From the British East India Company to Alibaba and Amazon, from Westminster to Washington and Beijing

When Microsoft CEO Bill Gates visited India in 2002, he was received and entertained by India's Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee as if he were a head of state. On his visit Gates announced that Microsoft would invest $400 million in India over three years (Pigman 2010, p. 17). For at least three decades now, such diplomatic summits, as it were, between technology CEOs and heads of government have become the norm rather than an exception. One of the most significant ways that technology has changed diplomacy has been through the rise of large technology firms as actors on the diplomatic stage. What we think of as state– firm diplomacy today is not a new business, but it is evolving. Large firms intimately involved with international trade have been around since the seventeenth century. The original idea of the international system (or nationstates system) mainly referred to states and their governments and to how they interacted: through diplomacy between governments, including institutions they set up to make diplomacy easier, or through conflict and war. Most scholars agree that the modern system of nation-states began with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War between supporters of the Catholic Holy Roman Empire and Protestant states. Yet even from the beginning of the ‘Westphalia system’ of diplomacy, which was based upon the principle of sovereign equality of nation-states, private firms, if they were large enough, had sufficient resources, wealth, and negotiating capacity to function analogously to governments as diplomatic actors.

The first such companies were chartered by the parliaments of their home countries specifically to engage in international trade: firms such as the British East India Company (chartered in 1600), the Dutch East India Company (1602), the Virginia Companies (1606), and the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629). In order to trade, from the start these firms had to engage in diplomacy. The boundaries between firms and governments themselves were more fluid than it would appear initially. The English-chartered Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company of London effectively became the governments of the colonies of Massachusetts and Virginia respectively.