound. At its height in the early 19th century, the East India Company controlled territory, collected taxes and fielded an army larger than Britain’s.

Today’s technology corporations may not have private armies or formally delegated sovereignty, but they control digital territories on which markets, communication and increasingly artificial intelligence depend.

There, they decide who may enter, what can be seen and the rules by which people and businesses participate.

Dalrymple asks what history can teach us about bringing such corporations under control. My recent research starts one step earlier: what is it about the corporate form itself that allows such power to accumulate and endure?

The legal machinery hiding in plain sight

Debate about Big Tech or corporate overreach usually begins after power has already accumulated.

Competition law addresses monopoly. Privacy law responds to surveillance and data extraction. Platform regulation tackles gatekeeping. All are necessary, but they mostly overlook the branch of law that creates the institutions they seek to regulate: corporate law.

Within corporate law, the significance of incorporation is often minimised.

Incorporation does something remarkable: it creates an artificial person. Like a human being, this legal creation can own property and enter into contracts. As with Theseus’s ship,........

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