The introductory chapter presents an overview of the book. It starts with the basic research questions and the objectives of the book. One of the main objectives is to make available systematic and comparable accounts of ownership structure change (respectively, persistence) in large firms in eight European countries over the last few decades. The second main objective is to examine the likely determinants of ownership structure change in each country. The third objective is to apply an international comparative approach to ownership structure changes to shed some light on the questions of whether similar forces impact ownership change or persistence in each country, whether particular institutional factors influence ownership change/persistence, and whether the eventual decline of corporate insiders and the state and the rise of foreign and institutional investors are influenced by similar forces in each country. The chapter provides an overview of the global corporate governance revolution in the 1990s as well as its countervailing forces. It discusses the theoretical assumptions about the determinants of corporate ownership, the data used in the country chapters, and gives an overview over chapter contents. The chapter concludes with cross-country summary, implications for the theory of the firm and policy implications.