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This chapter reviews what the unfolding story of European big business can tell us about the three important questions in this study. It begins with the issue of effective strategies and structures. It explains that despite the rise and alleged fall of the conglomerate and notwithstanding claims for a new networked, N-form economy, it discovers that the Chandlerian model holds more or less true. It adds that it must amend and renew the original model, yet its essential principles endure. It clarifies that there has been less of a managerial revolution in Continental Europe than the original Harvard scholars might have expected, yet corporations of all sorts have steadily been adopting the common business school model. It notes that it can accept the Chandlerian model as a provisional and adaptive conception of the firm, while leaving behind the modernistic, universalism of Chandlerism.

The concluding remarks consider again similarities, connections, and identities — the organizing framework for the book — summarizing and highlighting earlier findings and addressing at some length the question of whether there were distinct phases in Britain and Ireland's eighteenth-century relationship with the Continent.

This chapter details British engagement with the Mediterranean from 1800 to 1830. As Napoleon's grip extended across Continental Europe, the restrictions on Continental travel for British citizens led to an enhanced bias towards the Mediterranean, circuitously approached through northern routes such as the German states or even Russia, or by sea via Gibraltar. Once Napoleon took control of Corfu from a Russo-Turkish occupation of that island as a springboard for further French expansion, the British tentatively began to experiment with a counter-stake of their own in western Greece. This meant establishing a relationship with Ali Pasha, the warlord with a local empire based in Yannina in northwestern Greece. From this flowed the sinuous part played by the British government in the fate of the Orthodox Christian community of the Souliotes in Epirus.

This chapter is not intended to provide an exhaustive catalogue of professional performances of Gilbert and Sullivan since 1961, rather, it offers a decade-by-decade survey of the most significant productions and trends, not just in the United Kingdom and the United States but also in Australasia and Continental Europe. Competitors lost no time in challenging the D'Oyly Carte monopoly in the United Kingdom once the copyright restrictions ended. The complementary approaches of two companies, with Opera della Luna providing a postmodern minimalist and irreverent approach to G & S and Carl Rosa a lavish elegance and big operatic sound, have made the dawning of the 21st century an exciting time for professional G & S performance in Britain. Meanwhile, the year 2003 also saw the first known professional performance of a Savoy opera in central Asia when HMS Pinafore was staged in the opera theatre at Samarkand in Uzbekistan.

This chapter addresses one of the most important economic issues facing societies and the world as a whole: rising income inequality. It takes issue with two widely circulated assertions: that rising inequality is inevitable; and that the ‘Transatlantic Consensus’, or the proposition that increased inequality in the US and high unemployment in Continental Europe are due to a shift of demand away from unskilled workers towards skilled workers, is an acceptable explanation of that growth. The chapter shows how wage bargaining and income policies can influence the wages dispersion itself. It calls attention to the varying importance in different countries of redistributive policies, which have for many years exerted significant effects on the dispersion of after-tax incomes. Because economic growth has been uneven, the discussion argues that major lessons can be learnt from the variations in policy which caused that differential growth.

This chapter explores the theoretical arguments in favour of granting a remedy to the intervener in Continental Europe. One of the main arguments that have been used to justify the granting of a claim to the intervener has been that the law ought not to discourage interveners. Amongst English and American scholars, too, those who argue in favour of granting a remedy to the intervener usually invoke this policy argument. Under the present policy argument, it is assumed, potential good Samaritans are discouraged because their intervention might prove to be a costly affair if the beneficiary refuses to reimburse their expenses and compensate them for their losses. The solution, it is argued, is to introduce a right to be compensated for the loss incurred during the intervention — to ‘offset pre-legal countervailing disincentives’ — or even a right to a positive reward in order to actively encourage intervention.

This chapter examines the ideological, social, and political worlds of Cadwallader Colden and other intellectuals in early eighteenth-century New York. It begins by focusing on Robert Hunter, governor of New York and New Jersey, and his correspondence with James Logan. It then considers Colden's move to Manhattan and how he became involved in New York's political and intellectual circles. In particular, it explains how William Burnet's patronage allowed Colden to gain the important offices of provincial surveyor general and councilor. It also looks at Colden's January 1720 letter to Hunter, which contained a historical and social justification for an overhaul of the medical profession along the lines of astronomy. Finally, it analyzes Colden's correspondence to Logan and Burnet's role in the dissemination of Newtonian mathematics around Continental Europe.

From the beginnings of human settlement the small marginal fringe of western Europe that eventually became the British Isles has represented a final frontier for successive waves of colonists—each bringing its own set of cultural adaptations and its own ethos into the landscape. Over time both landscape and culture have matured from raw frontier to settled centre, moulded by the advent of agriculture, towns, and industry, and by streams of migration both within Britain and from outside. The chapters in this book, together with some of the comments which followed their original delivery as lectures, trace the various phases of that process, showing how much of the story has only recently been unearthed, and how much remains to be discovered. The period surveyed is necessarily a very long one, and it is significant that successive chapters cover an increasingly narrow span of time, from the half a million years of the first chapter to the 150 of the last. That is partly a function of the historical record, which shifts from the scattered evidence of archaeology to the plentiful records of modern social surveys. But it is also a reflection of the accelerating pace of change, particularly in the past millennium, as increasing density of population, urbanization, and the manipulation of new sources of energy and wealth reshaped both culture and environment. In the process Britain shifted from being marginal, on the outer edge of human developments whose focus lay elsewhere, to being central: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain was the originator of changes which have transformed the globe since then. That is one story, familiar enough in outline, but examined from new perspectives in the later chapters of this book. But there is also a second story, completed very much earlier, and forming the theme of the early chapters of this collection. It lies in the initial peopling of Britain by humans, and the stages by which biological evolution was replaced by cultural evolution as the main motor of change.

The conclusion reiterates the centrality of the coroner system and its oversight in the monopolization of violence, state formation, and the growth of state power by creating and delineating new definitions of legitimate and illegitimate violence. It also examines the resulting decline of extra-judicial violence—blood feud, vendetta etc.—and subsequent attempts by the English state to target and control non-lethal forms of non-state violence such as riot and assault. Finally, the conclusion offers some initial comparisons with continental Europe and suggests that the trends seen in England may have been mirrored by similar attempts to monopolize violence in the Holy Roman Empire.

The concluding chapter is divided into five sub-sections. That on the First World War argues that Britain’s experience of the war was comparatively benign, in so far as this was possible; a perhaps surprising and counter-intuitive conclusion. I have used the study of Keynes’s attitude to the rentier to consider more widely the political economy of interwar Britain. The ‘Decay of Industrial Society’ looks at the political and social consequences of Britain’s decline as an industrial economy: a decline fundamental to Britain’s history after the Second World War. ‘A Whole Social System’ argues for the significance of sport not only as part of popular life but also as fully representative of the wider connections of Britain’s social and political life. Finally, in ‘What Kind of Democracy’, I suggest how these together helped shape the kind of democracy that emerged in Britain in the twentieth century.