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Italy at the turn of the twentieth century could be said in many respects to be a figment of the imagination. When the disparate states of the Italian Peninsula were brought together as a nation in 1861, statesman Massimo d'Azeglio is famously reputed to have said, ‘we have made Italy; now we must make Italians’. But by 1900 his ambition had yet to be fulfilled, and creating a culturally homogeneous nation would remain a matter of pressing concern well into the new century. From the 1880s onwards the high hopes of the Risorgimento had been replaced in the minds of Italian intellectuals by a pervasive sense of anticlimax and disillusionment with the new state. Rather than narrowing regional, social and cultural divisions, the much-yearned-for unification had merely served to make them deeper. The north and south of Italy were, to all practical intents and purposes, separate countries, the economic inequalities between them having been exacerbated by rapid industrial modernisation in such northern cities as Milan and Turin. Regional allegiances remained stronger than national pride, emigration was rising sharply and unrest among new, disaffected social groups was on the increase. Creating a strong sense of shared identity and a unified, prosperous, modern Italy was therefore imperative, both in order to maintain stability at home and in order to present a united front to the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La bohème is nowadays one of the best-loved and most frequently performed of all Puccini's operas. After its première in February 1896 it was swiftly adopted into the repertory of all the major theatres across Italy, and performances soon followed in such diverse cities as Buenos Aires, Alexandria, Moscow, Lisbon, Manchester, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, London, Vienna, Los Angeles and The Hague. However, the response of the audience that listened to its first performance at Turin's Teatro Regio was subdued, and that in Rome a short time later little more enthusiastic. Critical responses were polarised (one commentator referred to them as either di cotte or di crude – burnt or raw) and coloured by a significant event that had taken place in Turin a little over a month earlier – the first Italian production of Götterdämmerung. In a city where many critics were relatively tolerant of forward-looking musical tendencies, La bohème was not judged on its own terms but became caught up in heated arguments about the merits of Wagner's music and ideas. Two key themes emerged from the comparison with Wagner: the issue of organic wholeness in music and the separate but related issue of organic growth, or how Italian music ought to progress. Thus, despite the subsequent popular success of La bohème, its initial critical reception was dominated by anxieties about the vitality of contemporary Italian music and its ability to keep pace with musical developments elsewhere in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are some signs of change in the right direction, there is still a great need for the ICRC to “open the windows” … On the whole, the ICRC seems to have blurred the differences between the discretion which their work requires and an obsession with needless secrecy. The Cold War years presented various challenges to the ICRC. Under concerted criticism not only from communist but also from certain western democratic circles, the ICRC staved off unwanted changes in its composition and mandate mainly through its performance in various conflicts – in Palestine and Hungary, for example. It also played its traditional role in helping to further develop international humanitarian law. By the middle of the Cold War, the organization was engaged broadly in complex ways not only in the Global South but also in Europe – not only in “developing areas” but also in Greece and Northern Ireland. There was clearly a need for its traditional roles during the Cold War, even if the ICRC was slow to anticipate some needed changes at headquarters as well as in the field. Its controversial performance in the conflict in Nigeria during 1967–70 led to important changes in Geneva. There were other opportunities for striking change, as in response to the 1975 Tansley Report on the Re-appraisal of the Red Cross, or at the 1974–77 diplomatic conference that produced two protocols additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the various chapters of this book it has become increasingly clear that the data available are far too patchy to reach any precise conclusions on the quality of British mercantile enterprise in the heyday of the country's overseas trading operations. However, it is possible to make some objective judgements from three angles. The role of ethnic, religious and cultural minorities has been a recurrent topic and some final assessment of their contribution is necessary. Secondly, it is possible to assess mercantile enterprise by comparing its achievements with those of other kinds of overseas marketing operations active in the period such as manufacturers selling directly abroad, free standing companies, exploration companies, and other forms of organisation traced by historians in the course of recent research. Finally, we should make a critical assessment of the one distinctive form of mercantile enterprise that emerged in the period, the managing agency system, in the context of other assessments of British economic performance in the nineteenth century. COSMOPOLITAN MERCANTILE ENTERPRISE The achievements of British mercantile enterprise in London and the outports in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were undoubtedly a consequence of the rich ethnic and cultural mix. As London superseded Amsterdam the cosmopolitan commercial bourgeoisie shifted to the new metropolis of trade, and as Manchester emerged as the ‘metropolis of manufactures’ it too attracted an international trading community. In Chapter i it was noticed that in London in 1763 more than three-quarters of merchants were of foreign origin or descent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the course of the nineteenth century, communications improved at an increasing pace, better roads, river navigation, canals, harbours, docks, and sailing ships being overtaken by the impact of the railways, steamships and the great international ship canals. The consequences were obviously far reaching for trade and merchant organisation, but change could be accommodated within the existing family business. The advent of the telegraph was quite another matter. It represented instant communication worldwide, and its effects were sometimes revolutionary. In principle there was now nothing to prevent direct communication between the manufacturer and his most distant customers, and the traditional chains of middlemen began to look redundant. The opening of the international telegraph lines broadly coincided with the intensification of competition in overseas markets from a rapidly industrialising Germany and the United States, and consequent pressure on mercantile profit margins. The last quarter of the nineteenth century was therefore a period in which British merchants were forced to rethink their strategies and to conduct very different kinds of business to those undertaken by their forebears in trade, or to withdraw into other activities. The Textile Trade Though the telegraph is familiar enough to historians, its economic implications have never been fully explored, and there is no major study to fall back on to measure its impact. The full implications are evidently too large to embrace in this book, but it will be helpful to identify some direct consequences of instant communication for merchant enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the features of the Industrial Revolution that has often been remarked on is the multiplication of the functions of entrepreneurs as merchants became manufacturers and financiers and manufacturers extended to importing, exporting, finance, landholding and other activities. This development increased the number of people engaged in trade and further blurred the traditional boundaries of mercantile enterprise. The increase of economic activity broadly coincided with long and difficult periods of war, notably those with the American colonists (1776–83) and with the French (1793–1815), which enervated or destroyed much hereditary enterprise and introduced some unprecedented opportunities for new firms. From this ferment there emerged an entirely new structure of mercantile enterprise and finance which lasted until the final quarter of the century. The process of restructuring forms the main subject matter of this chapter. War, Trade And Enterprise The American War of Independence and the French Wars coincided with the periods of major technical innovation and restructuring of the textile and iron industries of Britain. There was major interaction between the political and economic developments of the period and clearly one cannot be adequately understood without the other, but for the purposes of exposition it is convenient to consider them separately at this initial stage. Broadly speaking, war changed the composition of the merchant body by placing a premium on bold entrepreneurship and by the arrival of a new wave of refugees, while new industrial development changed the traditional functions of both merchant and manufacturer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research by economic historians into new forms of business organisation in the nineteenth century has cast the British role in a poor light. The British had shown little enthusiasm for joint-stock organisation for much of the century or for the credit-mobilier type of financing of industrial development. The multinational corporation was, it appears, largely an American phenomenon, with only late and limited indigenous development in Britain. The multidivisional corporation was again entirely a creation of American managerial creativity. The trust was, as we have long known, an outcome of German dynamism. Even the British banking scene continued to be dominated by family dynasties, while overseas investment in business enterprise, both colonial and foreign, was more restrained than historians had long thought. The consequence appears to be that the small-to-middling business remained the most characteristic form of enterprise, even in the ‘leading sectors’, for longer than the early writers led us to suppose. In a wide range of manufacturing and service industries the characteristic structure featured a multiplicity of diverse specialists whose leadership was addicted to family and (if possible) dynastic control. The evidence for this situation has been extensively researched and is quite convincing. Yet, so far as the British position in the world economy is concerned, some misgivings must be allowed to surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Introduction and first two chapters of this book it was recognised that the migration of foreign merchant families to London and provincial centres was a salient feature of British mercantile development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The policies, development and contribution of these families must now be given closer attention. They had a distinct character for which ‘international houses’ seems the best epithet. Their characteristic form can be traced back to the Florentine banks of the middle ages, which consisted of a parent partnership, characteristically located in Florence, with a controlling interest in several subsidiary partnerships, one for each branch abroad. For later centuries an international house may be defined more generally as a merchant enterprise simultaneously functioning in two or more countries. The organisation persisted from the middle ages, but did not receive a major fillip until economic expansion coincided with persecution and dispersion of religious minorities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The outlook and practice of the international houses is best identified in relation to more familiar European and American mercantile habits and conventions. Postlethwayt explained in 1774 that ‘The most capital houses of mercantile trade throughout Europe being generally composed of several partners, it is customary for one or the other to travel into foreign countries to make better judgement of the credit and fortune of their correspondents, cement ties of commercial friendship, and extend their traffic in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a life of bold decisions, none was more significant for the future than Cortés's decision to rebuild the city of Tenochtitlán-Mexico and to make it the capital of the kingdom of New Spain. The site had many serious disadvantages. It was an island, marshy and reputedly unhealthy; it produced no food of its own, except the fish caught in the lake; its drinking water had to be brought by expensive artificial means from the hills of Chapultepec, several miles away; it communicated with the mainland by causeways, and many among Cortés's following thought that these causeways, with their easily invested bridges, would be dominated by the Indians of the mainland rather than by the island Europeans. Moreover, a large Indian population still lived on the island, lurking among the ruins of buildings which Cortés had had pulled down in order to dump the rubble in the drainage canals, to facilitate the manœuvres of his cavalry. In short, the site might well be a trap, incapable of resisting siege, and peculiarly vulnerable in its provisioning and water supply. Cortés, though certainly aware of the economic defects of the place, overrode the objections. He believed it to be as strong a site for Europeans as for Indians. Further, he probably wished to avoid a too rapid dispersal of his followers through the land they had only partly conquered, where they might still become the victims of their new vassals, or of their own disagreements. Finally Cortés was wise enough to appreciate the prestige of Tenochtitlán, its ‘renown and importance’, as he expressed it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]