People Who Turned Specialist Trade into a Global Business

Tea, London. Twining, who learned the trade working for an East India merchant, bought Tom's Coffee House on the Strand in 1706 and specialised in tea when it was an expensive novelty, selling loose leaf to customers who tasted it on the premises. Expert blending and a reputation for unadulterated tea, at a time when much was mixed with leaves and dust, built a business that still trades from the same address.

Art auctions, London. Christie, a former naval officer, held his first sale in Pall Mall in 1766 and made the auction room a fashionable social event, handling the contents of grand houses and, in 1778, Robert Walpole's paintings for Catherine the Great. Trust in the auctioneer's catalogue and judgement was the asset. Christie's and its later rival Sotheby's became the global infrastructure of the art market.

The China trade. Jardine, a Scottish ship's surgeon turned merchant, co-founded Jardine, Matheson and Co. in Canton in 1832 with James Matheson, trading tea and silk out of China and, crucially, smuggling Indian opium in. He lobbied the British government towards the First Opium War, which opened Chinese ports and led to the founding of Hong Kong. The firm became a great Asian trading house, built on a trade that devastated millions.

Grain, Basel and Paris. Louis-Dreyfus, an Alsatian farmer's son, began buying wheat from local farmers and selling it in Basel in 1851, then used the telegraph and railways to buy grain cheaply across Russia and the Danube basin and ship it to Western Europe. Knowing prices in distant markets before rivals did was the edge. Louis Dreyfus became one of the handful of houses that still dominate world grain trading.

Stamps, Plymouth and London. Gibbons began selling stamps from his father's chemist's shop in Plymouth in 1856, famously buying sacks of rare Cape of Good Hope triangulars from sailors. In 1865 he published a price list that grew into the Stanley Gibbons catalogue, which became the standard reference collectors use to identify and value stamps. Owning the reference book gave his firm lasting authority in the trade.

Grain storage, Midwest. Cargill, the son of a Scottish sea captain, bought a grain warehouse at a railway terminus in Conover, Iowa, in 1865 and built a chain of elevators along the expanding railways, buying grain from farmers and storing it until it could be shipped. Control of storage along the route was the business. Cargill grew into one of the world's largest private companies, still family-owned, with a long record of criticism over its market power.

Tea for the masses, Glasgow. Lipton opened a grocery shop in Glasgow in 1871 and built a chain of hundreds, then in 1890 bought tea estates in Ceylon so he could sell tea direct from the garden to the teapot, cutting out wholesalers and selling packets at low prices. Owning the plantations, the packing and the shops let him undercut rivals, and Lipton became a global tea brand. The estates relied on poorly paid Tamil plantation labour.

Old masters, London and New York. Duveen, from a family of Dutch-Jewish decorative art dealers in Hull, saw that Europe had the art and America had the money, and from the 1900s sold European paintings to American industrialists such as Frick, Mellon and Huntington at enormous mark-ups. He relied on the art historian Bernard Berenson's attributions, some of them shaped by their secret commission deal. Many of those sales now hang in American public museums.

Diamonds, South Africa. Oppenheimer, a German-born diamond buyer in Kimberley, founded Anglo American in 1917 and took control of De Beers in 1929, then built the Central Selling Organisation in London, which sorted the world's rough diamonds and sold them to selected dealers at prices it set. Controlling supply kept diamond prices high for most of the century. The system rested on low-paid Black miners under South Africa's segregation laws.

Oil and metals trading, Switzerland. Rich, a metals trader, helped create the spot market for crude oil in the 1970s, buying from producers outside the big oil companies' contracts, and founded Marc Rich and Co. in Zug in 1974. He traded with regimes others shunned, including apartheid South Africa and Iran during the hostage crisis, and was indicted in the United States for tax evasion and sanctions breaking before a controversial presidential pardon in 2001. His firm later became Glencore.

Contemporary art, Los Angeles and New York. Gagosian began by selling posters in Los Angeles in the 1970s and built Gagosian into the largest contemporary art gallery business, with branches across several continents. His edge was a network of very rich collectors and a reputation for reselling works privately at high prices, which made the gallery a global marketplace rather than a local shop. Critics see it as a sign of how money now drives the art world.

Coal and commodities, Switzerland. Glasenberg, a South African accountant, joined Marc Rich's firm in 1984 as a coal trader and, as chief executive from 2002 to 2021, turned Glencore from a private trading partnership into a listed giant that both mined and traded, merging with Xstrata in 2013. Combining physical assets with trading knowledge was the model. In 2022 Glencore pleaded guilty to bribery and market manipulation charges covering years under his leadership.