Merchant Kings by Steve Bown

This book is subtitled: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900. The height of Europe's glory days. After China decided they did not need the world, they abandoned their elegant and advanced ships and the oceans became overrun with small European boats. Let the colonization of the world and the realignment of resources to strengthen Europe begin.
The world has been globalized for a long time. The merchants have always wielded significant influence, but this is a book about a particular period of time. The weakness of the book is that it is a series of biographies of 6 significant players on the world stage throughout the time period, rather than an analysis of the way companies interacted with empires and kings during this period to build colonies and wealth. It is more about the common character traits that it takes to be that sort of personl someone who highjacks the labor of thousands for the good of a few. Since there isn't an ideal book out there, this one will have to do for the time being.
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.
Then there was Peter Stuyvesant, another humorless Dutchman, 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, Aleksandr Baranov, who ruled as "Lord of Alaska" for the Russian American Co. — 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.
These were imperialist swashbucklers of the highest order--yet they reigned for a remarkable run, and again, while this book is imperfect in many ways, it does whet the appetite to learn more about this era of world history.