Marquis James's penchant for the sturdy individualists of our history, which has twice led him to a Pulitzer Prize, finds a sympathetic new subject in W. R. Grace, the Irish immigrant boy who not only opened new fields to American commerce but also became an outstanding mayor of New York and a powerful amateur in national politics. In this warm, nostalgic story, made possible by his access to the files of W. R. Grace & Co., James combines his gift for biography and his close acquaintance with business history to investigate a characteristic phenomenon of American life.
This previously unpublished work, by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer James (1891-1955), tells the story of Irish-born William R. Grace (1832-1904) who, arriving in America as a teenager in 1846, worked his way up from ordinary seaman to become master of a vast commercial empire, reformer of the Democratic party, and New York City's first Catholic mayor. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Peter Mundy was a seventeenth-century merchant trader who spent most of his life travelling the world. Even by the standards of his own day, his journeys to Istanbul, India, China, Danzig (Gdansk), Russia, and the Arctic were remarkable. His account of these travels, illustrated with his own lively drawings of the strange people and animals he met, survives in a single manuscript.This edited selection provides a fascinating, vivid account of early modern lives and times in all their barbarity and brilliance. It includes encounters with the Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, and Russian empires and Mundy's eyewitness accounts of the first contact between Britain and China, exhausting journeys through India, and events in London following Charles II's coronation in 1661.This edition is from the seventeenth-century manuscript of the Travels of Peter Mundy, first edited by Sir Richard Carnac in five volumes for the Hakluyt Society, 1905-36. Historians and lovers of travel literature alike will find this extraordinary account of one man's adventures across the globe a compelling read and an invaluable resource.
John Nelson was an entrepreneur born in the mid-seventeenth century--a man, in Richard Johnson's words, "operating ahead of the government and settled society from which he came," who "responded to conventions and conditions derived from several different and often competing cultures." For Nelson, this meant trading out of Boston to the French and Indians of Canada, pursuing his family's dreams of the proprietorship of Nova Scotia, and promoting schemes of espionage and military conquest on both sides of the Atlantic. In the course of a long and adventurous life, Nelson served as middleman between Canada and New England; led an uprising that toppled the royal government of Massachusetts in 1689; and passed years in French prisons, including the Bastille, and then at court in London as a player in the complex European diplomacy of the time. Nelson's career reveals in bold colors the political and economic pressures exerted upon colonial America by the expansion and bitter conflict of European empires--he himself complained of being "crusht between the two Crownes." Yet it also shows how one man fashioned a life as "spy, speculator, multinational merchant, memorialist, politician, prisoner, parent, friend, and gentleman." Gracefully written and widely researched, the book is both a fine example of the new Atlantic history and a vivid recounting of the fortunes of an exceptional individual.
The Tucson Artifacts document the annals of a forgotten Roman-styled military governorship in Chichimec Toltec Northwest Mexico. Perfectly preserved, complete and unaltered, they are straightforwardly composed in Latin, the official language of records during the Middle Ages. They do not have to be reconstructed, pieced together, deciphered or dated. This illuminating collection of readings translated from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Nahuatl, Hebrew and other languages by medievalist Donald N. Yates provides the cultural contexts for understanding these unique witnesses to world history. The finds come from the 1920s and consist of lost-wax, cast-lead ceremonial objects inscribed with medieval Latin historical texts and memorials of leaders with names such as Jacob, Israel, Benjamin, Joseph, Saul, Isaac and Theodore. Some also contain Hebrew phrases like “eight divisions” and “a great nation,” while others display commemorated leaders’ portraits, ships, trademarks in Tang-era seal script, temples, a Mesoamerican glyph, sacrificial fire, an anchor, Romanesque-style angels in glory and other drawings. Their iconography includes the Ten Commandments and cult objects like spice spoons, carpenter’s square, Frankish axes, snakes and trumpets. There are also military anthems and mottos. A series of thick one-sided double crosses, joined like sealed albums present what are clearly records signed by OL (Oliver), with dates ranging from 560 to 900 A.D. The overarching provenance is declared by the makers of the artifacts themselves to be Roman (Romani, monogram R), a term tantamount at this time to European. This claim to nationality is further divided into Levites (L) and Israelites (I). One of the stand-out emblems depicted is a triple tiara, a symbol of Jewish priesthood associated with the Mesoamerican figure of Quetzalcoatl.
Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive. Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe, and it had begun to face a daunting array of social, commercial, and political problems. Struggling with a single export-woolen cloth-the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners, especially as political discord followed the straitened circumstances in which so many English people found themselves. At first they headed east, and dreamed of Cathay-China, with its silks and exotic luxuries. Eventually, they turned west, and so began a new chapter in world history. The work of reaching the New World required the very latest in navigational science as well as an extraordinary appetite for risk. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive. Trade and business drove English interest in America, and determined what happened once their ships reached the New World. The result of extensive archival work and a bold interpretation of the historical record, New World, Inc. draws a portrait of life in London, on the Atlantic, and across the New World that offers a fresh analysis of the founding of American history. In the tradition of the best works of history that make us reconsider the past and better understand the present, Butman and Targett examine the enterprising spirit that inspired European settlement of America and established a national culture of entrepreneurship and innovation that continues to this day.
Lingelbach, W.E. The Merchant Adventurers of England: Their Laws and Ordinances with Other Documents. Philadelphia: The Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania, [1902]. xxxix, 260 pp. Reprint available October 2004 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-442-8. Cloth. $80. * With detailed notes and an extensive introduction. Chartered by the crown in 1474, the Merchant Adventurers was England's preeminent regulated international trading company until the early nineteenth century. This source book collects eighteen substantial documents written between 1407 and 1805, the most important years of the society's history. This group includes the Charter of 1407, extracts from the Charter of Edward IV (1462) and the Laws and Ordinances of 1608. Taken together, these records form one of the most detailed pictures of business organizations and methods during the later Tudor, the Stuart, and the early Hanoverian eras.
