Business History

Before there was Canada, there was the Hudson’s Bay Company.
HBC had its own laws and its own currency, and at one point controlled trade routes from the Arctic to Hawaii. It started cities like Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Victoria. It also fought an actual war with a rival business over pemmican, a traditional indigenous snack made of dried buffalo meat, fat and berries.
Business History’s resident Canadian Robert Smith tells Jacob Goldstein how two French traders built an empire out of beaver fur, and how the company they created later signed one of the biggest real estate deals in history.
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Before Reuters was a global news giant, it was a man and 45 homing pigeons. Julius Reuter saw that the telegraph would change how information moved, and he used that to his advantage. He didn’t have to get news out immediately — he just had to be first. Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith follow Reuter from Germany to England, where he scoops The Times of London with news that Europe was headed to war.
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Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith talk with Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea.
Companies are some of the most powerful institutions in the modern world – right up there with the nation-state. Where did the modern corporation come from? And what do AI and Chinese state-owned firms mean for the future of the company?
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In the late 1800s, a Russian immigrant named Samuel Zemurray spent nearly everything he had on a load of bananas, and turned it into a fortune. But Sam the Banana Man wasn’t just a business titan. He was a puppeteer on the geopolitical stage, bankrolling a revolution in Honduras and pushing the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected leader.
For decades, Zemurray battled the United Fruit Company, an institution with its tentacles in governments across the Americas — including the United States. In the end, he wound up running the company.
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We're here with a preview of Blockers, a new audiobook from Michael Lewis, the author of Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and more. In Blockers, Lewis tells the story of a handful of people who dedicated their careers to public service—until the Department of Government Efficiency decided they were a problem. These were people who believed they had a calling—people who kept American's sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands, made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules, and figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods—and then discovered they were no longer wanted.
Here's an excerpt from the audiobook. You can buy the audiobook exclusively at blockers.fm.
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