"A timely, compelling, and expertly researched passport to the tech companies that rule today's digital landscape."—Blake Harris, bestselling author of Console Wars and The History of the Future. In this provocative book about our new tech-based reality, political insider and tech expert Alexis Wichowski considers the unchecked rise of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla—what she calls “net states”— and their unavoidable influence in our lives. Rivaling nation states in power and capital, today’s net states are reaching into our physical world, inserting digital services into our lived environments in ways both unseen and, at times, unknown to us. They are transforming the way the world works, putting our rights up for grabs, from personal privacy to national security. Combining original reporting and insights drawn from more than 100 interviews with technology and government insiders, including Microsoft president Brad Smith, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the former Federal Trade Commission chair under President Obama, and the managing director of Jigsaw—Google’s Department of Counter-terrorism against extremism and cyber-attacks—The Information Trade explores what happens we give up our personal freedom and individual autonomy in exchange for an easy, plugged-in existence, and shows what we can do to control our relationship with net states before they irreversibly change our future.

Governments around the world? This volume answers these questions on the basis of detailed and rigorous case studies of trade disputes between the United States, Japan, and Europe in aircraft, semiconductors, supercomputers, telecommunications, and other electronics products. Tyson proposes a "cautious activist" policy agenda to promote US competitiveness in high-technology sectors and to strengthen multilateral rules governing high-technology trade.

Presenting new material and a fresh perspective, Technology, Trade and Growth in OECD Countries, provides a unifying framework for the exploration of the role played by specialisation in economic growth and international competitiveness.

This is the fifth collection of articles by Eliyahu Ashtor to be published by Variorum and focuses on the fundamental question of why, during the later Middle Ages, technology and industry declined, even collapsed, in the Muslim Levant, while simultaneously making enormous progress in the Christian West. An indefatigable researcher in archives all over the Mediterranean, Ashtor amassed quantities of data on this subject, and began to propose causal links between, on the one hand, demographic trends, types of political regime, economic policies and attitudes towards innovation, and on the other, the progress or decline of technology and industry. Although his work was cut short by his death in 1984, the information that Ashtor has made available, for instance on the sugar and the alkali industries, and the questions and hypotheses he has suggested will provide a vital basis for continuing research. The final article, dealing more specifically with the history of commerce, represents in effect a summation of the author's views on the role of the Jews in the trade of the Mediterranean. La cinquième collection d’articles d’Eliyahu Ashtor à être publiée par Variorum (pour les deux volumes encore disponibles, voir p.00) se concentre sur la raison fondamentale pour laquelle, durant le Bas Moyen Age, la technologie et l’industrie dans le Levant musulman étaient en déclin, voire même en plein effondrement, alors qu’elles faisaient simultanément d’énormes progrès dans l’Ouest chrétien. Cherchiste infatiguable des archives méditerranéennes, Ashtor a amassé quantité d’informations à ce sujet et a commencé à suggérer l’existence de lien de cause entre: d’une part, les tendances démongraphiques, les types de régimes politiques, la politique économique et les attitudes vis-à-vis du changement et, d’autre part, le progrès ou le déclin de la technologie et de l’industrie. Bien que son travail ait été interrompu par sa mort en 1984,

Focusing on the interactions of producers, sellers and consumers of meat across the world, from the nineteenth century onwards, Richard Perren provides a comprehensive analysis of how an efficient meat exporting industry was built. The study utilises the government reports and papers issued by all countries involved in the meat trade, including North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Britain.