Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900

by Stephen R. Bown Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

Overview

It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people.



The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company.



Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.

Editorial Reviews

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile

For listeners who relish history on a grand scale, this audiobook indictment of the great European trading kings will be riveting, and eye-opening. Dictatorial and insatiable, these weren’t capitalists but monopolists—Clive in India, Simpson in Canada, Rhodes in South Africa, figures forgotten today who nevertheless shaped national boundaries and plundered whole subcontinents. Narrator Malcolm Hillgartner, a favorite of those who listen to serious nonfiction, is especially effective in cutting these once-towering figures down to size. His steady, even, judicious tone makes history’s judgment of the Russian colonization of Alaska, and the Dutch East India Company’s ruthless behavior in the Spice Islands, all the more implicit. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Library Journal

From the tangled histories of the giant trading companies of the past, Bown (A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World) presents six of the most important figures: Jan Coen (Dutch East India Company), Peter Stuyvesant (Dutch West India Company), Robert Clive (British East India Company), Alexander Baranov (Russian-American Company), George Simpson (Hudson's Bay Company), and Cecil Rhodes (British South Africa Company). The monopolistic status of these companies, driven to maximize profits, meant that each became the sole power in its territory and an unofficial extension of its country's government, taking on duties of colonization and legal and martial powers. The leaders of these companies gained enormous influence to pursue their own goals, whether driven by personal avarice, nationalistic pride, or a need for control. Bown provides accurate summations of each man's life and motivations, but his focus is on how the ambitions of these men combined with the force of commerce to alter history as much as any legitimate monarch did. VERDICT Bown's treatment of each individual is succinct, so those wanting an in-depth study should look elsewhere. General readers interested in embarking on this subject will find this an excellent starting point.—Kathleen McCallister, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia, Lib.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178435359
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	01/25/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	895,695

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