Megacorporation
Megacorporation (Greek μέγας: large, corporation English: company), sometimes also called mega- corporation in German , describes a mostly historical company or corporate conglomerate with an enormous amount of power. Typical are a monopoly position and the power to ignore laws, to change them in accordance with your wishes or to write them yourself. The rule that goes with it is known as corporatocracy .
Historical examples
The Dutch East India Company , the first public limited company in the world, was granted sovereign rights (for example warfare and fort construction) and a trade monopoly by the Dutch state at the time. For many years it was probably the most powerful corporation in the world; in this historical phase a European hegemony began in world trade .
The British East India Company was a mega-corporation: it had a monopoly on the Indian trade and its own army, issued so-called by-laws , had the right to wage war and make peace, and was liege lord of Bombay .
Modern megacorporations
Hudson's Bay Company was the largest landowner in the world for a long time and at one point owned over 15% of North America, where it controlled the fur trade. Although state power over the area was nominally jointly exercised by the United States and Great Britain under the Anglo-American Agreement of 1818, the company had enormous power to practically undermine the rule. In 1869 it ceded its territory to Canada and in 1870 it lost its trade monopoly. Today it is considered America's oldest company.
The Walt Disney Company bought a large area of Florida from farmers in the 1960s through various letterbox companies . Governor Claude R. Kirk Junior established the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which includes this land. The district, which has more rights than an ordinary district, is governed by a five-member council elected by the landowners (almost exclusively Disney mailbox companies). The members, long-time company executives, each own five acres of land - the only one that neither belongs to Disney nor is a public street. Disney has the power to control the development plan, power plants, and the fire department . “Disney Safety and Security” is an 800-man order force that partly takes on police tasks such as traffic management. Arrests and subpoenas are made by the Florida Highway Patrol along with the Orange County deputies and the Osceola County sheriffs .
Fictional examples
- Megacorporations are specifically treated in the dystopian and cyberpunk literature. William Gibson coined the term in his novel Neuromancer .
- The subject was taken from films such as Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Metropolis (1927) taken up.
- Mega-corporations appear in various pen & paper role-playing games with a cyberpunk setting. One of the first was Shadowrun , in which ten mega-corporations became superpowers as shareholders in the bank that provides the world currency and, with the corporate court they created, are de facto above the UN . Their power allowed them to set up the so-called Business Recognition Accods, which obliged all signed countries to grant corporations extraterritoriality under certain conditions .