Yale/British East India Company Connection

Elihu Yale

The British East India company seems to be, in many ways, the corner stone of modernity. Elihu Yale coughed up some in-kind donations from the wealth he diverted from his employer over his career to help found Yale University. If you follow the biographical links in that Wikipedia article, you'll rattle around the east coast establishment for a while.

We're pretty oblivious today of the role of for profit corporate entities played in founding the "colonies", which in retrospect look like modern property development deals. A couple of generations later, the east coast establishment colonized the interior of the country using similar schemes. (See Connecticut Western Reserve)

It's interesting to wonder if there's any corporate entity that continued from the BEIC and remains today, and if the corporate descendants of it are shaped by their ancestor. Most notably is the CIA epithet "The Company" a reference to it? Seems plausible as it uses similar methods for similar purposes.