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

Bown, Stephen R.

ISBN 10: 1553653424 / ISBN 13: 9781553653424

Published by Douglas and McIntyre, Vancouver, BC Canada, 2009

About this Item

8vo (24 x 16 cm). 314 pp. Brown cloth covers with black titles to upper and spine. Two black dots (remainder marks ?) to tail-edge, rest of text block tight and unmarked. Unclipped DJ.

Seller Inventory # 5202

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900
• Publisher: Douglas and McIntyre, Vancouver, BC Canada
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1553653424
• ISBN 13: 9781553653424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very good +
• Dust Jacket Condition: very good +
• Seller catalogs:
  • History & Historiography

About this title

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.

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.