In the late twentieth century, the European Union (EU) emerged as a global leader in setting environmental protections, including vehicle emissions standards. But member state consensus around environmental rules did not come easily, and the regional norms eventually set by the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, had complex origins. This article argues that common emissions standards were ultimately achieved through a public-private process during the program to create the Single European Market in the 1980s and 1990s. For regional policymakers, standards were key to achieving an internal car market and strengthening the auto industry's global competitiveness; for many European carmakers and their transnational business associations, common norms could facilitate economies of scale and level the playing field. The “liberal environmentalism” born out of this convergence of interests produced common standards that fell pragmatically between the greenest member states and those most invested in protecting their national champion firms.

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.

How did Atlantic slavery stimulate British industry? This article answers that question through a study of five firms that supplied gunpowder to the slave trade. It first demonstrates that the Atlantic slavery trade certainly expanded Britain's explosives industry during the eighteenth century. British merchant capitalists established five plants in the proximity of Bristol and Liverpool to meet African demand, provincializing the gunpowder industry for the first time. The slave trade also inflated the gunpowder industry's volume, with twelve percent of all powder going to Africa before abolition. This article next reveals that supplying the slave trade was likely a lucrative pursuit for British manufacturers, with investors in the five mills earning profits that exceeded those of slaving. The boost given to the explosives industry faded considerably as abolition neared, however, and so this article concludes that Atlantic slavery's stimulus was likely of limited importance for driving the later Industrial Revolution.