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The Chairman
Victor Niederhoffer

“The Romance of Commerce,” by Gordon Selfridge, has glorious descriptions of the contributions, nobility and history of commerce. Printed in 1918 but written before the war, it’s the kind of book that might have inspired “Atlas Shrugged,” and should be required reading for every high school senior.

It’s the kind of book that might have inspired “Atlas Shrugged.” Chapter topics include ancient commerce, China, Greece, Venice, Lorenzo de Medici, the Fuggers, the Hanseatic League, fairs, guilds, early British commerce, trade and the Tudors, the East India Company, north England’s merchants, the growth of trade, trade and the aristocracy, Hudson’s Bay Company, Japan, and representative businesses of the 20th century.

One thing that's clear from this book and others is that business morality has been constantly improving. In the old days, wrecking, pirating, robbery and dishonesty was considered standard for a businessman. Thus, the Hanseatic League, a trade group, regulated all European commerce from 1300-1600 with the goal of preventing dishonesty. The strongmen of those centuries were rightly called robber barons, for their incomes were largely derived from lording it over hard-working peasants. And just as the great man went out with his retainers from his castle to rob and kill, so the robber of the sea, the pirate, looked on everyone as his enemy and everyone’s cargo of goods as his, if he could take it. Wrecking was as legitimate a calling as slave trading, in England, and a wrecker was considered as respectable then as the legal trickster of our own day who wins a case by technicalities.

One would never wish to recommend that anyone today write a business book unless it were for self promotion or business promotion or vanity, as 99% of them are today, but this book of the great English merchant gone for almost a century, who founded the retail stores that I found being auctioned off at the bottom in 2002, deserves to be republished again.

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