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The unlikely beginnings of the East India Company—from Tudor origins and rivalry with the superior Dutch—to laying the groundwork for future British expansion The East India Company was the largest commercial enterprise in British history, yet its roots in Tudor England are often overlooked. The Tudor revolution in commerce led ambitious merchants to search for new forms of investment, not least in risky overseas enterprises—and for these "adventurers" the most profitable bet of all would be on the Company. Through a host of stories and fascinating details, David Howarth brings to life the Company's way of doing business—from the leaky ships and petty seafarers of its embattled early days to later sweeping commercial success. While the Company's efforts met with disappointment in Japan, they sowed the seeds of success in India, setting the outline for what would later become the Raj. Drawing on an abundance of sources, Howarth shows how competition from European powers was vital to success—and considers whether the Company was truly "English" at all, or rather part of a Europe-wide movement

The true significance of Barre as an architect of European Economic and Monetary Union should be seen in terms of his economic convictions. They led him - far earlier than most of his compatriots, and against many detractors within French political, policy making and academic circles — to support the three main macro-economic stepping stones to EMU: macro-economic convergence based on low inflation; exchange-rate targeting (through an external exchange-rate regime) to reinforce domestic efforts to bring down inflation; and capital liberalization. As European Commissioner, and then as French prime minister from 1976 to 1981 with a concurrent stint as Finance Minister from 1976-1978, Barre maintained his consistent support for these three policy goals, although without the telos of a single currency by way of official justification. Prior to the Delors Report, Barre never publicly stated his support for the creation of a single European currency emitted by a European central bank. Barre repeatedly claimed that he was a European by conviction, but his Europeanism remained one in which Member States retained control. Barre was no fan of supra-nationalism. Domestic economic concerns and the competitiveness of the French economy were always his priorities.

This special issue has two main aims: to examine the contribution of political economy analyses of the sovereign debt crisis and to relate these findings to longstanding debates in the sub-disciplines of comparative political economy, international political economy and European economic governance. This introduction begins by reviewing the comparative political economy literature on national financial systems in order to account for the playing out of the crisis. It then examines the international political economy literature on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and financial (sovereign debt) markets that played such a key role in the unfolding of the sovereign debt crisis. Finally, it outlines longstanding academic debates on the main 'asymmetries'; in European economic governance, and provides a critical overview of the three main policy and institutional reforms adopted by European Union governments in response to the crisis.

Despite the far-reaching liberalization of the French banking system over the past quarter century, French banks suffered far less in the international financial crisis (2007–2009) than banks in the United Kingdom and Germany. However, the French system also suffered far more—at least in the first stages of the crisis—than the banking systems of Southern Europe. By several measures, French banks were world leaders in financial innovation, and the French banking system was highly exposed to international market movements. The limited impact of the crisis, however, owed to the specificities of French "market-based banking." Deliberate state action over the two decades prior to the crisis created a specific kind of banking system and encouraged forms of financial innovation, the unintentional consequence of which was the limited exposure to the securitization that caused the damage wrought during the financial crisis.

The Basel III Accord on a 'Global regulatory framework for more resilient banks and banking systems' was issued in late 2010 as the cornerstone of the international regulatory response to the global financial crisis. Its adoption into European Union (EU) legislation has, however, been met with considerable member state reticence and intra-EU negotiations are ongoing. This paper investigates the political economy of new capital requirements in the EU, arguing that the institutional features of national banking sectors convincingly account for the divergence in EU member state preferences on capital rules.