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

Bown, Stephen

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9781553653424: Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900

Synopsis

"Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world, as told by Steven Bown, Canada's Simon Winchester." -Globe and Mail

Through the Age of Heroic Commerce, from the 17th to the 19th centuries, a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life merchant kings ruled vast tracts of the globe and expanded their far-flung monopolies to generate revenue for their shareholders, feather their own nests and satisfy their vanity and curiosity. Their exploits changed the world during an age of unfettered globalization, mirroring a world we know today.

Merchant Kings looks at each ruling monopoly through its greatest merchant king and considers their stories together for the first time.

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About the Author

Stephen R. Bown is the author of many award-winning titles, including Island of the Blue Foxes (Douglas & McIntyre, 2017)—winner of the Alberta Literary Wilfred Eggleston Non-Fiction Award, long-listed for the BC National Award for Canadian Non Fiction, and short-listed for the RBC Taylor Prize—and White Eskimo (Douglas & McIntyre, 2015), which was the winner of the 2016 William Mills Prize for Non-Fiction Polar Books. Bown lives in the Canadian Rockies.

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