| Edition |
Unabridged. |
| Description |
1 online resource (1 audio file (9hr., 52 min.)) : digital |
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digital digital recording rda |
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data file rda |
| Access |
Digital content provided by hoopla. |
| Cast |
Read by Malcolm Hillgartner. |
| Summary |
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. |
| System Details |
Mode of access: World Wide Web. |
| Subject |
Trading companies -- History -- 17th century.
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Trading companies -- History -- 18th century.
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Trading companies -- History -- 19th century.
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Colonial companies -- History.
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Trading companies -- History.
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Europe -- Commerce -- History.
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International business enterprises -- History.
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Merchants -- Europe -- Biography.
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| Added Author |
Hillgartner, Malcolm.
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| Added Title |
hoopla (Digital media service)
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| ISBN |
9781666186178 (sound recording : hoopla Audio Book) |
|
1666186171 (sound recording : hoopla Audio Book) |
| Music No. |
MWT14695413 |
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