> I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.

It was always theft. Having been done in the past does not make them less theft. The reason East India Company is shown as example for such things is that it is the first human organization that did those on an industrial scale and genocidally.

https://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide

It was already starving Indians by forcing them to plant opium instead of food crops to sell to the Chinese to kill them for money (20 million/year estimated dead from opium) in the late 18th century. And when the Chinese finally tried to stop it, Opium wars happened. The justification shown for that war was 'Free trade'. The justifications still havent changed, neither the practices. This should tell you why East India Company is specifically evil, because it is the first large scale application of the evil you see today and it invented a lot of its methods.