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

Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world, as told by “Canada’s Simon Winchester” (Globe and Mail).

Through the Age of Heroic Commerce, from the 17th to the 19th centuries, a rogue’s gallery of larger-than-life merchant kings ruled vast tracts of the globe and expanded their far-flung monopolies to generate revenue for their shareholders, feather their own nests and satisfy their vanity and curiosity. Their exploits changed the world during an age of unfettered globalization, mirroring a world we know today.

Merchant Kings looks at each ruling monopoly through its greatest merchant king and considers their stories together for the first time:

Jan Pieterszoon Coen of the Dutch East India Company
Pieter Stuyvesant of the Dutch West India Company
Robert Clive of the English East India Company
Alexandr Baranov of the Russian-American Company
George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company
Cecil John Rhodes of the British South Africa Company
Sobre o Autor
Stephen R. Bown is the author of Madness, Betrayal and the Lash: The Epic Voyage of Captain George Vancouver (2008); Scurvy (2003), published in six territories, and A Most Damnable invention: Dynamite, Nitrates and the Making of the Modern World (2005). He lives in Canmore, Alberta.

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