British India was ruled by a commercial company, not a state, until 1857

Evidence

It is true that in the seventeenth century London resumed an acquisition of overseas territories arrested since the disastrous ending to the Hundred Years War. But the ‘spirit’ of these conquests was still fundamentally that of a prenational age. Nothing more stunningly confirms this than the fact that ‘India’ only became ‘British’ twenty years after Victoria’s accession to the throne. In other words, until after the 1857 Mutiny, ‘India’ was ruled by a commercial enterprise – not by a state, and certainly not by a nation-state. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 360

Categorization

• XREF: The company-to-state shift parallels the dynasty-to-nation weld central to official nationalism.

Related

• India was ruled by a trading company until after the 1857 Mutiny (similarity 0.94)