Blockchain-based fundraising transforms the way issuers raise capital from the public, promising to reduce transaction costs, expand financial access, and reshape issuer-investor interactions. Despite these promises, the blockchain finance market is currently plagued by severe asymmetric information and is rife with fraudulent and low-quality issuers who exploit this friction. This chapter explores the reasons for the severe asymmetric information in this market and discusses the extent to which signaling and analysts can address it. It suggests that the effectiveness of signaling is limited due to the low costs of producing and disseminating signals and investors' inability to verify biased signals ex ante and punish biased signals ex post. These limitations make analysts a vital source for reducing asymmetric information but they, too, appear to suffer from significant problems – ranging from conflicts of interest to lack of transparency to low competence and expertise – which hinder their effectiveness in reducing asymmetric information. The chapter concludes with the policy implications arising from these observations, which can also guide policy-makers in addressing emerging blockchain-based fundraising mechanisms, such as non-fungible token (NFT) offerings.

Mastering the art of compelling communication can be a passport to success, as this introduction explains.

Apple Computer, Inc. released its “Think Different” campaign in 1997 to mark the return of Steve Jobs and to resurrect the struggling computer company. The Think Different campaign “got an audience that once thought of Apple as semi-cool, but semi-stupid to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way.”1 Interestingly, be different is what Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) embraced and practiced from its beginning in 1983. The Bank distinguished itself from the crowded banking sector by serving entrepreneurs in the region since the early 1980s. At the time SVB was formed and officially named, “Silicon Valley” was considered unattractive for banking to capture the public attention and adopted the available moniker.

This chapter demonstrates how, whilst classical theatre was largely side-lined by the necessities and appetites of a new wartime culture, Shakespeare, followed an entirely opposite trajectory, rising even higher following a century of increasing British bardolatry. In considering the popularity of Shakespeare during the war the chapter considers the context of the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, and the use of Shakespeare for fundraising. It shows how throughout the war Shakespeare was used as a patriotic tool in performances both at home and at the front. In examining these performances the chapter also emphasises how Shakespeare would mix with comedy skits, and classical themes of royal demise or the rise and fall of empires would appear in snappy one act-ers. In considering classical theatre more broadly, the chapter shows how classical themes and narratives were drawn on to make sense of war. It focuses in particular on new plays which took up classical themes or modes such as Drinkwater’s X=0 and Masefield’s Philip the King and shows how the use of the classics changed as the war progressed. Overall the chapter shows how the war catalysed already changing attitudes to the divisions between high and low culture

Higher education in the United States advanced democracy during the much of the twentieth century by fostering social mobility and by deepening students’ understanding of democratic citizenship, as well as strengthening their capacity to participate in a democratic polity. Concurrently, higher education enjoyed widespread esteem in the United States, while colleges and universities became highly stratified by financial capital, or endowment size, which was closely correlated with prestige. Yet, this financial stratification widened into a yawning "wealth gap" that precipitated a decline in public esteem near the end of the twentieth century. This historical chapter explains these developments and argues that wealth concentration in higher education and wealth inequality in the US population are interrelated, and this interrelationship weakens social mobility and democracy in the twenty-first century.

In 1962, Sikota Wina wrote a report on the United National Independence Party (UNIP) International Publicity Bureau, which had just opened an office in Dar es Salaam, capital of newly independent Tanganyika and liberation hub in the making. Chapter 6 asks how the anticolonial culture of this cohort fell away over the course of the staggered independence dates of Tanganyika, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. Accra, having just begun to host liberation movements from around 1960, appeared unable to provide a platform for activists after Munu Sipalo’s stint on the editorial board of Voice of Africa. Cairo lost much of the appeal it held in John Kale’s heyday, as conflict over the legitimacy of political parties paralleled a crisis in office resources. Lobbying groups on the Western European Left grew irrelevant in a new funding landscape that came with the timetabling of statehood, while PAFMECA soon dissolved. The acceleration of independence negotiations in the region was ambivalent: this chapter closes by arriving in Dar es Salaam by way of radio broadcasting and technical training for Zambian secretaries – whose experience was not only one of anticolonial regional solidarity.

These articles represent a wide array of reporting in the Black press on social activities within the Black community.“Society” pages and local gossip columns provide an invaluable window into experiences of community life – including births, deaths, literary functions, and activities organized to support and sustain the papers themselves – that were, otherwise, rarely written into the historical record.For instance, readers sometimes turned to Black newspapers for help in locating missing family members. Contenders for leadership in Black organizations frequently criticized one another in the newspapers. Music and social dancing played a central role in coverage of community organizations. Dance parties could be celebrated as dignified and joyful or denounced as disreputable or unworthy. The interest that White compatriots took in Black dancing and music could be grounds for jubilation – signs that racial prejudice was eroding – for criticism of lax club leadership, for debates about whether to allow White men to attend dances in Black clubs, or for concern over performances of Carnival groups that reproduced harmful stereotypes.

The evacuation of Jewish children from Europe to Palestine through the Youth Aliyah programme drew global attention. Chapter 4 considers the fundraising activities in the Australian and Jewish community around the organisation of Youth Aliyah, which attracted leading humanitarians such as Aileen Fitzpatrick, Jessie Street, Ruby Rich and Camilla Wedgewood. Youth Aliyah was founded in Germany in 1932 by Recha Freier, a committed Zionist, who was also active during the 1930s in Women’s International Zionist Organisation. At the time, there was resistance to the idea of uprooting children and taking them to Palestine to receive an agrarian, socialist education. As it became clear the Nazi resolve was to eradicate the Jewish population, Youth Aliyah became a fully fledged child rescue effort. From 1933 to 1945, it evacuated 11,000 Jewish children, relocating them to Palestine. There has been little work on the global dimension of this campaign. By focusing on these fundraising efforts and other attempts to support Jewish children in Australia, Chapter 4 explores Youth Aliyah as a transnational global movement.

This chapter discusses venture capital (VC) fundraising, the very first stage of the VC life cycle, in the Chinese VC market. The general practice of VC fundraising has been discussed in fair detail in the existing literature: investors and experienced professionals partake in an investment venture, with the former contributing capital and the latter contributing expertise. In other words, capital that is pooled from investors is entrusted to specialised professionals for investment into specific portfolio companies. This fundraising process creates a number of legal problems, which have been analysed by academics. Most notable among these issues are the potentially divergent interests between investors and professionals and the best methods by which to address resulting conflicts. In developed VC markets such as the United States (US), several legal solutions are available to address this problem, including the use of specialised investment vehicles, such as the limited partnership, which demarcates distinct rights and responsibilities of investors (as limited partners (LPs)) and managers (as general partners (GPs)) in order to manage the investor–manager relationship and the imposition of fiduciary duties on managers.

Chapter 8 takes a broader historical view of humanitarian aid in Africa by revealing how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are the “missionaries” of the twenty-first century. In the wake of the 1970s and 1980s Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) of the IMF and World Bank, NGOs stepped in to fill the gap in social services that the now bankrupt and inept African governments could not provide. Until recently the vast majority of these NGOs have been international NGOs (INGOs) established, run, and funded by Europeans or North Americans. Like the missionaries who came to end the slave trade and bring “civilization” to Africa a century earlier, INGOs function on a platform of humanitarianism, human rights, and development for the poor. Whether in the form of slave narratives collected by abolitionist missionaries or television commercials asking for donations to help feed starving African children, not-for-profit organizations have generated an industry of fundraising in order to “save” Africans. More recently African individuals and communities have launched local NGOs that target causes they deem most important, such as women’s economic inequality, environmental degradation, and cultural preservation.

There are three ways of becoming a shareholder: by subscribing to a new issue of shares in a company; by purchasing shares from an existing shareholder; or by transmission of ownership in shares due to the operation of law (for example, where shares are transferred to the beneficiary under a will). Here we are concerned with the first of these alternatives. Companies issue shares as a means to fund projects commonly referred to as ‘raising capital’ or ‘equity raising’. The focus in this chapter is upon shares and securities as a means of fundraising,

By virtually every measure, American politics are more polarized today along political party lines than they have been in decades. In Congress, Republicans and Democrats are more sharply differentiated and internally homogeneous than they have been since the late-nineteenth century. This polarization has occurred in both houses of Congress and mirrors similar trends at the state level and among executive officers throughout American politics. The presidential nomination process is no exception. We live in a time of “hyperpolarization.”

Campaign finance may be partly to blame for modern hyperpolarization. Although today’s levels of partisan polarization began building long ago, the deregulation of campaign finance under the Roberts Court has likely accelerated the ongoing process of polarization even further. Deregulation of campaign finance permitted wealthy donors to channel more money into presidential elections and gave them greater influence over the political process.

The disruptive power of technological innovation is one of the defining features of modern life. The presidential nomination process is no exception. Changes in communication technology have profoundly shaped how presidential candidates conduct their campaigns. First radio, then television, and more recently the internet have successively emerged as essential tools for effective political communication. A presidential candidate cannot compete without embracing the new communication technologies of the day. But the adoption of new technology has relentlessly increased campaign costs for more than a century. This chapter examines how technology has shaped the presidential nomination process, making the pursuit of the White House an ever more expensive proposition.

This chapter takes a long view of the evolution of appeals for emergency aid. Our case studies of Ireland, Soviet Russia, and Ethiopia illustrate the trajectory of humanitarian fundraising over time. The chapter provides new empirical research on appeals for aid in each case, while identifying key distinctions as well as striking similarities and continuities in discourse and practice. In each case, transnational aid mobilisation gained momentum when the disaster received media attention after the crisis had escalated. The socio-political context differed, as Soviet Russia and Ethiopia were ruled by regimes hostile to the West, making transnational aid a delicate matter, while Ireland was part of the British Empire. While Irish and Russian representatives appealed directly to donors, Ethiopian victims depended on brokers abroad to make the calls for aid. However, humanitarian actors were also forced to complement their support for distant sufferers with ancillary campaigns for the local charity market.

The Introduction outlines how this book takes a fresh look at humanitarian action over two centuries through the concept of moral economy. The book employs a theoretical outlook that reflects the emerging academic interest in histories of morality, the cross-disciplinary rise of a ‘moral economy’ discourse beyond the confines of E. P. Thompson’s framing, and the growing field of humanitarian studies. The integrated moral economy perspective draws on philosophical, humanitarian, and medical ethics, especially the problems of triage. We present three empirical studies which provide insights into the history of three humanitarian causes.