Law, politics and the governance of English and Scottish joint-stock companies 1600-1850

This article examines the impact of law on corporate governance by means of a case study of joint-stock enterprise in England and Scotland before 1850. Based on a dataset of over 450 company constitutions together with qualitative information on governance practice, it finds little evidence to support the hypothesis that common-law regimes such as England were more supportive of economic growth than civil-law jurisdictions such as Scotland: indeed, levels of shareholder protection were slightly stronger in the civil-law zone. Other factors, such as local political institutions, played a bigger role in shaping organisational forms and business practice

Aliens and Predators

This article examines the intersections of prostitution and race in Cardiff, and shows that racialized concepts of predatory sexuality framed ideas of prostitution in twentieth-century British ports. These were linked to wider concerns over miscegenation in the dockside district of Butetown, a space historically linked to prostitution and seen as distinctly ‘foreign’ and ‘contagious' by the interwar years. These debates were informed by local demographics and geographies, and were dominated by continuities in nineteenth-century ideas over race and sex. This evidence demonstrates the ongoing fractured development of sexual knowledge and ideas of multiculturalism in twentieth-century Britain