Over breakfast at a Calgary restaurant, Canmore author Stephen Bown readily recalls the moment when he decided he wanted to write history books.

“I read Simon Winchester’s book The Professor and the Madman,” Bown says. “I loved it so much, I thought, ‘I’d like to do that.’”

He had written historical features for publications such as the Canadian magazine, The Beaver, but now he was ready to write the kind of full-length books he loves to read.

The latest result is Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World 1600 to 1900.

Bown has shown once again he has a keen eye for details and narrative that bring history to life, even for the impatient modern reader. In this tale, he profiles six men who were crucial to the establishment of international commerce in the 17th to 19th centuries: Dutchmen Jan Pieterszoon Coen and Pieter Stuyvesant, Englishmen Robert Clive, Sir George Simpson and Cecil Rhodes and Russian Alexandr Baranov.

They championed global monopolies, among them the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Dutch East India Company, building empires that blurred the lines between commercial and political adventures.

These men were often ruthless, not just with their control of international commerce, but in their oppression of native peoples. Coen, for example, ordered the beheading of 36 Bandanese Islanders and their chief to crush a resistance. The merchant kings’ insufferable smugness reflected the contemporary conviction that white men were destined to rule the world. In a manner, these individuals virtually achieved that goal, for a time.

“None of them were born into wealth, social status or power,” Bown writes, “but the struggle to win the contest, as they perceived it, was of paramount concern.”

Merchant Kings is a natural progression from Bown’s previous books. In Sightseers and Scholars, he told of the early naturalists who explored the New World in the pre-Darwinian Age. Scurvy chronicled the disease that took a terrible toll on seafarers in the age of sail, killing more sailors than were lost in all sea battles combined. A Most Damnable Invention was the story of explosives and their effects on world affairs, while Madness, Betrayal and the Lash chronicled the life and career of George Vancouver, whose epic voyages helped map Britain’s emerging empire, but left him in personal and financial despair.

Read them in succession, as I’ve done, and you can detect interwoven threads that unite all the stories.

“One idea generates the next idea,” Bown says. “For Merchant Kings, while I was working on those other books I kept coming across references to the East India Company, or some other company, owning this or that. I began to think these companies seem to be governing everything.”

“I started looking into it. I found that within a couple of hundred years, these corporations, as the extension of the colonial aspirations of European nations, ended up being the government for enormous chunks of the world.”

His next book will focus on the year 1494, when Pope Alexander VI drew a north-south line on a map of the known world, giving half to Spain and half to Portugal.

“I’m always interested in that kind of stuff — a simple decision that seems unimportant at the time, but changes the world incredibly.”

Bown’s enthusiasm infuses all his work, much like the British author who inspired him. Others have seen the connection, including The Globe and Mail, which called Bown “Canada’s Simon Winchester.”

“I consider that to be quite flattering,” Bown says. “And if I had one per cent of his income, I’d be very happy.”