Traders around the world use particular spoken argots, to guard commercial secrets or to cement their identity as members of a certain group. The written registers of traders, too, in correspondence and other commercial texts show significant differences from the language used in official, legal or private writing. This volume suggests a clear cross-linguistic tendency that mercantile writing displays a greater degree of language mixing, code-switching and linguistic innovations, and, by setting precedents, promote language change. This interdisciplinary volume aims to place the traders' languages within a wider sociolinguistic context. Questions addressed include: What differences can be observed between mercantile registers and those of court or legal scribes? Do the traders' texts show the early emergence of features that take longer to permeate into the 'higher' varieties of the same language? Do they anticipate language change in the standard register or influence it by setting linguistic precedents? What sets traders' letters apart from private correspondence and other 'low' registers? The book will also examine bilingualism, semi-bilingualism, reasons for code-switching and the choice of particular languages over others in commercial correspondence.

From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin's history details the novel ways in which Zigong merchants mobilized capital through financial-industrial networks and spurred growth by developing new technologies, capturing markets, and building integrated business organizations. She provides new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped Chinese economic and social development (independent of Western or Japanese influence) and challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, state extraction, the absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.

WINNER OF THE 2023 RALPH GOMORY BOOK PRIZE "A superb book."--Jerry Brotton "Wonderfully wide-ranging and deeply-researched."--William Dalrymple "Sharply observed, innovatively analysed, and always accessible."--Nandini Das A new history of English trade and empire--revealing how a tightly woven community of merchants was the true origin of globalized Britain In the century following Elizabeth I's rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin. Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. He reveals that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain's relationship with the world.

Merchants of Virtue is about a band of people who determined to make their company a good global citizen. Herman Miller has been looking at some of the critical questions of our time—for the past 35 years. Is sustainable business sustainable? In an age where sustainability is key to future success, businesses must incorporate new strategies towards sustainability in order to give them the competitive edge. But, can employees in global companies make great products, take care of the environment, benefit society, and make good money—all at the same time? The answer, as in so many stories of people working together, comes down to a principle of management. At Herman Miller, sustainability triumphs because people commit and recommit themselves to the guiding light of company values and in turn changed the world of business. Here author Bill Birchard goes deep inside the organization to find out how Herman Miller has been accomplishing this goal—from the individuals who have become passionate about this topic—to the designers who incorporate ideas of sustainability into every product they create. Birchard shares not only the stories—but the details of how every this remarkable effort has been accomplished.

Adhering to the combination of theoretical introduction and practical case introduction, this book summarizes the basic concepts and methods in management and big data analysis at home and abroad and introduces a large number of relevant practical cases, especially new cases in the Internet era, to help readers integrate theoretical knowledge into practical applications. The chapters of this book are interrelated and independent of each other, making it easy for the reader to study in pieces or to delve deeper into a particular topic of interest. Covering an array of theories about management and big data at home and abroad, this book lays a solid foundation for being an authentic manager. It is organized into sections on decision-making, organization, leadership, control, innovation, and big data to fully dissect and summarize the basic concepts of these characters in management and to show the basic methods that managers can use to solve problems. Each section contains a large number of examples to demonstrate how entrepreneurs successfully manage their large companies and overcome the difficulties in the business, utilizing the corresponding management functions or big data technology. Further, in order to adapt to the development of the Internet era, this book also absorbs a lot of practice cases of management innovation and big data which have emerged in recent years based on advanced network platform and big data analysis. This book puts great emphasis on the innovative function of management, adding more comprehensive methods and more updated cases related to the Internet.

Merchant organisation was a global phenomenon in the early modern era, and in the growing contacts between peoples and cultures, merchants may be seen as privileged intermediaries. This collection is unique in essaying a truly global coverage of mercantile activities, from the Wangara of the Central Sudan, Mississippi and Huron Indians, to the role of the Jews, the Muslim merchants of Anatolia, to the social structure of the mercantile classes in early modern England. The histories of merchant communities are not their histories alone, but also the histories of assumptions concerning their contexts. From the comparative perspective adopted here, it emerges that in markets where Western European merchants vied for place with competitors from the Near East, South Asia or East Asia, they were very often unsuccessful.

This collection presents new narratives on the emergence of intellectual property rights in the law of nations during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The collection reveals the extent to which various forms of intellectual property protection eventually shaped contemporary international law.

Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They set out to examine the relationship between institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.

Merchants and Revolution examines the activities of London's merchant community during the early Stuart period. Proposing a new understanding of long-term commercial change, Robert Brenner explains the factors behind the opening of long-distance commerce to the south and east, describing how the great City merchants wielded power to exploit emerging business opportunities, and he profiles the new colonial traders, who became the chief architects of the Commonwealth's dynamic commercial policy.

This book explores the causes and nature of the industrial revolution through a comparative study of the main wool textile manufacturing regions of England. Addressing many of the current debates in economic history and eighteenth-century studies through a detailed, archivally-based analysis, it examines how the interplay between merchants, markets and producers shaped the pace and character of economic growth during the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the implications of rapid product innovation and the export trade.