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.
