The twentieth century is a fascinating time to follow the relationship between global governance and firms because of the persistent tension between principles of mass democracy and private ownership and control. It is possible to narrate the entire century as a series of contestations between firms and international organizations. At times, firms have had the upper hand. At other times, the principle of popular sovereignty has threatened the self-perceived rights and prerogatives of business. In my own work, I have homed in on ruptures at two main points.

The care that David Richardson took, both in titling and in sub-titling his new book on Britain's transatlantic slave trade, is quite evident. This is not just a book on the abolition of Britain's slave trade, with a bit of material on Britain's previous conduct of its slave trade as a more or less unconnected prologue. This is a book about both things—“the British slave trade” and also “its abolition”—and it takes seriously the idea that the way in which the slave trade was ended had everything to do with how it had been conducted. And Richardson's presentation of both things bears out the double meaning of “principles/principals” in the before-the-colon title. The conduct of the slave trade, in his view, largely was an attempt to manage this particular manifestation of the classic “principal-agent” problem. Abolition, similarly, was a matter of principle, but the various sets of agents that carried it out related to that principle in diverse ways. Where Richardson shows these motivations for the political movement that eventually secured the Abolition Act in 1807, Mary Wills does so for the naval officers tasked with interdicting the transatlantic slave trade after that date, and Maeve Ryan does for the often self-interested agents of the Crown whose business was to resettle the Africans on captured slave ships within the bounds of the British Empire.

Every organization of the world economy has been unstable. Each system is necessarily composed of trade-offs. Opportunities emerge, and disappointments abound. Nothing lasts; nothing is finished; and nothing is perfect.

The international institutions that govern global capitalism—the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—wield considerable power over the flows of trade and finance, and thereby the nation-states that participate in it. (And opting out is nearly impossible.) Those institutions were created in July 1944, amidst World War II, with the laudable objectives to restore global trade and capital flows, protect national sovereignty, and promote peace through interdependence. In short, these institutions represented the solution to the failures of interwar international governance—more specifically, the failure of the League of Nations to stem macroeconomic instability or the Second World War.