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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
