Agents were crucial to the practice of international trade during the period covered by the book. They facilitated the import and export of goods, fixed shipping contracts, arranged insurance and conducted financial services for banks abroad. Agency patterns for goods changed and by about the middle of the nineteenth century sending goods to merchants abroad for sale on consignment was no longer as common as previously. For marketing reasons distributors of manufactured goods like motor vehicles were described as the ‘agents’ of manufacturers, but they were not true agents in law. Agents also came into their own in various parts of the world as so-called managing agents of plantations, mines and factories, and in the result became the fulcrum of powerful business groups. Through doctrines such as undisclosed principal and reasonable compliance with a principal’s instructions, and through devices such as the commission, del credere and confirming agent, the law went further in meeting commercial need. English law recognised that an agent should not always ‘drop out’ of the picture but should bear some responsibility for the underlying principal–third party contract if a transaction went wrong. The courts glossed over doctrinal difficulties to meet commercial need.

The chapter outlines and commercial and legal context for the subject matter of the book. Pivotal to the context of commercial law during the period to book covers was Britain’s dominant role in international trade and finance for a significant part of it. Commodities traded in the organised markets in London and Liverpool often set world prices. International trade was financed through London-based banks. Trading firms in Britain or with links to it imported raw materials to Europe and distributed exports. The law furnished a broad framework within which this commercial and financial activity took place. During the period state regulatory law was at a minimum and parties and markets were free to engage in private law-making. Lawyers and the courts were kept at bay, with the bulk of disputes being dealt with through private dispute settlement in the form of arbitration. When courts were involved, n the main they lent support with principles of party autonomy, a clear preference for certain and predictable rules and a supportive disposition. When legal difficulties were encountered, these were fairly readily surmounted by contractual or private arrangements. Overall, the law cast few shadows over profit making.

Britain was home to international commodity markets in London and Liverpool in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. There was a rising volume of international trade as Britain became the first industrial nation, a major importer of these commodities for its own needs, an entrepȏt, and a centre for organising distribution elsewhere. The London and Liverpool markets facilitated distribution through time with forward dealings. Futures contracts went a step further: actual delivery was not contemplated, and trades were settled by paying price differences. The markets and the trade associations whose members worked in them engaged in private law-making - the way that the markets were constituted and governed; the controls over those using them; the system of rules for transactions on them and how these were cleared and settled; the standard form contracts used for dealings; and the arbitration procedures for dispute settlement. State law intervened in only the most egregious cases of market abuse attracting public condemnation and threatening confidence. Until the twentieth century, lawyers were not regularly engaged in formulating the rules and contracts of the London and Liverpool commodity markets or in advising on how disputes were to be settled or arbitrated.

To satisfy an industrialising and industrialised Britain, huge quantities of ‘soft’ commodities - grain, cotton, coffee, cocoa, sugar and palm oil – were grown, harvested and transported from North America, the steppes of Russia, Asia, Africa and the southern hemisphere for sale on the commodity markets of London and Liverpool. Sales of commodities in the first part of the nineteenth century were by dealings on physical markets and by auction. Trade associations like the London Corn Trade Association formed from the mid-nineteenth century had as a major aim the formulation of standard form contracts to govern the international sale of these commodities. Sale in this way need not be on physical markets or by auction, but could be at a distance. These standard form contracts modified the default rules of sales law. They are the precursors of contracts used world-wide today. Although governed by English law, they were adopted internationally. Traders in other countries had an input into their formulation. In drawing them up trade association members took the lead, with lawyers ‘on tap, not on top’. Disputes were settled by arbitration provided in the contract, and relatively few reached the courts. Untoward court decisions were remedied by redrafting the contracts.

Sale was central to the trade in manufactured goods but hire and hire purchase were also used for the marketing of some goods such as railway wagons, motor vehicles and lorries. With sale the common-law rules, later codified in the Sale of Goods Act 1893, might be altered in the written contract if they failed to accord with commercial need. In practice the default rules and the terms of any written contract worked in the context of the relationship between the manufacturer and purchaser whether, for instance, it was long term and whether trust remained or had evaporated. These written contracts were vital if the contract contained detailed specifications as to how an item was to be made. What happened when things went wrong might be more informal, without resort to lawyers or law. Hire and hire purchase meant customers obtained manufactured goods on credit; on the other, suppliers had some protection through a form of quasi-security if customers defaulted in their payments, or the goods were wrongly disposed of. Manufactured goods could be distributed through commercial intermediaries who were allocated geographical areas to market them and bound to do that at specific prices and in specific ways.

Banks offered two essential sources of finance to trade and commerce. First, the merchant banks financed trade through the bill of exchange, which banks would discount for exporters so they received payment on shipping the goods. From the middle of the nineteenth century the bill of exchange might be drawn under a letter of credit issued by the importer’s bank and payable on presentation of the shipping documents, notable the bill of lading which gave title to the goods. Second, banks provided working capital to industry – not long-term finance - enabling it to pay wages and the cost of raw materials in anticipation of the sale of finished products in home and export markets. This was done by means of an overdraft on the customer’s account (who could draw up to that amount) or through a short-term loan. Typically, both were repayable on demand. They might be unsecured, or supported by a personal guarantee, but in some cases the customers had to provide collateral. Underpinning the banks’ performance in both areas were sophisticated institutional arrangements such as the bankers’ clearing house and the money markets. All these arrangements operated within a framework of generally supportive law.

What do we owe to others when interacting with them and what should we know when asking this question? Those seemingly straightforward queries get quickly more complicated when we realize that many of our actions take place not only in institutional contexts – such as promising or contracting – but also in organizations when we are vested with ‘authority’. In both cases special responsibilities are created, but in the latter case they can no longer be ascribed to us as ‘persons’ when we act as ‘managers’ of an organization, or as magistrates, holding public office.

In the public sphere, it is unequivocal that the language of virtues impregnates much of our discourse and analyses about domestic and international leaders. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Christine Lagarde, Donald Trump, Luis Moreno Ocampo or Silvio Berlusconi often trigger(ed) heated reactions about their official and private behaviours deemed to be inappropriate and found wanting from a moral standpoint. On the other side of the fence, Barack Obama, António Guterres, Nelson Mandela or Dag Hammarskjöld and Greta Thunberg are or have been praised as being virtuous and inspirational leaders capable of moving the world towards a brighter future.

International organizations (IOs) were once expected to guarantee the ‘salvation of mankind’ but have increasingly come to be questioned. On the one hand, waves of populism, nationalism and isolationism threaten the stability of the international legal order and the capacity of IOs to address policy dilemmas. On the other hand, these policy dilemmas keep piling up – for example, the influx of refugees, climate change, global health issues, cyber wars, growing inequality and widespread poverty. It appears that what is needed are more global cooperation and leadership, at a time when the mission and capacities of IOs may be at risk. Compounding the problem, the latter are also often accused of corruption, embezzlement, negative externalities, political capture, poor and immoral performance and so on.

This chapter develops an exemplarist virtue approach to ethical leadership in international organizations. An exemplarist virtue theory of ethical leadership endorses a virtue perspective on ethical leadership that assigns a prominent role to exempla. This approach involves two central commitments about the structure of a theory of ethical leadership: first, a commitment to the view that virtues, rather than rules or consequences, are the primary concepts in a theory of ethical leadership, and second, a commitment to the claim that exempla of ethical leadership occupy a central stage within the theory. The development of an exemplarist virtue approach to ethical leadership thus draws on two main, connected, traditions of moral theory: virtue ethics and exemplarism.

During the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430BC) the city-state of Athens was ravaged by a plague. The great historian Thucydides, who survived himself the disease, documented the social effect of the pandemic upon the city, where almost 100.000 people died. According to his account on the moral decadence the epidemic caused, he wrote that ‘the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen to them next, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.’ The ancient plague had triggered an ethical crisis, but the Athenian democracy had to survive, due to its main characteristics as highlighted by Pericles in his famous Funeral’s Oration. In this speech dedicated to the dead fighters, of the first year of the war, Pericles emphasized, that one of the emancipatory elements of the Athenian democracy was the sensibility of measure and a combination of philosophy with action.

International organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) present themselves as champions for the rule of law. In recent years, EU member states such as Hungary and Poland have taken questionable measures, replacing the top of the judicial branch, bringing media under political control, changing the electoral system. The European Union has responded by employing the EU Treaty instruments for rule of law oversight. The United Nations are less directly engaged in supervising the rule of law, but there are many documents and policies that confirm the UN concern for the rule of law in states. What is much less obvious is how the UN and the EU think about the rule of law as a governing idea for themselves. The EU Treaty presents the rule of law as something to which it is committed in general. The UN discussions of the rule of law include reference to the rule of law as an international value, and include UN bodies as actors that need to commit to governance of international law. In both cases, however, the rule of law is primarily described as something that states need to uphold.