For 350 years, African and European slave merchants traded with each other on the African coast as equals. Europeans generally recognized and accepted African rules on who could and could not be enslaved. When they did not, then trading relations would break down. The African names database allows the identification of the major slave-trading groups, at least for the nineteenth century. For most parts of the African Coast the ruling authority’s role was not to sell large numbers of people, but rather to provide a secure environment in which slave trading could take place. A wide-ranging database of African sellers shows that while large traders certainly existed, the great majority of sellers sold just five or fewer captives. The chapter evaluates the positions of four major Africanist scholars on relations between Europeans and Africans in light of the new quantitative work. It concludes that only one, John Thornton, has made arguments consistent with the new findings. Also it is now clear that slave traders in Africa, like those in Europe and the Americas, fronted a large labor force for growing provisions, guard-duty, and distribution of trading goods, especially in West Africa. Abolition is not likely to have had economic motives either at the level of the individual or the state.

This chapter will give you a fundamental understanding of microbial metabolism and the chemical and biochemical reactions associated with industrial biomass refining. After going through this chapter and solving the assignments, the reader will be able to describe biomass processing and perform the stoichiometric and kinetic calculations needed to solve given biomass processing challenges.

In the previous chapter we explored how to determine the interest rates (rates of return) for risk-fee assets (i.e., investments with no default risk); however, individuals and investment professionals invest their wealth in not only risk-free assets, but also risky assets. There are a great number of risky assets, such as individual stocks, that individuals can potentially invest in, and thus individuals can form a portfolio of different assets. In addition to choosing which assets to invest in, individuals must also choose how much to invest in each asset. The process through which people choose assets to invest their wealth in is called portfolio selection.

The Northwest Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery and had to make do with second-best trading locations. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic growth of the English and Dutch that allowed them to break into the Iberian Atlantic system rather than the two countries needing the slave trade to stimulate their economic development. Northwest Europeans never broached the Portuguese strongholds of Guinea-Bissau and Angola as slave-supply centers and were able to use Brazilian gold to hold their own in the Bight of Benin. And the British and the Dutch sold many of the slaves that they did buy to the Spanish Americas. The British made repeated unsuccessful attempts to break into the Brazilian market. The traffic was widely supported in most European countries, given that preparation for a successful voyage absorbed a large labor force and many thousands of investors.

Perhaps paradoxically, it is vital for any newly founded company or established business not to focus exclusively on technology development, technology maturation, and product design. Of course, having a product that performs according to specification is critical, but if the market is not well understood, you have a flawed business model, or your manufacturing costs far exceed what customers are willing to pay for your product, then even if the technology is excellent the business might fail. This chapter is devoted to basic business concepts and fundamental principles in cost accounting, analysis, and market research. Topics include an introduction to value chains, calculating capital costs of building new plants or acquiring new units for production (CapEx), operational expenditures (OpEx), learning curve analysis, and assessment of profitability. The chapter will also introduce basic tools and methods for market research, which will provide the necessary insights to position your technology in a constantly evolving market.

The chapter addresses attentional distribution in conceptualisations of events. It argues that language directs attention over particular portions of an event-structure selecting certain elements for focal attention while conceptually backgrounding other elements. The ideological implications of attentional distribution are discussed with reference to mystification whereby either human agency in or the human impact of harmful social actions is obscured. Two case studies are presented. The first considers action-chain profiling in media coverage of fatalities on the Gaza border. It shows how attentional distributions evoked by intransitive, passive and agentless passive constructions as well as nominalisations conceptually background those responsible for the fatalities. It further shows the conceptual means by which the impact of violent actions may be mitigated. The second considers path-profiling in immigration discourse. It shows how different verb choices serve to highlight humanitarian motivations for migration versus the impact of migration on host countries and considers the role of metonymy in legitimating hostile immigration policies.