The Birth of Business

Money and Power

By Howard Means

John Wiley & Sons Inc.

US$27.95

PRAISE TO THE MERCHANT BECAUSE HE travels to remote lands to bring us pepper, cloves and galangal, proclaims an anonymous French poem from the Middle Ages. In medieval Europe, spices were coveted goods and as a result, commanded a high premium on the market.

Perhaps that anonymous author also thought his poem fitting because the merchant class at that time enjoyed little prestige. Christianity condemned greed and usury, and too much affection for worldly goods could cost you your soul. Or as the New Testament says: It is easier to lead a camel through the eye of a needle than to get a wealthy person through the gates of heaven.

Never mind that the wealth of kings, feudal lords and even the Catholic Church, which in the Middle Ages was a powerful entity with armies, lands and serfs, seemingly contradicted the Biblical concept of wealth. After all, human history abounds with paradoxes.

In Money and Power, Howard Means relates the history of business over the past thousand years, starting with the age-old dilemma of accumulation of wealth vs. the salvation of the soul--that is, the conflict between riches and conscience. His list of historical figures in the business world starts with an entrepreneur and saint: Godric. This 11th-century English peasant made his fortune as a trader and pirate in the Baltic, the North Atlantic and the Middle East. At the age of 40, moved by the preaching of the Catholic Church, he renounced his worldly possessions and lived another 50 years as a hermit and preacher, in absolute poverty. He was canonized shortly after his death.

While Godric could not overcome his era's prejudice against wealth, he is the opening figure in this book because he represents the entrepreneurial spirit at the dawn of free trade and the possibility of succeeding purely thanks to one's own efforts.

Following Godric is a parade of characters whose histories were a string of adventures: Cosimo de Medici, the Florentine financier of the Renaissance; Philip II, king of Spain, who inherited the world's richest empire and brought it to ruin; J.P. Morgan, the magnate who saved the United States from a stock market crash in the late 19th century; John D. Rockefeller, the titan who founded Standard Oil; Henry Ford, car maker and commercial colossus; Bill Gates, the computer whiz, and others.

Cosimo de Medici resolved the dilemma that did Godric in: He balanced prosperity in business with charity and philanthropy. With his generous donations to churches, monasteries and libraries, Cosimo was one of the great leaders of the Renaissance and a catalyst for the creation of many classic works of art. One year after his death in 1464, he was officially bestowed with the title of pater patriae, or father of the country, the same title given his favorite writer, Cicero.

Cosimo helped create the Renaissance world, a world that did not revolve exclusively around God but around society, with humankind at its core. In addition, he showed that it was possible to make money and simultaneously save your soul, to get rich and at the same time enrich the lives of others. The union of personal wealth and philanthropy is a model that many business leaders have followed. Today, in some circles, it has become institutionalized in the form of periodic donations and support of charitable foundations. Gates, the richest man in history and the closing figure in this book, is a high-profile partisan of that school of thought.

But there is often more to philanthropy. The Ford Foundation, with its numerous contributions to charitable and scientific organizations, glossed over the dark side of Henry Ford's personality. The man who propagated the concept of mass production was an anti-Semite and a despot who imposed a strict code of discipline on his factories and even dictated the private lives of his employees.

Based on a documentary written for U.S. television by David Grubin, this book succeeds in tracing how business and trade have evolved through the actions of larger-than-life personalities. It also shows how this evolution has changed the world, allowing some regions of the globe to attain levels of wealth and freedom never before known. If nothing else, it's a pointed justification of that medieval cry to praise the merchant.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Freedom Magazines, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group