This book gives good historical perspective on what made company-states, like the Dutch East India Company, British East India Company, and the Hudson's Bay Company, special compared to state-controlled colonization and today's private companies. The authors focus on the relative novelty of the corporate form at the time of their inception and how their early success spawned copycats across the European colonial powers.

I found it interesting that there were originally no norms against empowering companies with de facto state powers over their chartered regions, but that atrocities committed by the private armies of these company-states against indigenous populations, as well as evolving norms around governance, shifted the tide against these organizations and eventually led to their dissolution in nearly all cases.

The fact that the modern Hudson's Bay Company is in fact the same company-state that used to control large swathes of Canada was startling, and the investigation of why they avoided the fate of other company-states was similarly fascinating.

If you're interested in the political implications of these organizations this book is going to be a winner for you, but I wanted to learn a lot more about the inner workings of these company-states and found a lack of detail from that perspective. Overall, however, this book is still a thorough examination of an important historical era and provides excellent grounding for debates around corporate power today.