Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six
merchant-adventurers who built the modern world
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. They
managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects
as employees, customers, or competitors. 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, whose narrow-minded approach lost
Manhattan to the British; 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, who was chauffeured about his vast
fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so
he could set speed records.
Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the
centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed
responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography,
corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic,
new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social
legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered
globalization.
