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Merchant Kings
- When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
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Publisher's 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.
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As one of the most potent turning points in the country's modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today's China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to "open" China even as China's imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country's decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China's advantage.
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Balanced readable narrative about the Opium Wars
- By Carl A. Gallozzi on 09-05-18
By: Stephen R. Platt
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Liberty's Exiles
- American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
- By: Maya Jasanoff
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Maya Jasanoff won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her groundbreaking work Liberty's Exiles. After the American Revolution, 60,000 British loyalists fled the U.S. for Canada, the Caribbean, India, and other points abroad. Jasanoff traces their harrowing journeys across the globe, shedding light on their ambitions, the post-revolutionary world they encountered, and their legacies.
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Staggering in its Breadth
- By Anders P Morley on 02-21-21
By: Maya Jasanoff
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Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History
- By: Sandra Benjamin
- Narrated by: Fred Filbrich
- Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins
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Emigration of people from Sicily often overshadows the importance of the people who immigrated to the island through the centuries. These have included several who became Sicily's rulers, along with Jews, Ligurians, and Albanians. Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Hohenstaufens, Spaniards, Bourbons, the Savoy Kingdom of Italy and the modern era have all held sway, and left lasting influences on the island's culture and architecture.
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Surprisingly compelling!
- By P. Strayer on 08-25-12
By: Sandra Benjamin
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire
- By: H. W. Crocker III
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
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Nothing offends liberals more than Western imperialism—it is racism, sexism, and chauvinism all in one. And of course the epitome of Western imperialism is the British Empire, covering at its height a quarter of the globe’s surface and ruling a quarter of the world’s population. Here, best-selling author H. W. Crocker III exposes how the British Empire was actually one of the greatest establishers and defenders of freedom in history.
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More Propaganda than History
- By Mike on 10-21-19
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The Great Sea
- A Human History of the Mediterranean
- By: David Abulafia
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 29 hrs and 25 mins
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Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea is above all the history of human interaction across a region that has brought together many of the great civilizations of antiquity as well as the rival empires of medieval and modern times.
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American Narration at it's Most Disapointing
- By Anonymous User on 03-26-18
By: David Abulafia
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El Norte
- The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America
- By: Carrie Gibson
- Narrated by: Thom Rivera
- Length: 21 hrs and 20 mins
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Because of our shared English language, as well as the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in El Norte, the nation has much older Spanish roots - ones that have long been unacknowledged or marginalized. The Hispanic past of the United States predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century, and has been every bit as important in shaping the nation as it exists today.
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Chicken Noodle History
- By Jose on 10-30-19
By: Carrie Gibson
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America's Hidden History
- Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation
- By: Kenneth C. C. Davis
- Narrated by: Sam Freed, Kenneth C. Davis
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Kenneth C. Davis presents a collection of extraordinary stories, each detailing an overlooked episode that shaped the nation's destiny and character. Davis' dramatic narratives set the record straight, busting myths and bringing to light little-known but fascinating facts from a time when the nation's fate hung in the balance.
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Boring, boring, boring
- By Yeshe on 10-14-10
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The Pirate Queen
- By: Susan Ronald
- Narrated by: Josephine Bailey
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Dubbed the "pirate queen" by the Vatican and Spain's Philip II, Elizabeth I was feared and admired by her enemies. Extravagant, whimsical, and hot-tempered, Elizabeth was the epitome of power. Her visionary accomplishments were made possible by her daring merchants, gifted rapscallion adventurers, astronomer philosophers, and her stalwart Privy Council, including Sir William Cecil, Sir Francis Walsingham, and Sir Nicholas Bacon.
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Too lilttle about Elizabeth!
- By Eunice on 12-20-07
By: Susan Ronald
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1619
- Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy
- By: James Horn
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
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Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly - the first gathering of a representative governing body in America - came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America.
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Brilliant!
- By HonestOpin on 05-06-19
By: James Horn
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The Age of Revolution
- A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume III
- By: Sir Winston Churchill
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
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This is the third volume in Churchill's famous account. During the long period of 1688 to 1815, three revolutions took place, and all led to war between the British and the French.
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Historical Overview of Britain
- By Lois on 01-30-12
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Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red, and Britannia ruled not just the waves but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries.
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Such a great listen - What a History Lesson
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In the 18th century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannons, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalized racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" was designed in Britain's interests alone.
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An entertaining and provocative history
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In A Splendid Exchange, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports listeners from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the 16th.
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Very interesting and Germane to Today's World
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What listeners say about Merchant Kings
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- richard
- 02-20-24
Very interesting
It's a good and interesting read, well researched.
The author introduces also the historical background and environment in which those figures lived and acted
I enjoyed listening to it
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- Zero
- 08-28-23
Fun, if traditional
This was a fun text. However, the author does write history in a rather traditional manner. An example of this is during the section on the East India Company under Clive, the author uses the term "hordes" without qualification to describe Mughal armies. Is the year 1965?
I was also amused when in the introduction, the author broadly described the types of men written about in this book -- men like Robert Clive of the EIC and Alexander Baranov of the Russian-American trading company -- as "monopolists and not capitalists." He then goes on to describe how these men put their companies "on the surest business footing they knew - monopoly."
In any case, the stories told are entertaining and the book is interesting, keeping the shortcomings of the approach in-mind.
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- Mary
- 03-10-23
Learned a great deal
While these “kings” should in no way be lauded, it is important that their stories be told (if for no other reason that power hungry people still exist today, so that understanding what makes them tick and also how to curtail their unscrupulous manipulations of economies and governments is necessary). This work tells such stories, as both history and cautionary tale. I was looking for a book that covered the maritime enterprises of the world powers from 1600s through 1800s, which few books touch on. I now feel I have a better grasp of the dynamics, corporate entities, and personalities at play. Really helps make sense of world history, especially for those, like me, interested in ancestry research, understanding the motivations for immigration and/or world travel.
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- mona berrier
- 03-02-22
Disappointed
I found it highly superficial and deliberately deceitful in playing up the financial success of the men discussed while providing only a cosmetic treatment of the evil the men perpetrated in pursuit of $$. If you like you history whitewashed, this book is stellar.
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