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

Stephen R. Bown

Jan 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Stephen R. Bown is the author of The Last Viking, which won the Williams Mills Award for the best book on the Arctic in 2016. His award-winning books, including Scurvy and Madness, Betrayal, and the Lash, have led to a reputation as "Canada's Simon Winchester."

Malcolm Hillgartner is an accomplished actor, writer, and musician. An AudioFile Best Voice of 2013 and the recipient of several Earphones Awards, he has narrated over 175 audiobooks.