Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 16001900
Maps from the early seventeenth century show the fragmented vision of the world’s geography available to mariners. A vast, blank expanse filled these maps, a frightening terra incognita concealing unknown possibilities for commerce or plunder. The only viable trade route to the silks, spices and gems of the mysterious Eastern lands was precarious a
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The merchant kings and their monopoly corporations show us the potential danger of our current trends of globalization: the greater the distance between the product and the consumer, the less opportunity for consumers to oversee production, to ensure that in the producing countries the producers adhere to the laws and recognize the same rights enjo
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Theoretically, any Dutch citizen could become a shareholder, but soon the entire enterprise was governed by a small number of powerful merchants, with capital invested for a ten-year period rather than in each voyage. This venture, the world’s first “joint stock company,” was set to become the world’s largest single business enterprise of the seven
... See moreStephen R. Bown • Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 16001900
The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue’s gallery of larger-than-life merchant-adventurers who, during a period of three hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a good portion of the world for no other purpose than to generate revenue for their shareholders, feather their own nests and satisfy their
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