One Nation Under Copyright: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

Essentially, a corporate state is a government run and organized like a business. At the top is typically a board of executives (more likely than not [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|corrupt]] in fiction) which makes all the decisions; for the common people, the terms "citizen" and "employee" are more or less interchangeable. Some may actually have a form of quasi-democratic government, allowing all shareholders a certain number of votes proportional to the number of shares the voter owns.

** Rifts features several of these, where a corporation is the replacement for a local government.

* ''[[Shadowrun]]'''s setting doesn't just have the corporations taking over nations. A Yakuza front company practically takes over its original criminal gang, and a few corporations struggle to rule the world. They start as plain [[Mega Corp]], but since their laws are the only ones that matter on company grounds...

* Most of the Terra Novan population centers in ''Heavy Gear'' have conventional governments, but the Paxton Protectorate are an unusual Good Guy version. They lay claim on and defend a majority of Terra Nova's physical territory, the Badlands, although there's not much in the way of people or resources there. The government of the Protectorate is really just the board of the military-industrial Paxton Arms corporation, and they're ''still'' a more egalitarian bunch than the polar confederacies.

* In [[Fading Suns]] the Guilds, while they're not quite encyclopedical example of [[Mega Corp]], rule over several planets and own pieces of land on most of the rest.

** The game's background mention precise examples in the game-universe's history. The Earth-based First Republic was really a governmental figure-head, with a number of [[Mega Corp|MegaCorps]] holding the only real power. After the fall of the First Republic, both era known as The Diaspora and to a lesser extent during the Second Republic, some planets were openly owned and operated by corporate entities.

* The [[GURPS]] ''Terradyne'' setting is named after the first off-planet [[Mega Corp]], which eventually gained enough raw muscle to secede from Earth and dictate terms to the rest of humanity.

* The Corporation RPG features a world run by five mega-corporations.

* ''Blue Planet'' has the Incorporate, corporations who bought "failed states" after a global famine with the consent of the UN to restore governance in those areas. They are run like corporations, but have their own armies, issue their own money and sit on the GEO (UN replacement) council just like nations.

* The Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa. Aside from the usual practices of a maritime trading state, both cities also respectively specialized and profited from otherwise private enterprises like shipbuilding and banking. Pretty much anyone in government was either a merchant or a noble, although some posts required applicants to forgo all business practices for the duration of their office.

* The Honourable East India Company: Ran the British Empire's interests in India until the Mutiny of 1857 and thus, by a combination of bribery, alliances and superior competence - oh, and a private army larger than that of the ''Empire itself'' - controlled a substantial part of the subcontinent.

** Their Russian counterpart, the Russian-American Company, owned and ruled Alaska.

* Going eastward: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (known in English as the Dutch East India Company). The first stock-based, multinational corporation that controlled parts of Indonesia for almost 200 years. They had their own military, minted their own currency, and had the right to establish colonies, negotiate treaties, even wage wars! Their rule made an everlasting impression to locals even after they went bankrupt and the official Dutch government took over. So much that their legacy lives on to this day; the local word for colonial forces is still "Kompeni".