In 1623, at the height of the conflict between the English and Dutch East India Companies, 10 English East India Company employees and 10 foreign employees of the Dutch VOC (their East India company) were arrested on Ambon, an island in Indonesia.

The Dutch, using a 17th-century type of waterboarding, tortured a Japanese worker who admitted to spying on Dutch fortifications on behalf of the English. All 20 men were convicted for treason and beheaded. The head of the English captain was impaled on a bamboo pole in the main square of the city. It is even said that the Dutch sent the other English traders the bill for cleaning the blood-spattered carpet from the executioner’s block.

This grim episode, known to history as the Amboyna massacre, marked a low point in Anglo-Dutch relations. It also brought the activities of a certain Jan Pieterszoon Coen into public light. Coen was a tough trader whose wealth forms one of the subjects in John Kampfner’s readable and engaging book.

Like Robert Clive, the English adventurer who also made his fortune in the east, Coen was a clever businessman who devoted his entire life to trade in the East Indies. Again like Clive, he was pragmatic and ruthless. Both Coen and Clive died in their 40s, Coen of dysentery in Indonesia, while Clive died in very mysterious circumstances in London in 1774, aged only 49.

Kampfner relates how these men not only acquired huge fortunes but had traits we associate with the super rich; obsessive attention to wealth creation and the belief that money was the only measure of success. These characteristics are combined with extraordinary paranoia and a single-minded ruthlessness.

Kampfner’s book roams effectively across different centuries and different cultures. We learn about the extravagance and gold obsession of Mansa Musa, a 14th-century emperor in Mali who dazzled the Arab world when he undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Musa, of course, is far better known in the Arab world than he is among western historians. More familiar figures in Kampfner’s eclectic account include Alfred Krupp, the German industrialist magnate, Andrew Carnegie and such hereditary potentates as Louis XIV. One of the most interesting chapters is a comparison between Louis XIV and Akhenaten, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived about 1,300 years before the birth of Christ. Both of these despots used the sun as a metaphor for their rule. Louis XIV may have been known as the Sun King, but Akhenaten made the sun the sole object of worship in his attempt to create a new religion.

The wide range of figures described culminate in more recognisable and more modern characters such as Silicon Valley geeks, hedge-fund managers and bankers in the City of London.

The ambition of the book, which leaps from ancient Rome to medieval Mali to Silicon Valley, leads to some oversights. Mansa Musa never spoke in public, and whispered everything to an interpreter; he was also never allowed to be seen eating a meal. These characteristics are shared by modern West African hereditary rulers. Such taboos are bound up in a cultural context which, occasionally, Kampfner overlooks.

Still, The Rich is witty, extremely readable and home to all sorts of enjoyably crazy figures, among them the obsessive and controlling Krupp. Taking over the small family business (which employed five people) at the ludicrously young age of 14, he developed a sense of insecurity that spurred him to expand his business at every turn. Obsessively secretive, he used a network of spies to keep abreast of global developments in steel making. The success of Krupp was perhaps easier for the population of Germany to understand than the inordinate wealth exhibited by today’s super rich. His armaments fortune was built on something very tangible. Almost the entire town of Essen was dominated by homes he had built for his workers.

Carnegie came from the same mould as Krupp. He was a tough Scot who built an enormous empire based on something solid – steel – which, according to the banker JP Morgan, made him “the richest man in the world”. Equally, the oil-rich monarchs and sheikhs of the Gulf, such as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who lost $6m in one night at the tables in Monte Carlo, had an obvious source of wealth.

By contrast, many of the bankers and cybergeeks that Kampfner describes as today’s super rich have far less palpable sources of wealth. The contrast between a figure such as Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire before he was 30, and Alfred Krupp, who spent 60 years building one of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, is striking.

Kampfner tries to show how today’s super rich are connected with their predecessors over a 2,000-year period. Indeed he concludes his whistle-stop tour across the centuries with the sentence: “The victory of the super rich in the 21st century is a product of 2,000 years of history.”

You could reach almost the opposite conclusion. Indeed, Kampfner’s subtitle, From Slaves to Super Yachts, suggests that the world in which Mark Zuckerberg lives is a far cry from a world in which a man’s wealth was determined by the number of human beings he owned.

Kwasi Kwarteng is the Conservative MP for Spelthorne. His book War and Gold is published by Bloomsbury.

The Rich is published by Little, Brown (£25). Click here to buy it for £18.75