Merchant Princes (Company of Adventurers)

This book draws the author's "Hudson's Bay" saga to its conclusion. Here, the great fur-trading enterprise expands from its original western Canadian base to "conquer" the Arctic, leaving its influence on Inuit culture and lifestyle. How different would Canada's northern territories be now, had there been no Hudson's Bay Company to transform them from a hunting culture into a trapping and trading one? Peter Newman details the life and times of one of the Hudson's Bay Company's great governors, Donald Smith (he served for a record 44 years), who became one of his generation's leading business powers, concurrently heading the Bank of Montreal, and being the dominant financier behind the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. During World War I, the Hudson's Bay Company acquired the world's third-largest merchant ship fleet which enabled them to undertake secret missions for Winston Churchill and the Allies during World War II. The author reveals the extent of the boardroom backstabbing and conflicts of the 1970s when the Company was involved in a controversial takeover by Toronto billionaire Ken Thomson. The author's history of the Hudson's Bay Company began with "Company of Adventurers" and continued with "Caesars of the Wilderness".