From the mid-eighteenth century, the global dimensions of European inter-state rivalries intensified, complicating company-states’ trade-off between power and profit. There was also a more general ideational shift in European (especially British) conceptions of political legitimacy from the mid-late eighteenth century. With the East India Company’s metamorphosis into a power ruling more people and territory than the British monarch, British elites had to rethink the character of sovereignty, and with it, the legitimacy and limits of company-states’ exercise of sovereign powers. Sharper, more rigid, and more recognizably modern demarcations between the public and the private sphere consolidated, leaving ever less legitimacy for hybrid sovereigns such as the company-state. From their very beginnings, company-states had faced their share of critics jealous of the company-states’ enjoyment of lucrative monopoly privileges. But from the late eighteenth century, the legitimacy of the companies themselves became an object of controversy. Finally, the company-states declined as a result of their growing functional redundancy. In the early 1600s, rulers’ powers for governance and transcontinental power projection were positively anemic. By the late eighteenth century, however, successive waves of European warfare had helped forge military-fiscal states, which could mobilize credit to pay for powerful national navies and armies that served as an instrument of the sovereign’s will. At the same time, company-states had ironically helped hasten their own redundancy through their successes. The infrastructure company-states had built throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas lay ripe for the plucking by aggrandizing and increasingly powerful European states. This combination of geopolitical competition (and a resulting sharpening of company-states’ existential trade-offs), delegitimation, and creeping redundancy thus pushed the companies to seemingly permanent extinction by the mid-nineteenth century.