Big Business has rarely had it so good as during the three centuries between 1600 and 1900. By the time that long orgy of capitalism came to a close, business regulations were being enacted here in the U.S. and strengthened over the course of the 20th century. And a huge body of those restrictions--let's call them the Separation of Greed and State--were lifted only last week by the Supreme Court, as it ushered in a new era of tea time and corporate consensus in government.

Let me explain.

Following the Dark Ages, when sailing ships and more stable governments opened new trade routes during the Age of Discovery, tea and other spices grown in India and the Orient became prized commodities in Europe.

In 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted charter to the East India Tea Company, one of the world's first corporations. This new type of business entity--adapted from the organizational structure long used by towns, universities and guilds--was used among investors to defray the risks and liabilities of carrying expensive cargoes over wide, rough seas.

The East India Tea Company began thriving in Asia and soon developed a monopolistic control over the region that includes Indonesia and the Indian subcontinent. The company also had a monopoly on all goods entering Britain.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, the Dutch East India Company was chartered in 1602, as the world's first multinational corporation, to counter the threat of a global British monopoly in spices and other exotic goods.

Both companies were empowered to negotiate treaties, maintain armies, and execute similar powers overseas that today we think of as reserved for national governments. In fact, the English and the Dutch fought more than one war and several running skirmishes over the spice trade.

In 1773, the British Parliament (many members of which held stock in the East India Tea Company) passed the Tea Act to save the company from bankruptcy, as it had millions of pounds of surplus tea rotting on the docks. Thus it became the beneficiary of one of the first government bailouts of a corporation. The new law allowed a half-million pounds to be exported to the Colonies--dumped on the market, basically--subject to no export duty and only a three-pence-per-pound import duty when it arrived in American ports. The cheap tea quickly undersold the Dutch tea widely smuggled in, as well as tea legally purchased at higher prices and already warehoused by colonial merchants. In today's jargon, the colonists were "upside-down on their investments."

So it was not the tax on tea (which the Tea Act actually reduced), but the disastrous effects of Parliament's price manipulation, that prompted Boston colonists dressed as Indians to throw overboard on December 16, 1773, tea imported by Britain's East India Tea Company.

It wasn't just tea that the mega-corporations of that era trafficked in with the aid and blessings of government. It was tobacco and slaves, too. Sugar to molasses to rum. Wars to protect interests from competition and piracy. Cotton in the South. Steel in the North. Railroads and cattle barons and the heady days of the 19th century, when corporate interests in America held sway over the government and operated very much like the great seagoing tea companies that had helped build Britain into an empire upon which the sun never set. Cozy arrangements of symbiosis between great powers and the nations that encouraged and licensed them.

Rubber plantations in Brazil. Oil anywhere it could be found. Eminent domain to benefit private interests, not just the public interest. More wars, and ... well, here we are today.

A century after Teddy Roosevelt began reigning in the monopolies, they flourish. Last week, the Supreme Court granted them a renewed charter for profiteering, tax breaks, bribery and unrestricted political influence.

Perhaps America will experience a renewed Corporate Consensus in government over the months and years ahead. The kind of agreeable "controlling interest" among landed gentry that wedded government to commerce while the public suffered. The kind of synchronous purpose among elite bedfellows that for centuries let average citizens be damned--whether by poverty, disproportionate tax burdens, slavery, indentured servitude or increased mechanization of everyday life--all in the name of corporate prosperity.

I think that day is bearing down upon us again, like an approaching galley whose stench is borne ahead upon the trade winds. Given the ruling of our retro-activist Supreme Court and the work of today's history-challenged Tea Party, yes, I'd bet on it--if I had the money to spend lazy afternoons sipping tea and dreaming of expanded wealth and empire at the expense of democracy.