This study argues that businesswomen were central to urban society and to the operation and development of commerce in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It presents a rich and complicated picture of lower-middling life and female enterprise in three northern English towns: Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield. The stories told by a wide range of sources - including trade directories, newspaper advertisements, court records, correspondence, and diaries - demonstrate the very differing fortunes and levels of independence that individual businesswomen enjoyed. Yet, as a group,...

For the first time classic readings on Jesus from outside of Christianity have been brought together in one volume. Jesus Beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts features significant passages on Jesus from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The fifty-six selections span two millennia of thought, including translated extracts from the Talmud and the Qur'an, and writings by Mahatma Gandhi and the 14th Dalai Lama.
The volume features fresh translations of important texts, 'Key-Issues' introductions, questions for discussion and guides for further reading. Importantly, each set of...

The corporate governance systems of continental Europe have traditionally been quite different to those of the liberal market economies (e.g. the US and the UK). Company ownership has been dominated by incumbent blockholders, with a relatively minor role for minority shareholders and institutional investors. Business strategy has focused on the achievement of social stability--taking into account the interests of a broad group stakeholders--rather than the maximisation of shareholder value.
However, since the mid-1990s, European corporations have adopted many of the characteristics of the...

This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature - the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words. Drawing on six case studies of different kinds of narrative - epic, historiography and tragedy - and authors as diverse as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles and Euripides, this wide-ranging study analyses each example of debate in its context according to a set of interrelated questions: who debates, when, why, and with what consequences?...

The Tactile Eye expands on phenomenological analysis and film theory in its accessible and beautifully written exploration of the visceral connection between films and their viewers. Jennifer M. Barker argues that the experience of cinema can be understood as deeply tactile--a sensuous exchange between film and viewer that goes beyond the visual and aural, gets beneath the skin, and reverberates in the body. Barker combines analysis of embodiment and phenomenological film theory to provide an expansive description of cinematic tactility. She considers feminist experimental film, early...