GettyImages Tayfun Coskun/Getty ImagesThe 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 sightDebate 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, its identity can endure even when every constituent part has been replaced.In a business corporation, capital contributed by investors becomes its property. Investors receive shares, but don’t own its underlying assets. Shareholders can sell their shares and leave, while the corporate fund can keep growing for as long as the corporation exists.Notably, a corporation can itself own capital – capital owning capital – as well as other corporations.Subsidiaries can sit within wider corporate groups, allowing capital and control to expand while assets and liabilities remain legally partitioned. The result is an institutional structure capable of accumulating resources and pursuing objectives across generations.Incorporation alone, of course, does not explain big tech’s dominance. Data, network effects, intellectual property, finance, technological design and political choices all play a part.But the corporate form acts as a multiplier, allowing these advantages to accumulate and persist over time. Its distinctive superpower is not simply the accumulation of existing capital.It can identify resources such as data, turn them into new forms of capital, and use that capital recursively to create still more value.History (sometimes) repeatsThe East India Company was chartered in 1600, acquiring permanent capital in 1657. This attached investor capital to an enduring corporate person, allowing wealth to accumulate. By 1701 its governor, Josiah Child, could describe the company as a “Fund of Wealth”.Its later territorial and governmental powers were delegated by the state, but its corporate structure allowed them to accumulate within a single continuing institution.During America’s Gilded Age, corporations amassed capital and brought railways and other essential infrastructure under their control. American legal scholar Herbert Hovenkamp wrote that corporate law had “unleashed a power it could no longer control”.The antitrust law that emerged in response sat outside the corporate law that had enabled these companies to grow.Big Tech has again demonstrated the power of the corporate form. A dominant platform is not merely a participant in a market. It may own the marketplace, compete against businesses using it and write the rules for everyone involved.Its power is not formally sovereign, as the East India Company’s became, but is produced through ownership, contracts, code, network effects and state acquiescence.Like the East India Company, Big Tech corporations have used the corporate form to create new types of capital. For Big Tech, it is data. For the East India Company, colonisation turned India itself – its land, labour, revenues and trade – into capital.Where corporate law can helpCompetition, privacy and AI regulation remain indispensable responses to corporate overreach. But regulation need not wait until that power manifests as misconduct. If incorporation law helps create and maintain these institutions, it can also place conditions on how they operate.Legal scholar and former US Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has argued for structural separation: a dominant platform should not both operate essential infrastructure and compete on it.Separation must address ownership as well as conduct. Moving the competing business into a subsidiary would not solve the conflict if the same corporate group controlled both.Law could also make platform corporations that control essential digital infrastructure subject to public-governance duties.These could include non-discriminatory access, transparent rule-making and protection against the commercial use of data obtained from dependent businesses. They could also give people whose livelihoods depend on a platform some representation in how it is governed.Such obligations should follow access to a market, not merely the jurisdiction in which a company chooses to incorporate.Corporations can create enormous value at scale. The corporation is one of humanity’s great social inventions.For that reason, regulatory interventions should use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. The challenge is to distinguish productive growth from the concentration of infrastructure, commercial activity and accumulated capital within the same artificial person.Dalrymple’s history and the first Gilded Age demonstrate that states can curb extraordinarily powerful corporations.But incorporation law points to something more fundamental: corporations are privately initiated but state-constituted institutions.They are artificial persons we create. If incorporation law helped unleash their power, it can also reshape them to serve more than the gilded few.Susan Watson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.