This volumeuses the extreme case of misers to examine interlocking categories that undergirded the emergence of modern British society, including new perspectives on charity, morality, and marriage; new representations of passion and sympathy; and new modes of saving, spending, and investment.Misers surveys this class of people—as invented and interpreted in sermons, poems, novels, and plays; analyzed by economists and philosophers; and profiled in obituaries and biographies—to exp...

During the century after 1750, Great Britain absorbed much of the world's supply of gold into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers when it became the only major country to adopt the gold standard as the sole basis of its currency. Over the same period, the nation's emergence was marked by a powerful combination of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, alongside preservation of its older social hierarchy. In this rich and broad-ranging work, Timothy Alborn argues for a close connectio...

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all social classes. This primary resource collection is the first comparative history of British and American life insurance industries.

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all social classes. This primary resource collection is the first comparative history of British and American life insurance industries.

This collection of reported British shareholder meetings originally published between 1800 and 1920 provides scholars and students new insight into the development of big businesses in the world today. Although such meetings comprised only one of many facets of companies’ intersections with their publics during the nineteenth century, they regularly provide a rich insight into each industry. This collection offers a breadth of examples, including utilities, land companies, and theatres as ...

Questions concerning the relationships and boundaries between 'private' business and 'public' government are of great and perennial concern to economists, economic and business historians, political scientists and historians.Conceiving Companies discusses the birth and development of joint-stock companies in 19th century England, an area of great importance to the history of this subject. Alborn takes a new approach to the rise of large scale companies in Victorian England, includ...

Understanding the challenges of corporate governance is central to our comprehension of the economic dynamics driving corporations today. Among the most important institutions in capitalism today, corporations and joint-stock companies had their origins in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And as they became more prevalent, the issue of internal governance became more pressing. At stake—and very much contested—was the allocation of rights and obligations among shareho...

Most young people considering studying law, or pursuing a legal career, have very little idea of what learning law involves and how universities teach law to their students. The new edition of this book, which proved very popular when first published in 2007, provides a 'taster' for the study of law; a short, accessible presentation of law as an academic subject, designed to help 17- and 18-year old students and others decide whether law is the right choice for them as a university subject...

The Republic of Ireland, which declared itself in 1949, allowed the Catholic Church to dominate its civil society and education system. Investment by American and European companies, and a welcoming tax regime, created the 'Celtic Tiger' of the 1990s. That brief burst of good fortune was destroyed by a corrupt political class which encouraged a wild property boom, leaving the country almost bankrupt.What Ireland needs now is a programme of real change. It needs to become a fully mo...

Words of wisdom from American philanthropist Andrew CarnegieFocusing on Carnegie's most famous essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," this book of his writings, published here together for the first time, demonstrates the late steel magnate's beliefs on wealth, poverty, the public good, and capitalism. Carnegie's commitment to ensuring and promoting the welfare of his fellow human beings through philanthropic deeds ranged from donations to universities and museums to estab...

First Published in 2005. This book is an attempt by a layman to explain to other laymen the purposes and processes of industrial assurance, an institution which exercises a far-reaching influence upon the life of the community, and in which for that reason the community, through its political organs of Parliament and administration, has long taken an inquisitive, critical, and entirely proper interest. This will be of interest to those studying the long experience which will enable its sta...

The questions surrounding how the Irish economy was brought to the brink – who was to blame, and who should pay for these mistakes – have been rightly debated at length. But beyond this very legitimate exercise, there are deeper questions that need to be answered.These questions relate to why we made the decisions we did, not just in the last 10 years, but over the last 80. How did certain industries become prominent at the expense of others, banking as opposed to ...