In Building European Union, Trevor Salmon and William Nicoll draw upon twenty years experience, one as an academic, the other as a practitioner of European policy to bring together over 100 key documents on european integration in one volume. each document or group of documents, is preceded by commentary which locates the document in its historical context and explains its provenance, purpose and impact upon the development of European Union.

Rising defaults in the financial market in 2007, the current widespread economic recession and debt crisis have added impetus to existing doubts about companies’ governance, and cast new light on future trends in shareholder-oriented corporate practice. Taking account of these developments in the field and realising the current need for changes in governance, this book offers a thorough exploration of the origins, recent changes and future development of the corporate objective—shareholder primacy. Legal and theoretical aspects are examined so as to provide a comprehensive and critical account of the practices reflecting shareholder primacy in the UK. In the wake of the financial crisis, this book investigates the direction of future policy, with particular attention to changes in governing rules and regulations and their implications for preserving the objective of shareholder primacy. It examines current UK and EU reform proposals calling for long-term and socially-responsible corporate performance, and the potential friction between proposed legal changes and commercial practices. This book will be useful to researchers and students of company law, and business and management studies.

The World We Want compares the future world that Enlightenment intellectuals had hoped for with our own world at present. In what respects do the two worlds differ, and why are they so different? To what extent is and isn't our world the world they wanted, and to what extent do we today still want their world? Unlike previous philosophical critiques and defenses of the Enlightenment, the present study focuses extensively on the relevant historical and empirical record first, by examining carefully what kind of future Enlightenment intellectuals actually hoped for; second, by tracking the different legacies of their central ideals over the past two centuries. But in addition to documenting the significant gap that still exists between Enlightenment ideals and current realities, the author also attempts to show why the ideals of the Enlightenment still elude us. What does our own experience tell us about the appropriateness of these ideals? Which Enlightenment ideals do not fit with human nature? Why is meaningful support for these ideals, particularly within the US, so weak at present? Which of the means that Enlightenment intellectuals advocated for realizing their ideals are inefficacious? Which of their ideals have devolved into distorted versions of themselves when attempts have been made to realize them? How and why, after more than two centuries, have we still failed to realize the most significant Enlightenment ideals? In short, what is dead and what is living in these ideals?

Die Waffen nieder! (1889), translated into English in 1892 as Lay Down Your Arms, was an international bestseller. Its Austrian author Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914) chose the medium of fiction in order to reach as broad an audience as possible with her pacifist ideals. Challenging the narrow nationalisms of nineteenth-century Europe, Suttner believed that disputes between nations should be settled by means of arbitration rather than armed conflict. She devoted her life to campaigning for the cause of peace, and in 1905 became the first female recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Suttner’s influential novel yields insights into the early development of calls for a united Europe and an end to the arms race. This English translation of the novel was carried out as a ‘labour of love’ by the eminent Victorian surgeon and medical scholar Timothy Holmes (1825-1907), the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, for whom this was an unusual foray into the world of fiction. Holmes was Vice-Chairman of the London-based International Arbitration and Peace Association and a contemporary of Suttner. His translation helped to spread Suttner’s views across the Anglophone world, and contributed to the growth of the peace movement in the period before the First World War.