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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Transport industries > Shipping industries > Maritime / nautical trades
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Barons of the Sea - And Their Race to Build the World's Fastest Clipper Ship (Paperback)
Loot Price: R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
You Save: R33
(7%)
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Barons of the Sea - And Their Race to Build the World's Fastest Clipper Ship (Paperback)
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List price R489
Loot Price R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
You Save R33 (7%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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"A fascinating, fast-paced history...full of remarkable characters
and incredible stories" about the nineteenth-century American
dynasties who battled for dominance of the tea and opium trades
(Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award-winning author of In the
Heart of the Sea). There was a time, back when the United States
was young and the robber barons were just starting to come into
their own, when fortunes were made and lost importing luxury goods
from China. It was a secretive, glamorous, often brutal
business-one where teas and silks and porcelain were purchased with
profits from the opium trade. But the journey by sea to New York
from Canton could take six agonizing months, and so the most
pressing technological challenge of the day became ensuring one's
goods arrived first to market, so they might fetch the highest
price. "With the verse of a natural dramatist" (The Christian
Science Monitor), Steven Ujifusa tells the story of a handful of
cutthroat competitors who raced to build the fastest, finest, most
profitable clipper ships to carry their precious cargo to American
shores. They were visionary, eccentric shipbuilders, debonair
captains, and socially ambitious merchants with names like Forbes
and Delano-men whose business interests took them from the
cloistered confines of China's expatriate communities to the sin
city decadence of Gold Rush-era San Francisco, and from the teeming
hubbub of East Boston's shipyards and to the lavish sitting rooms
of New York's Hudson Valley estates. Elegantly written and
meticulously researched, Barons of the Sea is a riveting tale of
innovation and ingenuity that "takes the reader on a rare and
intoxicating journey back in time" (Candice Millard, bestselling
author of Hero of the Empire), drawing back the curtain on the
making of some of the nation's greatest fortunes, and the rise and
fall of an all-American industry as sordid as it was genteel.
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