
Merchant Kings
When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900
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Narrated by:
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Malcolm Hillgartner
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By:
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Stephen R. Bown
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.
©2009 Stephen R. Bown (P)2022 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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Corporation hell
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Just enough
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The author introduces also the historical background and environment in which those figures lived and acted
I enjoyed listening to it
Very interesting
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Learned a great deal
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Succinct, informative and engaging
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I was also amused when in the introduction, the author broadly described the types of men written about in this book -- men like Robert Clive of the EIC and Alexander Baranov of the Russian-American trading company -- as "monopolists and not capitalists." He then goes on to describe how these men put their companies "on the surest business footing they knew - monopoly."
In any case, the stories told are entertaining and the book is interesting, keeping the shortcomings of the approach in-mind.
Fun, if traditional
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The more the world changes, the more it stays the same.
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Excellent and interesting historical presentation
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An non-academic overview
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Disappointed
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