COMPETING WITH THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY.

Double Description of an Armed Ship 'Indiaman', from the Time of King William III of England (1650-1702), of the East India Company by Isaac Sailmaker

It may seem provocative to assert that a twenty-first-century technology and infrastructure company is, in some ways, “competing with” the British East India Company (BEIC). After all, the BEIC is most commonly remembered today — if it is remembered at all — for the violence, coercion, and exploitation that characterised much of its history. Let us be clear at the outset: we do not condone or aspire to the cruelty or violence perpetrated under its name. Those are dark chapters in human history, and our aim is neither to romanticise them nor to emulate them.

But to understand what made the BEIC truly consequential — what made it, in the words of some historians, “larger than several nations” and arguably the most powerful commercial institution in human history — we must examine the structural and institutional lessons it offers about scale, longevity, frontier infrastructure, and the creation of new economic space. HISTORY

This is the historical frame against which we must interpret the analogy: not as emulation of misconduct, but as study of institutional scale and civilisational effect.

i. A Frontier Institution of the first Renaissance Age of Discovery

Founded by royal charter in 1600 under Queen Elizabeth I with a modest pitch to London investors, the British East India Company began as a commercial venture seeking access to Asian spices and textiles. In its earliest years its voyages were fraught with peril; ships were lost, cargo spoiled, and returns uncertain. From this precarious origin it evolved into a global commercial power — and, eventually, a geopolitical one — that for nearly 274 years exercised functions that in later epochs would be understood as those of a state: administering territory, collecting taxes, maintaining military forces, and operating infrastructure. HISTORY

This longevity — far beyond the fifteen-year lifecycle that the modern tech sector often labels “generational” — is itself instructive. A truly generational institution is not measured in quarters or even decades, but in centuries. This perspective should recalibrate how we think about scale, ambition, and institutional continuity.

II. Cities and Frontier Infrastructure

One of the most striking legacies of the BEIC was its role in the emergence and transformation of urban centres that remain economic powerhouses today. These cities — while obviously shaped by many historical forces far beyond the Company’s actions — were among the major nodes through which the Company built its commercial and administrative networks. They are also among the most significant economic engines in the contemporary world.

Bombay (Mumbai)

Originally an archipelago of seven islands, Bombay was leased to the East India Company in the late seventeenth century and later transferred to the British Crown. Today, the Mumbai metropolitan region is one of the largest urban economies in the world, with a nominal GDP of approximately $278 billion and GDP (PPP) around $400 billion. Estimated GDP per capita in purchasing power terms is around $23,000 — far above India’s national average — making it not only an economic centre of South Asia but a global urban powerhouse. Wikipedia

Calcutta (Kolkata)

Founded as a trading post, Calcutta became the administrative and commercial capital of British India. It continues to be one of India’s largest cities, with a metropolitan economy estimated at roughly $150 billion in GDP, supported by industry, services, and cultural sectors. NoBroker

Madras (Chennai)

Madras, now Chennai, was established as a Company trading post in 1639 and grew into a major urban and economic centre. Estimates put Chennai’s contribution to India’s GDP at tens of billions of dollars, with a thriving automotive, information technology, and services economy. NoBroker

Singapore

Although founded under different colonial auspices, Singapore’s emergence as a global trading city bears historical resonance with British commercial expansion in the region. Today, Singapore’s metropolitan GDP exceeds $547 billion and its GDP per capita is among the highest globally at roughly $141,000, signalling the extraordinary productivity of modern urban nodes originally tied to early modern trade networks. Wikipedia+1

These figures place the economic scale of these cities at the very highest tier of contemporary urban systems — analogous to the role cities like London, Tokyo, or New York play in their respective national and regional economies. Wikipedia

III. A Market Cap for the Ages

To appreciate the scale of the BEIC against modern corporations, some economists and financial historians estimate that if the Company’s revenues, taxation rights, territorial control, and commercial leverage were translated into contemporary corporate valuation metrics, its effective market capitalisation might range between 4 and 10 trillion USD — surpassing the largest corporations in the world today. This is not an idle comparison, but a heuristic for understanding institutional reach: it was not a firm, it was a persistent, system-level actor in global economic space.

IV. Financial Infrastructure

 One of the most extraordinary and least appreciated aspects of the British East India Company is that it did not merely trade goods. It built financial architecture on a continental scale.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Company was:

• minting its own currency,

• issuing its own coinage in Bengal, Bombay, and Madras,

• operating banking functions,

• managing tax collection,

• extending credit to merchants, rulers, and even, at times, to the British state itself.

In Bengal alone, the Company controlled the minting of rupees — a monetary authority comparable to a central bank in all but name. It standardised coinage, stabilised exchange rates within its jurisdiction, and controlled flows of silver and bullion across Asia. In London, its shares were among the most liquid and widely traded securities on the nascent stock exchange; its dividend policy shaped entire classes of British investors; and its bonds and credit instruments were used to fund state operations.

By the 1770s, the Company’s financial capacity had grown so expansive that the British government found itself compelled to intervene not from lack of trust but from an awareness that the Company’s balance sheet had become too large, too influential, and too systemically important to be allowed to fail.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the BEIC built:

• a quasi-sovereign monetary system,

• a pan-continental credit network,

• and a proto-central bank, long before such institutions formally existed in most states.

This is the scale of financial infrastructure required to build cities, trading networks, and supply chains across continents.

V. Hope and Wealth to Talented Young ‘Nobodies’

Another aspect of the BEIC’s legacy is the social mobility it enabled for certain cohorts. While much of its wealth extraction harmed indigenous economies, its operations also generated substantial personal wealth for thousands of individuals who would otherwise have remained outside the economic elite.

Across its nearly three centuries of existence, the Company employed hundreds of thousands of people directly and indirectly — from mariners and captains to clerks, factor-agents, administrators, and logisticians. Conservative historical estimates suggest that at least 5,000 to 10,000 individuals encompassing officers, administrators, merchants, and investors accrued significant wealth — in some cases sufficient to seed merchant families, patronage networks, and even later industrial and financial institutions.

This pattern — young actors from relatively modest backgrounds rising to positions of influence and economic power — is one historians frequently observe in frontier enterprises where risk, distance, and technical skill create unconventional opportunities. It is here that a linkage to contemporary ambitions becomes most poignant: societies require institutions that allow talent to scale with technological and geographic frontiers.

VI. The West Needs a new Frontier Institution

Today’s global frontier is not the Indian Ocean or the South China Sea, but rather the interlinked domains of artificial intelligence, space industrialisation, and advanced urban infrastructure. These domains will shape the next century’s economic, strategic, and civilisational contours in the same way that early modern trade networks and colonial administrations shaped the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The West lacks an institution capable of:

• operating at century-long horizons

• building frontier infrastructure

• integrating economic, scientific, and geopolitical instruments

• creating urban and orbital nodes of sustained productivity

• generationally scaling capability across domains

VII. ROMULLUS seeks to fill that strategic gap.

Through the construction of technologically integrated cities, spaceport infrastructure and transdomainal compute networks ROMULLUS aims to build the substrate on which a renewed Western civilisational project can be realised — one that fosters opportunity, prosperity, and strategic resilience without recourse to exploitation.

Conclusion: A Structural Comparison

To say we are “competing with the British East India Company” is not to equate our ends with its means. Rather, it is to recognise that the scale of ambition necessary to build a multi-planetary, technologically integrated future requires an institution as bold and long-lasting as any in history.

The BEIC shaped the world by expanding economic space, building cities, and mobilising resources across continents.
The West’s current frontier — AI, space, and urban infrastructure — demands nothing less.
We are competing, not for domination, but for construction; not for empire, but for abundance.

It's time to rebuild.