Military historian Si Sheppard argued that Britain's conquest of India owed as much to how the East India Company was organized as to British weapons. In the discussion, a hypothesis was put to him: a company could choose leaders for competence and replace them when they failed, while hereditary monarchies would sooner or later end up with a bad king. Sheppard answered "Absolutely" and took it further, back to the Spanish conquistadors and even the Vikings, whose expeditions he described as "business operations." The conversation appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast in an episode published October 1, 2026.
Most of the episode asks how Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, leading a few hundred Spaniards, brought down the Aztec and Inca empires. The publisher's description ties the story to AI: people talk about an AI takeover as unprecedented, it says, but this would not be the first time "an alien force" used better technology and diplomatic cunning to take over a larger, long-established order. This part of the conversation moves from battlefields to the organizations doing the conquering.
Why the Mughals could not hold on
The discussion asked why the Mughal emperors could not keep control of India by playing the competing European powers off against one another. Sheppard began with the Mughals themselves. In his account, the empire peaked under Aurangzeb at the beginning of the 18th century, after he had come close to taking over all of India. His successors lacked "the authority, the charisma" to hold that dominance. The Metropolitan Museum's chronology of South Asia describes a similar turn: after Aurangzeb died in 1707, the imperial court weakened while several regional courts flourished.
Sheppard compared the Mughals with the Manchu, who conquered Ming China in the 17th century and built the Qing dynasty to the greatest extent China ever had. Both, he said, were outsiders, ruling people who held a vague resentment of being governed by foreigners. That was tolerable while the rulers went "from success to success." Once momentum stalled and began to reverse, local power brokers started to think they had more to gain by breaking away than by staying.
He called this a "fatal defect" built into the basis of their authority. Even without the Europeans, he said, the Mughal Empire would have peaked and disintegrated into "a patchwork quilt" of larger and smaller authorities. He expected the Maratha Confederacy to have been a major player, but not one able to bring the whole subcontinent under its rule.
Sea power
Why the British in particular? Sheppard's bluntest answer was that "the Royal Navy rules the waves." Control of the sea lanes let Britain force the French out of Canada and India. France had the larger population and military, he said, but "if you can't project that force, it's really of no value to you." The National Army Museum's history of the Seven Years War supports that outline: British naval strength discouraged France from sending large reinforcing convoys to North America, and in India the French surrendered Pondicherry in January 1761 after a joint British army and navy siege.
A company that could replace its managers
The conversation then turned to why the British could consolidate control where no other power in India did. The hypothesis put forward was that people discuss advantages in technology but rarely advantages in governance and organization. The East India Company was run like a company, it held: it had a board that could hire and fire the equivalent of chief executives and lieutenants, though no one used those titles. The British Library's description of the company's records confirms the basic structure: stockholders elected an executive Court of twenty-four directors.
On this view, the company did not need brilliant people in charge, only fairly competent ones such as Robert Clive and his subordinates, and it could replace them one after another if they were killed or resigned, without "some crazy succession crisis" creating anarchy for a rival to exploit. Indian principalities, with their monarchical traditions, would sooner or later get a bad king. The example given was Bengal just before the British took control. A capable ruler who had held the British at bay was followed, the argument went, by an erratic heir who ignored advice. Bengal became the initial tax base for further British conquest.
The argument added that the financiers and troop-providers around such rulers had choices to make. Seeing a bad king and a British operation that looked competent, they would side with the British. And most of the troops the British used were Indian sepoys.
The National Army Museum's account of the Battle of Plassey, fought June 23, 1757, fits the picture of local backers changing sides. Mahtab Rai of the Jagat Seth banking family feared that the nawab, Siraj-ud-Daulah, would seize the family's wealth. The bankers and Clive offered the nawabship to Mir Jafar, who kept his forces out of the fighting. The museum estimates Siraj's army at about 50,000 against roughly 3,000 under Clive, about 2,100 of them Indian sepoys and 800 Europeans. In 1765 the Company obtained Bengal's tax and customs collection rights from the Mughal emperor. By the early 19th century, the museum's history of the Company's armies says, those armies numbered about 250,000, the great majority Indian.
Loyal to profit, not bloodlines
Sheppard's example was the Hundred Years' War. The English were winning, he said, because the French king, Charles VI, was insane and at one point convinced he was made of glass. Then the English lost because their own king, Henry VI, could not function for months at a time.
In non-democratic settings, Sheppard said, corporations are profit-driven and so not loyal to bloodlines. They look for the most competent leadership and can exchange people, which made them "much more flexible than those kind of hierarchical states." He added that corporations can arguably outmaneuver even democratic governments because they are untied to particular loyalties.
Britain and the Netherlands came late to imperialism, Sheppard said, and given the differentials "you wouldn't give them much a chance." But they "unleashed the power of the free market" through the English and Dutch East India companies and the Hudson's Bay Company, which he credited with making Canada as we understand it today. Acting with almost plenipotentiary powers, meaning broad authority to act on their own, at vast distances, they could exploit local circumstances and insert themselves into diplomatic arrangements weighed down by centuries of grievances.
He said that taking control of Bengal's tax revenue effectively took control of the entire political orbit: "What can you do without taxation?" In his telling, the Company turned that revenue toward its shareholders and forced local people to stop producing food crops and produce opium instead, "even if it means millions starved to death." Those are Sheppard's own claims; he said the impact was devastating for political structures with no tradition of anything like it.
Conquistadors and Vikings as ventures
The same logic, Sheppard said, applied much earlier. Vikings assembled with what weapons they had and enough capital up front to pay for boats, then made raiding profitable by looting churches and monasteries. The conquistadors, he said, "were freebooters operating within a capitalist system." They were not the lowest of the low: many had some education, and many were hidalgos, the lowest rung of Castile's petty nobility, who inherited titles and attitudes but little property beyond what they could stake as soldiers of fortune. They called themselves compañeros, colleagues or companions, not soldados. Sheppard called the enterprise "the most raw, unbridled capitalism at its finest, pooling assets to derive enormous profits from very risky ventures."
The memoir of the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo shows the upfront cost. Cortés financed his expedition's preparations with debts and loans secured against income, including a 4,000-peso advance from merchants, and ships, weapons, powder and supplies had to be bought before anything was won on the mainland.
Why men signed up
An earlier question put to Sheppard asked how a hundred or so men could be willing to confront an empire of 10 million, comparing it to dropping a hundred marines into 18th-century England and telling them to come out controlling Parliament. Sheppard called the answer the classic "push-pull factors."
On the push side, he described Spain as a country only united in 1492, proud of its history of struggle in the Reconquista, the centuries-long campaign to retake the peninsula from Muslim rule, but with little to show for it. Extremadura, where many conquistadors came from, was a hard land of small farms and unproductive, dusty terrain. A man whose only asset was his fighting skill could keep fighting the Moors or the Turks, but Sheppard called those "high risk, low return ventures": "These Turks can fight." The message from across the Atlantic was that the risks were lower and the rewards higher.
Early conquests made that seem true. In Sheppard's account, the island peoples of Hispaniola, Cuba and Puerto Rico were not unified, had little military presence and had nowhere to run, so the feeling was "why would it be any different in the mainland?" It was different. Some veterans of the wars against the Turks later called it some of the hardest fighting they had been through, Sheppard said, but by then they had seen how much greater the rewards could be.
On whether religion gave the conquerors confidence, Sheppard said Cortés and Pizarro both brought clergy and later wrote a great deal about their outrage at Aztec human sacrifice. He saw no reason to doubt they were genuinely horrified, citing Cortés's description of a pyramid temple in Tenochtitlan whose interior was black with spilled blood. Tearing down idols and raising up "the one true faith" also gave them legitimacy and eased their consciences, he said: "men will sometimes seek to find a higher purpose in what are very low endeavors."
Then there was gold. When the Spaniards reached Lake Texcoco and saw the Aztec capital seemingly floating like Venice, Sheppard said, the sight both awed them and inflamed their greed. He said Cortés admitted as much to Moctezuma's envoys, telling them he and his men suffered from "a disease of the heart that only gold can cure." Moctezuma sent feathered headdresses, jade and obsidian, gifts of great regard in the Aztec world. The small trinkets of gold were what Cortés really wanted, and Sheppard said local people described the Spaniards "chattering like monkeys" as they picked them up.