The link between private corporations and U.S. world power has a much longer history than most people realize. Transnational firms such as the United Fruit Company represent an earlier stage of the economic and cultural globalization now taking place throughout the world. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources in the United States, Great Britain, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, Colby combines "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to provide new insight into the role of transnational capital, labor migration, and racial nationalism in shaping U.S. expansion into Central America and the greater Caribbean. The Business of Empire places corporate power and local context at the heart of U.S. imperial history. In the early twentieth century, U.S. influence in Central America came primarily in the form of private enterprise, above all United Fruit. Founded amid the U.S. leap into overseas empire, the company initially depended upon British West Indian laborers. When its black workforce resisted white American authority, the firm adopted a strategy of labor division by recruiting Hispanic migrants. This labor system drew the company into increased conflict with its host nations, as Central American nationalists denounced not only U.S. military interventions in the region but also American employment of black immigrants. By the 1930s, just as Washington renounced military intervention in Latin America, United Fruit pursued its own Good Neighbor Policy, which brought a reduction in its corporate colonial power and a ban on the hiring of black immigrants. The end of the company's system of labor division in turn pointed the way to the transformation of United Fruit as well as the broader U.S. empire.

John Darwin's After Tamerlane, a sweeping six-hundred-year history of empires around the globe, marked him as a historian of "massive erudition" and narrative mastery. In Unfinished Empire, he marshals his gifts to deliver a monumental one-volume history of Britain's imperium-a work that is sure to stand as the most authoritative, most compelling treatment of the subject for a generation. Darwin unfurls the British Empire's beginnings and decline and its extraordinary range of forms of rule, from settler colonies to island enclaves, from the princely states of India to ramshackle trading posts. His penetrating analysis offers a corrective to those who portray the empire as either naked exploitation or a grand "civilizing mission." Far from ever having a "master plan," the British Empire was controlled by a range of interests often at loggerheads with one another and was as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength. It shows, too, that the empire was never stable: to govern was a violent process, inevitably creating wars and rebellions. Unfinished Empire is a remarkable, nuanced history of the most complex polity the world has ever known, and a serious attempt to describe the diverse, contradictory ways-from the military to the cultural-in which empires really function. This is essential reading for any lover of sweeping history, or anyone wishing to understand how the modern world came into being.

In this book, the author weaves a unique narrative that looks at both empires of business created from mergers and acquisitions and global empires from world history in an attempt to answer the question: why do certain empires endure for long periods while others collapse in a short space of time.

This is not a 'how to' book about branding. Instead it outlines approaches that will increase the accountability of marketing spending and provide tools to support investment decisions. Drawing on the world's largest database of brand research, The Business of Brands outlines the ways in which brands are a source of value for both businesses and consumers. For businesses, it shows how brands contribute to shareholder value, both through revenue generation and by acting as a management tool. And for consumers, it shows how brands can fulfil various valuable functions - such as acting as a source of trust or a predictor of quality.

The Business Book clearly and simply explains all of the key theories that have shaped the world of business, management, and commerce. Using easy-to-follow graphics and artworks, succinct quotations, and thoroughly accessible text, The Business Book introduces the would-be entrepreneur and general reader alike to the work of great commercial thinkers, leaders, and gurus. The Business Book includes: - Almost 100 quotations from the great business thinkers and gurus - Information on every facet of business management, including alternative business models, with real life examples from the marketplace - A structure that takes the reader through every stage of business strategy, from start-up to delivering the goods The clear and concise summaries, graphics, and quotations in The Business Book will help even the complete novice understand the key ideas behind business success.

This book originated in a symposium on business ethics that took place in the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Canterbury in September of 1997. Professor Werhane, who was a visiting Erskine Fellow, provided the keynote address, and many of the papers in this collection were originally presented at this symposium. We are grateful to Kluwer Publishers for the opportunity to publish these essays in their series on International Business Ethics. We want to thank the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics at the Darden School, University of Virginia, and the Erskine Trust and the Department of Management at the University of Canterbury for their support of Professor Werhane's fellowship, research for this text, and funding for its production. We especially want to thank Lisa Spiro, who copy-edited and prepared the manuscript for publication. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW This book originated in a symposium on business ethics that took place in the faculty of commerce, at the University of Canterbury, in September 1997. Professor Werhane, who was a visiting Erskine Fellow, provided the keynote address. Contributions to the proceedings were. inter-disciplinary, spanning theory and practice. Subsequent contributions were obtained from within New Zealand and from Asia. The book starts off on rather a pessimistic note: the new managerialism (the kind of thing Scott Adams jokes about in the world-famous Dilbert cartoons) is economically suspect and psychologically damaging.