“A fascinating, fast-paced background…full of remarkable personas and incredible stories” about the nineteenth-century American dynasties who battled for dominance from the tea and opium deals (Nathaniel Philbrick, Country wide Book Award-winning author of In the Heart of the ocean).

There was a period, back when the United States was young as well as the robber barons were beginning to enter into their own, when fortunes were made and lost importing high end goods from China. It had been a secretive, attractive, about Barons of the Sea: And their Competition to develop the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship frequently brutal business—one where teas and silks and porcelain had been purchased with revenue through the opium trade. However the trip by ocean to New York from Canton could take six agonizing a few months, and so the most pressing technical challenge of your day became ensuring one’s goods came first to advertise, so they might fetch the best price.

“With the verse of an all natural dramatist” (The Christian Science Monitor), Steven Ujifusa tells the story of a handful of cutthroat competitors who raced to develop the fastest, finest, most profitable clipper ships to carry their precious cargo to American shores. These were visionary, eccentric shipbuilders, debonair captains, and socially ambitious vendors with titles like Forbes and Delano—guys whose business interests took them from the cloistered confines of China’s expatriate neighborhoods to the sin city decadence of Platinum Rush-era San Francisco, and from the teeming hubbub of East Boston’s shipyards and to the lavish sitting areas of New York’s Hudson Valley estates.

Elegantly written and meticulously researched, Barons of the ocean is a riveting tale of innovation and ingenuity that “takes the reader on a rare and intoxicating journey back in time” (Candice Millard, bestselling writer of Hero from the Empire), drawing back the curtain on the making of a number of the nation’s greatest fortunes, and the rise and fall of an all-American industry mainly because sordid as it was genteel.