In this chapter, we examine the law relating to corporate finance, focusing on how companies raise capital by issues shares or taking on debt. We examine the nature of share finance (including different types of shares), the different forms of debt finance (including debentures), and the nature of security interests. We consider share capital transactions including dividends, alterations and reduction of capital, share buy-backs and financial assistance transactions. This area of corporate law uses specific terminology. We define these terms in the text, noting that other sources, such as legal and business glossaries, may also assist.

The financial management of healthcare organisations is a key management responsibility for both public and private facilities. While this responsibility has always been important, it is becoming increasingly more so, with the rising costs of healthcare provision due to advances in technology and rising rates of chronic disease and ageing populations. The responsible use and management of scarce healthcare resources requires knowledge and information. The accounting process provides the necessary information to develop and monitor a budget. However, it is the financial management of the budget and associated activity levels that provide the necessary framework to ensure budget integrity and financial governance.

Financial flows and financial structures are fueling climate instability and worsening inequities around the world. A stable future now requires urgent change including transformative financial innovations. Yet the pandemic and recent financial disruptions reveal how financial architecture designed to promote stability in times of crises exacerbates economic inequities and vulnerabilities. Recognizing the division in climate politics among those advocating for stable policies and a smooth transition and those calling for more radical, disruptive politics, this chapter reviews the critical role of financial innovations, including central banks’ monetary policies, in redirecting society toward a more just and stable future. We propose a paradigm shift to reconceptualize stability and politicization in finance and central banking for climate justice. We argue that current depoliticized perspectives on financial stability are worsening climate instability, and that finance, central banks, and their monetary policies are an underappreciated part of climate politics. Transformative climate policy to promote stability requires repoliticizing finance and financial innovations.

Climate activists are divided over whether to adopt strategies emphasizing stability and incremental change versus strategies promoting more extreme and immediate action. One way to promote policy stability is through private governance, that is, voluntary industry self-governance. Proponents argue this can stabilize expectations about the future, incentivize incremental reductions in emissions, and lock in policies and practices. This problem-solving approach serves to depoliticize debate but can lead to political backlash and repoliticization. I examine these dynamics through a case study of the financial sector, particularly the insurance industry. Collective attempts to ensure policy lock-in and stability include initiatives such as the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI), the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, and Net Zero Insurance Alliance. This is a case of failed depoliticization as demonstrated by the political backlash against these efforts.

Naval warfare changed out of all recognition from the late sixteenth century onwards through the rapid development of large square-rigged warships carrying heavy broadside gun batteries. A whole series of developments followed, with a long (if far from smooth) evolution in ships, equipment, strategy, and tactics continuing down to the last sailing navies of the early nineteenth century. It was clearly no accident that this naval revolution coincided with a great age of global European empires, which would have been impossible to create or maintain without effective naval power. Galleys and other oared craft became largely obsolete, except for some amphibious operations in the Mediterranean and for use in shallow waters around the innumerable Baltic islands. The crushing Dutch victory over a Spanish fleet at the battle of the Downs (1639) marked the first occasion when the full power of broadside gunnery became evident. Then the three Anglo-Dutch wars between the 1650s and 1670s saw a series of savage and bloody engagements between the fleets of two nations that were coming to be known as the Maritime Powers. The combination of imperial and trading ambitions, new financial arrangements, and relatively open societies enabled first the Dutch, and then the British, to develop naval power to new heights, in turn allowing them to punch well above their weight on the international stage. Under Louis XIV, France did mount a serious challenge to the Dutch and English, and for a time possessed the largest navy in the Western world. However, by the 1690s the French, and more gradually the Dutch, were finding the costs of maintaining this level of power at sea, as well as on land, to be too great.

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

In the 1970s, due to the Nixon administration’s decision to abolish the gold standard, money entered into an ontological crisis. This crisis has reverberated, via an avalanche of other financial events in the decade and after, all the way into the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I consider various novels (and some films as well) that point to deep philosophical relations between the kinds of questions that money’s post-1970 ontological crisis opens up, and the art of fiction-writing. These relations are especially evident in the tensions between literary realism – exemplified in the field by Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) – and postmodernism, which comes to challenge realism in the early 1970s, exactly when money’s ontological crisis opens up. Whereas the realist project, which has seen a revival after the 2007–8 global market crash, seeks to provide epistemological responses to money’s ongoing crisis – a descriptive and explanatory project that is necessary, even if it may be doomed to failure – post-1970s postmodernism and more experimental fiction are better placed to engage money’s ontological crisis, which has laid bare the ways in which money exceeds what we can know about it and demands a realism that is speculative – like contemporary finance itself.

What do fantasy football managers want? Critics have suggested that they harbor dreams of front-office management and perhaps racial dreams of managing Black bodies. Chapter 6 suggests an alternative theory: that fantasy football doesn’t sell users on an identification with management but a disidentification with forms of labor – manual, high-risk, short-term – once associated with Black people, people of color, and immigrants but now carried out by more and more white people of a declining middle class. From Rotisserie League Baseball in the 1980s to daily fantasy sports in the 2010s, the fantasy hasn’t been to win in the market but to get out of it.

From an “infrastructural gaze,” this chapter examines the penetration of artificial intelligence (AI) in capital markets as a blend of continuity and change in finance. The growing infrastructural dimension of AI originates first from the evolution of algorithmic trading and governance, and second, from its ascent as a “general-purpose technology” within the financial domain. The text discusses the consequences of this “infrastructuralization” of financial AI, considering the micro–macro tension typical of capital accumulation and crisis dynamics. Challenging the commonly espoused notion of AI as a stabilizing force, the analysis underscores its connections with volatile, crisis-prone financialized dynamics. It concludes by outlining potential consequences (unpredictability, operational inefficiency, complexity, further concentration) and (systemic) risks arising from the emergence of AI as a “new” financial infrastructure, particularly those related to biases in data and data commodification, lack of explanation of underlying models, algorithmic collusion, and network effects. The text asserts that a thorough understanding of these hazards can be attained by adopting a perspective that considers the macro/meso/micro connections inherent in infrastructures.

Pepys kept his diary for more than nine years, covering a variety of topics that is unrivalled among seventeenth-century diarists. This chapter explores why and how he did so, drawing on recent work which has expanded our sense of early modern life-writing. Pepys turned the methods seen in religious diaries and financial recording to his own ends. His diary’s purposes developed to include assessing his social status and his health; storing useful anecdotes; and relishing illicit pleasures. To illustrate Pepys’s techniques his account of Charles II’s coronation is examined, alongside his friend John Evelyn’s account of the same event. Pepys’s diary was a dynamic text: it evolved in response to Pepys’s changing needs and was intended to act upon him, stimulating favourable change in him and for him.

This chapter explores broader cultural European trends following the First World War, including the consequences of currency dynamics and market speculation. These postwar changes culminated in a heightened financialisation of the culture of the art market, reflecting broader shifts in capitalist economies towards financial forms of revenue and profit. The saturation of financial language that accompanies financialisation processes was also a characteristic of this period: the aftermath of the war saw debates revolving around themes of profit, money-making, and an inflation of art production. This chapter parallels previous chapters by examining how cultural and artistic changes were linked to socio-economic developments. The war had acted as a catalyst and accelerator, inflaming cultural tensions within the art markets. It continued to shape market discourses, embedding wartime mentalities into post-war cultural landscapes.

This chapter analyses the auction milieu’s cultural responses to war-induced developments. Within societies deeply entrenched in the mentality of mobilisation and sacrifice, the commercialisation of art stirred moral apprehensions, feelings of possession, and envy, both among the general public and within the art industry. Debates on nouveaux riches and profiteers underscored the construction of antagonist figures during the war, highlighting threats to the market from both external and internal forces. The widespread destruction of heritage also catalysed nationalist feelings, deepening the cultural fragmentation of a formerly integrated trade sphere. By scrutinising the biographies of dealers, examining art’s vulnerability in wartime upheaval, and exploring the interplay between art and finance, this chapter also outlines how the war acted on the tensions characteristic of each market and brought them to a conflagration.

Between 500 and 1500, the economy of Europe changed considerably. The papal court saw an equally radical change in the nature of their income, their expenditure, their administration, and their financial expectations. The papal court became the jurisdictional apex of the medieval Church and a major power in European secular politics. Consequently, the income of the Roman Curia increased radically, as did their expenditure. The papacy was a religious power first and foremost. Therefore, the accounting, income, and expenditure of the popes had to correspond to a model medieval Christianity thought good; the pope should look after his flock and spend appropriately on their welfare. There were times, however, when it was not clear to the Christian world that the pope was acting in an acceptable manner, as regards finance and wealth. Bitter satires followed, and the papacy gained a reputation for extravagance. It has never fully thrown off that reputation.

Chapter 5 addresses undercover investigations of street begging, a topic that illustrates the new genre’s prioritizing of journalistic considerations over humanitarian aims. Beggary’s conflation with fraud in the public imagination made the practice a unique object for incognito investigating. Undercover journalists sought to reveal not the sufferings of those driven to public humiliation but the exploitation of charity by a cadre of swindlers. Despite failing in this ambition, such would-be exposés were perennially popular with newspaper audiences, who saw in them a simulation of their own hypothetical shipwreck but also a low-life equivalent to the specialist expertise and terminology characteristic of all professions. Undercover investigators thereby forged the troubling connection between respectability and criminality that informs the portrayal of beggars in fictional works such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891), a Sherlock Holmes story in which a respected businessman is exposed as a professional beggar.

How did an English state torn apart by sectarian conflict, civil war and a revolution in the late seventeenth century become the most powerful in the world by 1819?

This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.