Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France.

The discovery of the New World and the rise of Europe's Atlantic economy brought unprecedented wealth. It also reordered the political balance among European states and threatened age-old social hierarchies within them. In this charged context, the French developed a "science of commerce" that aimed to benefit from this new wealth while containing its revolutionary effects. Montesquieu became a towering authority among reformist economic and political thinkers by developing a politics of fusion intended to reconcile France's aristocratic society and monarchical state with the needs and risks of international commerce. The Seven Years' War proved the weakness of this model, and after this watershed reforms that could guarantee shared prosperity at home and in the colonies remained elusive. Once the Revolution broke out in 1789, the contradictions that attended the growth of France's Atlantic economy helped to bring down the constitutional monarchy.

Drawing upon the writings of philosophes, diplomats, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution.

Obwohl die Bedeutung des Dienstleistungssektors auch bei uns steigt, hat er bisher nicht die Bedeutung wie in anderen Landern gewonnen und der Sektor gehort auch nicht zu den "Exportweltmeistern." Dieses Buch zeigt, dass Dienstleister, die als Netzwerk organisiert sind, ihre Wettbewerbsposition verbessern konnen, da sie Kundennahe mit effizientem Systemhintergrund verbinden. Nach einem konzeptionellen Uberblick werden empirische Ergebnisse einer internationalen Benchmarkingstudie zu den Erfolgsfaktoren von Dienstleistungsnetzwerken vorgestellt. Dabei werden funf Erfolgsfaktoren identifiziert und deren Umsetzung in Form von "Best Practice Case Studies" aufgearbeitet. Diese Fallstudien stellen die international erfolgreichsten Benchmarks vor. Die Vorstellung von Franchising und Cooperations-Netzwerken und Uberlegungen zum "idealen Dienstleistungswerk" bilden den Schluss des Buches."

The typical British publicly traded company has widely dispersed share ownership and is run by professionally trained managers who collectively own an insufficiently large percentage of shares to dictate the outcome when shareholders vote. This separation of ownership and control has not only dictated the tenor of corporate governance debate in Britain but serves to distinguish the UK from most other countries. Existing theories fail to account adequately for arrangements in the UK. Corporate Ownership and Control accordingly seeks to explain why ownership became divorced from control in major British companies.
The book is organized by reference to the 'sell side', which encompasses the factors that might prompt those owning large blocks of shares to exit or accept dilution of their stake, and the 'buy side', which involves factors that motivate investors to buy equities and deter the new shareholders from themselves exercising control. The book's approach is strongly historical in orientation, as it examines how matters evolved from the 17th century right through to today. While a modern-style divorce of ownership and control can be traced back at least as far as mid-19th century railways, the 'outsider/arms-length' system of ownership and control that currently characterizes British corporate governance did not crystallize until the middle of the 20th century. The book brings the story right up to date by showing current arrangements are likely to be durable. Correspondingly, the insights the book offers should remain salient for some time to come.

This text covers such topics as value, money, agriculture, domestic and foreign trade, war, labor, interest rates, luxuries, and the various government policies that affect these subjects.The theme that unites these disparate subjects is liberty.
As Condillac writes near the end of the work, the means to eradicate all the abuses and injustices of government is "to give trade full, complete and permanent freedom." In their preface to the 1997 edition, Shelagh and Walter Eltis wrote, "English language readers . . . will find . . . that the case for competitive market economics has rarely been presented more powerfully."
Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac (1714-1780) was one of eighteenth-century France's preeminent philosophers of the Enlightenment, who had wide-ranging influence beyond metaphysics and epistemology to political thought and economics. He was a leading advocate in France of the ideas of John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, and David Hume.
Shelagh Eltis is a historian and graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, U.K.
Walter Eltis is an Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Reading, U.K.

A new vision of money as a communication technology that creates and sustains invisible-often exclusive-communities "In an engaging and timely work, brimming with fascinating anecdotes and historical and literary references, Lana Swartz brilliantly illustrates how financial technologies are quietly transforming how we socialize and what it means to belong."-Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It One of the basic structures of everyday life, money is at its core a communication media. Payment systems-cash, card, app, or Bitcoin-are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what's at stake when we pay. This accessible and insightful analysis comes at a moment of disruption: from "fin-tech" startups to cryptocurrencies, a variety of technologies are poised to unseat traditional financial infrastructures. Swartz explains these changes, traces their longer histories, and demonstrates their consequences. She shows just how important these invisible systems are. Getting paid and paying determines whether or not you can put food on the table. The data that payment produces is uniquely revelatory-and newly valuable. New forms of money create new forms of identity, new forms of community, and new forms of power.