The Chartered Company
From the seventeenth century, European states granted companies exclusive trade over a region by charter, and with it the right to raise armies, sign treaties and govern. The English East India Company, chartered in 1600, ended up ruling a subcontinent; the Hudson's Bay Company, chartered in 1670, held exclusive trade and governance over a watershed covering roughly a third of present-day Canada. The model made possible ventures no private purse could carry, and it made possible harms no private company should have been able to inflict. Both belong to the same charter. The form wound down through the nineteenth century as states took the governing back; the Hudson's Bay Company kept trading as a retailer until 2025, when the last of its department stores closed.