In her recent book Suiting Themselves, bestselling author Sharon Beder exposed how the global corporate elite have brazenly rewritten the rules of the global economy to line their pockets. In this new book she trains her sights on the insidious underbelly of this global trend to show how they have also orchestrated a mass propaganda campaign to manipulate community values and convince us that their interest - co-opting and controlling all of us in the name of the free market - is in our interest. During the 20th century, business associations coordinated mass propaganda campaigns combining 20th century American PR methods with revitalized free market ideology from 18th century Europe. The aim was to persuade people to eschew their own power as workers and citizens, and forego their democratic power to restrain and regulate business activity. Sophisticated corporate-funded think tanks augmented these campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, promoting free enterprise and business-friendly policies. Thesefree market missionaries now seek to change individual and institutional values through bolder strategies such as expanding share ownership and manipulating wider public concerns. In each case the goal is the same: the triumph of business values over community values. Beder‘s is an intellectual call to arms: challenge the ideology of the free market missionaries or be converted to it.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Following the Communist Revolution of 1949, missionaries were kicked out of China and proselytizing was outlawed. However, since the beginning of the reform era, China has witnessed a massive return of missionary workers. Today there are more Christians in church on a given Sunday in China than anywhere else on the globe. This book investigates the interaction of Western missionaries, ethnic minorities, and Han Chinese converts with the Chinese state in an increasingly globalized China. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Yunnan, it tries to make sense of the disparity between official state rhetoric and everyday reality. Examining morality in the context of the free-market system, spatial practices, linguistic activity, and Christian welfare organizations, Gideon Elazar reveals the ways in which the previously conflicting Communist Party and Christian “civilizing projects” have reached a measure of convergence, enabling local authorities to treat missionaries with a degree of tolerance. Elazar shows how this unofficial arrangement relates to the social realities and challenges of the reform era, including ethnic culture and identity, Yunnan’s many social problems, and the integration of ethnic minorities into the state system. By exploring the continuously shifting social and religious borders negotiated by converts, missionaries, and state authorities in Southwest China, this book sheds light on the larger issue of contemporary religion in China’s global era. It will be of interest to researchers of religion, Christianity, and minority groups in the People’s Republic of China.

The processes of globalisation are reshaping our world dramatically and rapidly. The great issues of our day emphasise that we are all in this together: startling inequalities, pressures on the environment, continuing hunger and poverty, climate change, economic integration, mass migrations, instant communications and recurring armed conflicts.

This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart's world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.

The history of Protestant mission in the world has unfolded in step with the history of the modern marketplace, defining missions success in marketplace terms. Scott Bessenecker points toward a view of missions freed of false attachments to material paradigms and tailored toward a kingdom vision.

The onslaught of globalization has brought with it sweeping changes to the foreign economic policy of the last 50 years. As the international political economy of nations and regions continues to be drawn and redrawn, this book traces the goals and instruments of foreign economic policy during this period, providing insight into the long-run trends and developing new theoretical generalizations. The book charts the journey from the point when foreign economic policy was solely concerned with foreign trade - pursued to promote the interests of individual countries - to the current globalization of the world economy that creates a uniform market in goods, services and factors of production that embrace all countries and regions.

Winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize Financial Missionaries to the World establishes the broad scope and significance of "dollar diplomacy"—the use of international lending and advising—to early-twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. Combining diplomatic, economic, and cultural history, the distinguished historian Emily S. Rosenberg shows how private bank loans were extended to leverage the acceptance of American financial advisers by foreign governments. In an analysis striking in its relevance to contemporary debates over international loans, she reveals how a practice initially justified as a progressive means to extend “civilization” by promoting economic stability and progress became embroiled in controversy. Vocal critics at home and abroad charged that American loans and financial oversight constituted a new imperialism that fostered exploitation of less powerful nations. By the mid-1920s, Rosenberg explains, even early supporters of dollar diplomacy worried that by facilitating excessive borrowing, the practice might induce the very instability and default that it supposedly worked against. "[A] major and superb contribution to the history of U.S. foreign relations. . . . [Emily S. Rosenberg] has opened up a whole new research field in international history."—Anders Stephanson, Journal of American History "[A] landmark in the historiography of American foreign relations."—Melvyn P. Leffler, author of A Preponderence of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War "Fascinating."—Christopher Clark, Times Literary Supplement

Do you wonder; • Why is there so much national debt? • Where has the middle class gone? • Why do my kids have less opportunity than I did? If so, this book is for you! • 97% of money is created by the banks, not by governments. • The Federal Reserve is a private bank controlled by private banks. • Adam Smith did not say an invisible hand guides the markets. • Government debt was static until the mid-1970’s and has soared since. • Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan both admitted to fundamental economic errors. • About 1/3 of an average persons’ spending is goes to banks as interest. • Corporations are using treaties to overrule nations and democracy. • The TARP bank bailouts were the biggest theft in history.