THE Canadian writer Stephen R. Bown has a nice idea for a book with “Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World: 1600 to 1900” (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books).
From that title, I thought I knew what the author planned to do: teach Globalization 1.0. Tell the stories of the great old multinational trading companies — you know, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Dutch East India Company, et al. — and suss out some business lessons for today’s multinationals. And sprinkle it all with bouts of swordplay, machete-swinging wilderness exploration and massacres.
But Mr. Bown, the author of previous books about scurvy and the explorer George Vancouver, has decided not to write that book. Instead, he offers six biographical vignettes of swashbuckling capitalists, including one or two you’ve heard of, like Cecil Rhodes of Britain, and several you probably haven’t, like Alexandr Baranov of the Russian Alaskan Company.
The men themselves led interesting careers. Several, like Robert Clive of the British East India Company and Jan Pieterszoon Coen of the Dutch East India Company, started as Melvillian clerks who, once overseas, broke free of straitjacketing company traditions to build and rule their own international empires. Coen was the first of this new breed of Euro-pasha, conquering Indonesia for the Dutch in the early 1600s and generating huge profits by dominating production and trade of the archipelago’s most valuable spices, chiefly cloves, nutmeg and pepper.
This was done not with spreadsheets and calculators but with warships, armed clashes with European competitors and the displacement of native peoples. As an executive, Coen was a humorless zealot, and not really the kind of chap whose tactics will soon be taught at Wharton.
Then there was Peter Stuyvesant, another humorless Dutch zealot, who was responsible for building the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam from a collection of festering shanties into something approximating an actual city. He did such a nice job that the British swooped in and took it for themselves, creating the city and colony of New York.
In building the foundations of the East India Company, Clive defeated the French and assorted forgotten nawabs; these sections of the book read more like Kipling than Kiplinger.
Across the Indian Ocean, Rhodes would use native armies to pry diamonds out of South Africa, while in the northern Pacific, Baranov — a dour, overbearing sort, as these men tended to be — oversaw the slaughter of sea otters between the Bering Strait and San Francisco. His counterpart in Canada, George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company, pursued a similar policy, in his case a crusade against the beaver.
As fascinating as these men might have been, there are problems with Mr. Bown’s approach. His focus on individuals means that the book deals with the companies themselves in only the most glancing way, and what analysis he offers is less than eye-opening, and often attributed to other authors.
In the discussion of the Russian Alaskan Company, for instance, Mr. Bown quotes another writer who says, “The whole enterprise was in the long run a scheme to enrich a few on the blood and guts of a subject people.” As the businessman F. Ross Johnson famously said, this is a blinding glimpse of the obvious.
Mr. Bown notes that these six capitalists have never been considered as a group. But the individual stories, in essence, seem to read like summaries of longer, more detailed narratives.
The ideal reader of “Merchant Kings” would appear to be an eighth-grade boy. Both the prose and the analysis are simplistic, occasionally purple — soldiers are not shot but “blasted” — and largely devoid of business insight.
Mr. Bown seldom embraces details when generalities will suffice. Here is his description of an epic 1824 trip that George Simpson took from the shores of Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean: “The entourage of voyageurs paddled furiously across the prairies, wound their way through the Rocky Mountains, were propelled down foaming canyon streams, clambered up steep, craggy inclines dragging their canoes and supplies behind them, followed winding mule-paths. ...” Instead of specific details, we get a blizzard of adjectives and adverbs.
THE book is not without merit. It offers an easily digestible overview of the period and its major figures for anyone seeking an introduction. And Mr. Bown does identify one priceless term on the very first page, calling the period “the Age of Heroic Commerce.”
What a wonderful phrase. In fact, whenever I spy Warren Buffett or Bill Gates smiling on the cover of Fortune magazine, I’m going to hark back to it. Despite all the messiness of the last years, we, too, live in an Age of Heroic Commerce, in which business titans are generally lauded for their fortunes.
Other than the absence of swordplay, jungle exploration and killing of innocent natives, it’s amazing to think how little has changed in centuries.
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