What channel partnerships represent is initially focused upon. To reinforce the meaning even more, three different types of indirect channel relationships are identified, including arm’s-length relationships, strong inter-firm relationships, and partnerships. Emphasis is given to key features of strong channel relationships, which can evolve into partnerships. Then, the major determinants of channel partnerships are covered. Why building and maintaining trust is so important to effective channel partnerships concludes the chapter.

Through investigating how exactly bribery take place, this chapter examines why guanxi is a necessary conduit of corruption in China. I argue that guanxi-practice embodies an alternative contracting mechanism of corruption with three functions. First, it allows corruption practitioners to communicate their intent to exchange without explicitly expressing it. Second, it minimizes the otherwise prohibitively high transactional costs and reduces the moral and cognitive barriers of corruption. Third, it contains a self-enforcing mechanism that allows the terms of corruption to be negotiated and enforced. Performed with tactics and etiquettes, guanxi-practice seamlessly grafts a corrupt and immoral agreement upon a social setting, in which venality is neutralized and rationalized. In this redefined social reality of corruption, an instrumental relationship is perceived or at least presentable as a reciprocal relationship based on social commitment. Lastly, I draw attention to the emergence of professional guanxi-brokers that has marketized guanxi and extended the otherwise highly restricted opportunity to engage in parochial corruption to a much-broadened user base.

What happened when people did not pay their debts? Debts Unpaid argues that conflicts over small-scale unpaid debts were a stress test for the economic order. To ensure the wheels of petty commerce continued to turn in Mexico, everyday debtors and creditors had to believe that their interests would be protected relatively fairly when agreements soured. A resounding faith in economic justice provided the bedrock of stability necessary for the expansion of capitalism over the longue durée. Introducing the two-hundred-year period of massive economic transformation explored throughout the book, this chapter presents the text’s key historical and theoretical interventions from the late eighteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first. As the capitalist credit economy grew, especially through modern financial institutions, ordinary people used new financial tools and navigated increasingly opaque and impersonal credit relations. This Introduction outlines the dynamics of change and the challenges and opportunities they posed for the world of small-scale debtors and creditors.

This book places the troubles of ordinary people at the centre of economic change in Mexico, arguing that conflicts over small-scale unpaid debts were a stress test for the economic and political order. Studying malfunction – what happened when contracts broke or soured – exposes the ways in which debt trouble became a driving force in the history of accumulation and justice in the modern world. This concluding chapter offers final thoughts on the book’s core proposal: that a broad sense of fairness and justice provided a bedrock of stability that allowed for massive economic transformation over a long chronological horizon.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of disinformation in the digital era and its implications for freedom of expression. It explores how the rapid dissemination of false, manipulated, and misleading information – termed a ‘disinfodemic’ – poses threats to human rights, democracy, and public trust. The chapter outlines the historical roots of disinformation, the technological factors that enable it, and the responses by public and private actors to mitigate its harmful effects. The chapter differentiates between disinformation (intentional), misinformation (unintentional), and malinformation (genuine information used to harm), while highlighting their diverse forms, such as fake news, deepfakes, and conspiracy theories. Disinformation erodes public trust, affects electoral integrity, threatens public health, and harms individuals’ rights to information and privacy. The chapter emphasises the necessity of finding a balance between combating disinformation and preserving freedom of expression.

This chapter examines the philosophical and practical foundations for state regulation of the internet, focusing on the interplay between individual rights and societal interests. It argues that the digital realm introduces unique challenges that require state intervention to preserve the integrity of public discourse and democratic values. Drawing on legal theory, particularly the ideas of Lon L. Fuller, the chapter emphasises the importance of fostering trust, maintaining the rule of law, and balancing power between states, private actors, and users in internet governance. The chapter critiques the traditional view of rights as individualistic and argues for a more community-focused approach, emphasising that human rights should serve the common good. Trust is highlighted as a cornerstone of effective internet governance. The chapter underscores that moving online fundamentally alters the scope, impact, and mechanisms of regulation. Human rights law and governance frameworks must adapt to preserve trust, community, and the integrity of public discourse in the digital age.

Chapter 6 aims to construct a future-looking theoretical framework for handling cultural objects for which questions of past illegality and/or illegitimacy arise but where a potential claimant – whether an individual, a community, or a source nation – is unable to pursue formal legal proceedings against the current possessor, and the relevant law enforcement agencies cannot equally pursue criminal, administrative, or public law proceedings. Accordingly, the chapter seeks to identify normative principles for dealing with the issue of “restitution” (broadly defined) that operates outside the realm of hard-law norms and institutions. It starts by examining the key aspects of the institutional/procedural and normative principles of the restitution committees established in certain European countries and tasked with the development and implementation of “just and fair solutions” to address Holocaust-era wrongful dispossessions. It then considers whether “just and fair solutions” can be devised for other contexts and, if so, how legalistic ethical reasoning could be adapted for these settings. The focus then shifts to the case study of France and its complex approach to the restitution of colonial-era objects to African source countries. The chapter then examines the various remedial mechanisms that are in operation, or that can be developed, to apply such normative principles to broader contexts of addressing past wrongs, including long-term loans, digital restitution, and the establishment of cross-border trusts to enable the joint custody and stewardship of collections. The chapter, and the book, conclude by addressing the role of such a normative blueprint, aligned with the concept of new cultural internationalism, in moving toward the convergence of law, policy, and markets for cultural property.

This chapter investigates moderating factors such as trust-related mechanisms, norms, and institutions, and their ability to explain the relationship between intrinsic motivation and compliance, which is free of regulatory coercion.

The Desolate Boedelskamer was an innovative institution. It introduced a new approach to insolvency. Rather than punishing the insolvent debtor, the Desolate Boedelskamer sought to raise him up. Even though it remained firmly embedded in the early modern mental world and its communal culture of governance, the Amsterdam Desolate Boedelskamer is a clear example of how professionalization and good governance were able to provide systemic trust in a world of growing complexity. This new institution was part of the moral economy of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and relied upon it to function, but it also helped to shape that moral economy. Through a careful balancing act of trust and power, this institution was able to support the proliferation of credit, granting numerous insolvents in seventeenth-century Amsterdam a true stay of execution. In this analytical conclusion, the impact and wider implications of the book's argument will be discussed in a broader context.

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth and the expansion of overseas trade went hand in hand with a high level of religious tolerance. In this world of increasing complexity, legal and governmental innovations were essential in order to adapt the urban institutional landscape to the challenges posed by these great social, economic, and cultural changes. The topic of insolvency legislation, as a crucial junction of the fundamental contextuality of commercial law, is most suitable to shed new light on the precise circumstances under which the most striking and seminal developments in the rise of a modern commercial order took place. This introductory chapter explains how new empirical evidence from Amsterdam's legal archives can help understand how innovative governance and legal practices interacted with moral thought in order to produce a liberal, open-access insolvency regime.

This chapter explores aspects of individual visions and visionaries that increase the traction to create social change. It begins by examining epistemic gaps – knowledge deficits that inspire visionary ideas – and the role of imagination in addressing these gaps. The chapter then focuses on compelling narratives, discussing the importance of storytelling, relatable characters and moral alignment in crafting transformative visions. It continues by discussing the factors that enable a vision to be spread, such as social identity and network positions that bridge social divides. The chapter also considers how visionary ideas interact with group dynamics and system attributes that facilitate or hinder change. Case studies of William Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Karl Marx are presented: transformative visions arise from unmet needs; are effective when they offer innovative social relationships; are marked by clear, moral narratives; are more likely to emerge in societies with diverse, autonomous subgroups; and spread via networks of higher trust.