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. Monopolies, such as England’s storied East India Company, have inspired many popular histories and biographies. Bown synthesizes this material into a lively gallery of six men who built up their firms and enriched themselves. Motivations and character are in the forefront of Bown’s portraits, whose subjects viewed their employment as their main chance for ascending to status and wealth, manifesting traits of determination and ruthlessness along the way that posterity looked upon askance, to put it mildly. Take Cecil Rhodes, the racial-supremacist empire builder who organized a company to dispossess Africans from what is today Zimbabwe and Zambia. Bown compares Rhodes to Jan Coen, who in the early 1600s pitilessly monopolized the East Indies spice trade on behalf of the Netherlands and his company, the VOC, and counts Robert Clive in 1700s India as a comparable buccaneer of self-interest and imperial expansion. Additionally profiling Pieter Stuyvesant in New York, Aleksandr Baranov in Alaska, and George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Bown ably deploys biography to present the successes, costs, and legacies of an era’s commingling of private money and state sovereignty. --Gilbert Taylor Bown has fashioned a chronicle perfectly relevant to our own time--and ultimately shows us that a market is free only when those who live and consume within it are protected from the powerful. --NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS Stephen R. Bown  has been writing about adventurers, travelers, and explorers for many years. He is the author of  1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the world in Half; Madness, Betrayal and the Lash; Scurvy; A Most Damnable Invention; and Merchant Kings. He lives in the Canadian Rockies with his wife and two children. Merchant Kings When Companies Ruled the World, 1600--1900 By Stephen R. Bown Thomas Dunne Books Copyright © 2010 Stephen R. Bown All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312616113 MERCHANT KINGS (Chapter one)First among Equals Jan Pieterszoon Coen and the Dutch East India Company ·   1   · The thirteen heavily armed ships sailed towards the East Indies’ remote Banda Islands in the spring of 1609, after nearly a year’s voyage from Amsterdam. The heady, sweet scent of flowering nutmeg trees filled the humid air. The commander of the squadron, one of the largest corporate fleets yet to depart the Netherlands for “the spiceries,” was Admiral Pieter Verhoeven (Peter Verhoef), a veteran not of trade and exploration but of combat at sea. He was now employed by the Dutch East India Company, the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), with the objective of securing for his employers the exotic cloves and nutmeg of the Moluccas, as the “Spice Islands” of Indonesia were then known. The admiral commanded more than a thousand fighting men, including a contingent of Japanese mercenaries, and his orders from the “Heeren XVII” (the Lords Seventeen), his powerful corporate directors in the Netherlands, were direct and clear: “We draw your special attention to the islands in which grow the cloves and nutmeg, and we instruct you to strive after w