{"product_id":"the-company-that-owned-a-country","title":"The Company That Owned a Country","description":"Every serious power on earth has been forced to accept a constitution. Kings were handed one at swordpoint. Armies got courts-martial and rules of engagement. Churches lost the right to burn people. Universities acquired tenure committees, and even the police, eventually and grudgingly, acquired paperwork. One institution slipped through. Walk into the building where you work and count what you left in the parking lot: no vote, no free speech, no assembly, no due process, no appeal, and, in most of the United States, no requirement that anyone give you a reason before ending your income on a Tuesday morning.\u003cbr\u003eThis book begins with the only company that ever took the logic all the way to the end. The East India Company had a flag, an army twice the size of Britain's, a currency, a navy, its own diplomats, and twenty million subjects who had never been consulted. It also had shareholders in London who wanted a dividend, which turned out to be the most dangerous fact about it. Then it went bankrupt, got the world's first bailout, dumped its surplus tea on Boston, and accidentally started the United States.\u003cbr\u003eFrom there the story moves to the present, where the interesting powers no longer bother with flags. Somebody decides what four billion people may say and there is no appeal. Somebody takes thirty percent of every transaction in an economy the size of a mid-sized country and calls it a platform fee. Two card networks decide which legal businesses get to receive money. An algorithm ends a career without a human being reading the file. None of this is a conspiracy. It is written down, in the founding documents, in plain language: this entity exists to enrich the people who own it. No dictator in history was ever that honest.\u003cbr\u003eSharp, funny, occasionally furious, and stubbornly fair to the other side, this is a book about the last great institution nobody thought to democratize - and about the unglamorous, entirely achievable repairs that would fix it.","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46233102286895,"sku":"9798172085956","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0770\/2855\/6847\/files\/imageloader_5bcabcdd-07d1-4409-a246-625d220d32ea.jpg?v=1789992025","url":"https:\/\/tssbooks.com\/products\/the-company-that-owned-a-country","provider":"tssbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}