Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival

by Peter Stark

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Book cover for Astoria

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From the Prologue...

ASTOR’S SETTLEMENT, “ASTORIA,” was the first American colony on the West Coast of North America, much in the way that Jamestown and Plymouth were the first British colonies on its East Coast. For John Jacob Astor, the West Coast colony would serve as the epicenter of a global commercial empire that leveraged nearly all the wealth of western North America into one vast trade network that passed through his own hands. For Thomas Jefferson, who had enthusiastically encouraged Astor to start the colony, it would provide the beginnings of a separate country on the West Coast—a sister democracy to the United States that looked out to the Pacific. Both men grasped far ahead of most of their contemporaries that the Pacific would one day take on the central importance in world affairs and trade that the Atlantic held in their day.
  • ISBN10 0062218298
  • ISBN13 9780062218292
  • Publish Date 4 March 2014
  • Publish Status Out of Stock
  • Imprint Ecco Press
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 400
  • Language English