Before you read the text check you know these phrases.

Now see if you can understand what they mean.

Read the text and match the headings to the paragraphs.

1  Scottish writer Iain Banks’ 1999 novel The Business tells the story of a mysterious multinational company who decide to try and buy an entire country in order to give themselves a seat at the United Nations.  While Bank’s novel is still, fortunately, a satirical fantasy, some aspects of it are becoming disturbingly true.

2  The connections between commerce and colonisation, between business and international politics are becoming stronger.  Some historians have recently started to look at how the whole idea of colonialism is based on trade and commerce.  British and Dutch colonialism began with merchants trying to find new trade routes.  The East India Company have been described as the first multinational company.  Starting as a trading company in 1600, the group of merchants won the right to have a monopoly on trade in India.  Their power steadily grew until the conquest of Bengal in 1757, after which the company collected taxes and had their own army.  At a certain point it was easier for them to take a direct part in governing India than it was to try and deal with the people who lived there.  This was the beginning of Britain’s involvement with India.

3  The old nineteenth-century empires have now gone, or at least changed, but they are being replaced by new ones.  Companies such as Microsoft, Coca Cola and Time Warner now have annual turnovers far larger than those of many nations.  It would, in theory at least, be easy for them to buy an entire country.  Of course, no company has tried to do that openly (at least up until now!), but governments in many developing countries are aware of the huge influence and importance of multinational companies in their countries.

4  There are, of course, many positive aspects of this.  Big companies can provide jobs and bring money into poor and developing countries.  However, critics say that multinational companies only invest in developing countries because labour costs are very low – much lower, in fact, than they would be in Europe or the United States.  When there is an economic downturn, the companies will leave as suddenly as they arrived.  They are not interested in the country’s overall welfare, but only in their own profits.