Dangerous Commerce

by Virginia Haufler

2019 · Cornell University Press

As businesses search increasingly for opportunities beyond their national borders, they face the risk that political change in other countries will jeopardize their efforts. Anything from minor shifts in regulations to sudden revolutions can threaten business investment, trade, and credit. Virginia Haufler shows that a crucial factor in the expansion of global markets has been the private sector's creation of a sophisticated insurance industry to redistribute the risks entailed in foreign commerce, a privately constructed safety net for international transactions. Haufler believes that the network of relationships and institutions established by the insurers constituted a privately led regime for the management of international risk. She analyzes political risks insurance during three periods of substantial uncertainty: the era from the turn of the century to the beginning of World War I, when British global power began to wane; the interwar years, leading up to the collapse of world trade and a second world war; and the 'debt crisis' decade of the 1980s. Public and private involvement in supplying insurance against international risks has varied depending on demand, the availability of resources, and the norms of what can be insured. As the scale and complexity of risks have expanded, Haufler suggests, responsibility has shifted from commercial insurers first to the state and now to multilateral institutions.

Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia

by West Virginia

1893

Includes extra and special sessions.

Outside the Magic Circle

by Virginia Foster Durr

1990 · University of Alabama Press

Winner of the 1986 Alabama Library Author Award, Outside the Magic Circle tells the remarkable story of Virginia Foster Durr, a southern white woman born into privilige who (along with her husband Clifford Durr, a lawyer best known for defending Rosa Parks), nonetheless devoted her life to Civil Rights activism. "Outside the Magic Circle is a valuable document...engaging, warm, and shrewd. [Durr's] odyssey of political commitment belongs in the collective biography of a remarkable generation of Southern liberals and radicals." --Southern Exposure