Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Thomas Twining (merchant)Thomas Twining (merchant)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…0i
  2. 2James Christie (auctioneer)James Christie (auctioneer)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…0i
  3. 3William Jardine (merchant)William Jardine (merchant)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…0i
  4. 4Léopold Louis-DreyfusLéopold Louis-DreyfusBorn 5 Mar 1833Grain, 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…0i
  5. 5Edward Stanley GibbonsEdward Stanley GibbonsStamps, 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…0i
  6. 6William Wallace CargillWilliam Wallace CargillGrain 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…0i
  7. 7Thomas LiptonThomas LiptonBorn 10 May 1848Tea 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…0i
  8. 8Joseph Duveen, 1st Baron DuveenJoseph Duveen, 1st Baron DuveenOld 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…0i
  9. 9Ernest OppenheimerErnest OppenheimerBorn 22 May 1880Diamonds, 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.…0i
  10. 10Marc RichMarc RichBorn 18 Dec 1934Oil 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…0i