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ItemRegional trade agreements: Non-market strategy in the context of business regionalization(Routledge, 2015-04-24)A complex network of regional trade agreements (RTAs) spans our globalized world. For the most part, the scholarly literature refers to these as free trade agreements (FTAs), although they may potentially constitute a variety of market grouping and market integration constructs. Many of these RTAs emanate from the design of FTAs or customs unions, common markets, economic unions, currency unions, or other political or geo-economic constructs ruled under preferential trade agreements. The FTA is typically limited to the elimination of certain tariffs; the customs union also establishes a common customs duty; and each one of the above-cited constructs has its own politically negotiated variations. These variations, in essence, establish different types of level playing fi eld for fi rms with distinctive variants of harmonization effects that infl uence internal and external trade and investment conditions.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBotanizing at Badminton House: The Botanical Pursuits of Mary Somerset, First Duchess of Beaufort(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)In the last decades of the seventeenth century, Mary Somerset, the third Marchioness of Worcester and first Duchess of Beaufort, actively collected, identified, and classified thousands of plants from around the world. She worked with her gardener, George Adams, and several famous botanists to grow, study, catalogue, distribute, dry, and paint her specimens. Friends, family, and colleagues from both Oxford and the Royal Society of London contributed to her collection. Yet she also obtained many plants and seeds through conventional garden suppliers, and she commissioned agents to hunt down and collect specimens within the British Isles and abroad. The report of just one such shipment, received in 1696, indicates that she had hundreds of seeds, leaves, cuttings, saplings, and even several large trees shipped to her from Barbados. This particular consignment was so large that the first 11 tubs were split between five ships, with eight more promised in the next fleet. Each tub was large enough to contain, in one instance, one fern tree, seven water common trees, and one white mangrove tree, and, in another, one great bay tree and 50 saplings.1 In this way, Somerset amassed an exceptionally large and diverse collection of plants at the family estate of Badminton House in Gloucestershire, which provided the foundation for her botanical pursuits.