London's Triumph

Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare's City

At the start of the 16th century, England was hardly involved in the wider world, and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed, something extraordinary happened which placed London at the center of the world stage forever.

Stephen Alford's evocative, original new audiobook uses the same skills that made his widely-praised The Watchers so successful, bringing to life the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks, and sailors who changed London and England forever. In a sudden explosion of energy, English ships were suddenly found all over the world - trading with Russia and the Levant, exploring Virginia and the Arctic, and fanning out across the Indian Ocean. The people who made this possible - the families, the guild members, the money - men who were willing to risk huge sums and sometimes their own lives in pursuit of the rare, exotic, and desirable - are as interesting as any of those at court. Their ambitions fueled a new view of the world - initiating a long era of trade and empire, the consequences of which still resonate today.

©2017 Stephen Alford (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

John Lee was an excellent choice for this story!

John Lee was an excellent choice for this story! I recommend it for history buffs.

Cheers to the Merchant Adventurers

A fantastic read that is thoroughly researched! After diving into Stephen's books, The Watchers and All His Spies, I felt compelled to discover more about London merchants, and this book was precisely what I needed.

I was looking for more for info on the 'hoi polloi

Alford gives us quite a few rundowns on some of the merchant class and England's developing interest overseas, but he fails to explain his opening statement. That statement pointed out that both England and London were a backwater in 1500. Alford gives the statistics of how fast London grew all the while emphasizing that London was not the important city that it would become. Alford does relate how the Muscovy company started and histories of some of the wealthier, if less known, burghers lived. But personally I wanted to know what impelled so many people to move to the big city. A city that had a negative growth rate based on births and deaths.
So parts of this book were quite engrossing, but too much seemed like a list of names. While I am happy that Iread this book, I am not prepared to recommend it.