Great Review of Merchant Kings by Timothy Brook in the Globe

"Historian Stephen Bown has ingeniously whittled this multinational history down to vignettes of six of its more notorious figures: Jan Coen operating in what is now Indonesia; Pieter Stuyvesant in New York; Robert Clive in India; Aleksandr Baranov in Alaska; George Simpson in Canada, and Cecil Rhodes in Africa. Excellent biographies exist for them all, and Bown does not repeat that work. Rather, he uses (and fully acknowledges) these biographies to distill their complex life stories into six sharply etched portraits....

In a thoughtful epilogue, Bown invites the reader to consider this history not as the natural creation of trade, but as the product of monopoly: a “nightmare of unscrutinized and unchallenged power combined with ideology – in this case, controlling whole civilizations and societies for the maximum gain of distant shareholders.” These companies were anything but expressions of the market. They were vehicles of states intent on building empires..."

Timothy Brook is the Author of Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global Age

Read the full review at the Globe and mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/...