Merchant Kings

When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900

By: Stephen R. Bown

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

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 Tantor

The more the world changes, the more it stays the same.

This fine overview demonstrates how our present geopolitics can be mentally mapped back to the days when companies (under the veneer of countries) ruled the globe. The bedrock of the industrial-military complex is laid bare. I really enjoyed this book!

Very interesting

It's a good and interesting read, well researched.
The author introduces also the historical background and environment in which those figures lived and acted
I enjoyed listening to it

Learned a great deal

While these “kings” should in no way be lauded, it is important that their stories be told (if for no other reason that power hungry people still exist today, so that understanding what makes them tick and also how to curtail their unscrupulous manipulations of economies and governments is necessary). This work tells such stories, as both history and cautionary tale. I was looking for a book that covered the maritime enterprises of the world powers from 1600s through 1800s, which few books touch on. I now feel I have a better grasp of the dynamics, corporate entities, and personalities at play. Really helps make sense of world history, especially for those, like me, interested in ancestry research, understanding the motivations for immigration and/or world travel.

Succinct, informative and engaging

Well constructed explanation of the history and economics of the period when companies explored and conquered the resource rich parts of the world.

Fun, if traditional

This was a fun text. However, the author does write history in a rather traditional manner. An example of this is during the section on the East India Company under Clive, the author uses the term "hordes" without qualification to describe Mughal armies. Is the year 1965?

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.

An non-academic overview

Excellent examples but each study seems to draw largely upon just one or two secondary sources.

Disappointed

I found it highly superficial and deliberately deceitful in playing up the financial success of the men discussed while providing only a cosmetic treatment of the evil the men perpetrated in pursuit of $$. If you like you history whitewashed, this book is stellar.