[1] Edward Van der Porten, "The Hanseatic League," National Geographic, vol 186 no. 4, Oct/94, pp 56-79.
[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica CD 98, Muscovy company. I am well aware that whenever I use the term 'first' in this type of context I am probably putting my foot in my mouth. In fact there probably were several joint stock companies, somewhere in the world, before the Muscovy company was formed, but if I were to cater to every possible quibble at every point this book would be impossible to read. The Muscovy Company is the direct ancestor of the trading companies that changed the world and while others may have been earlier, they did not play a major role in modern history.
[3] Encyclopaedia Britannica online, The East India Company in North America.
[4] Encyclopaedia Britannica CD 98, Hudson Bay Co.
[5] Robert Heilbronner, The Worldly Philosophers, fifth edition, Simon & Schuster Inc, NY, 1980, pp 29-30.
[6] In "The Winners and the Losers" essay in The Case Against the Global Environment writer James Goldsmith quotes (on pg 176) estimates that cash crop farming encouraged by the GATT will ultimately displace about 2 billion of the world's 3 billion small farmers. For a specific example see Price, Niko, "Black times in Nicaragua's coffee farms," Toronto Star Aug 28/01, pg A12.
[7] And whether they were aware of it or not, some unions joined management in a metasystem. In his book Adventures of a Bystander writer and management consultant Peter Drucker quotes Charles Wilson, one-time president of General Motors, about the company's plan to offer workers supplementary unemployment benefits in the 1940s. The company did not offer the plan voluntarily because, rightly or wrongly, Wilson believed that the union would not accept it as a gift. Instead, he said, he would wait until the union 'demanded' it. Then the company would 'resist' for a while but eventually the union would 'win.'
Wilson told Drucker that the adversarial system worked well for General Motors because it promoted "continuity" of union leadership. As long as the workers thought their leaders were fighting for increased benefits, and winning them, they did not look for new leaders. Adventures of a Bystander, pg 274.
Union and company managements are supposed to be opponents but they have some common interests and, in some cases, they will cooperate for the sake of those interests. In this case the cooperation may have been one-way and the union leaders may not have known that company management was actually helping them, but cooperation existed.
[8] The global market is based on a system which has an administrative core -- the World Trade Organization -- but because the global market is much more than the WTO I consider it a metasystem. In the real world, very few large systems or metasystems will fit neatly into a single pigeonhole.
[9] Colin Hines and Tim Lang, "In favor of a new protectionism," in The Case Against the Global Economy, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1996, pg 489.
[10] The way the World Bank and other agencies distort the development of the third world is described in several sections of The Case Against the Global Economy. Part one, "The Multiple Impacts of Globalization" and part three, "Engines of Globalization" are especially informative. The book is published by the Sierra Club, and most of the writers write from first-hand experience.
[11] Andrew Cockburn, "21st Century Slaves," National Geographic, Sept/03, pp 2-25.
[12] Ralph Nader and Lori Wallach, "GATT, NAFTA and the Subversion of the Democratic Process," The Case Against the Global Economy, pp 101-106.
[13] Ralph Nader and Lori Wallach, "GATT, NAFTA and the Subversion of the Democratic Process," The Case Against the Global Economy, pg 98.
[14] Edward Goldsmith, "Global Trade and the Environment" The Case Against the Global Economy, pg 89.