This chapter discusses earlier histories of the world, and explains the social and cultural approach of this book. It lays out the book’s five chapters.

This chapter discusses the Paleolithic and Neolithic, thus covering the vast majority of human history. It examines the more complex social structures and cultural forms that plant and animal domestication enabled, as the simple stone hand axes of the Paleolithic were replaced by more specialized tools, small kin groups gave way to ever larger villages, egalitarian foragers became stratified by gender distinctions and divisions of wealth and power, and spirits were transformed into hierarchies of divinities worshipped at permanent human-built structures. The basic social pattern set in early agricultural societies—with most people farming the land and a small elite who lived off their labor—was remarkably resilient, lasting well into the twentieth century for most of the world.

The transformations of the modern era have led to today’s vast social divisions between wealth and poverty, but also created a human community that is interconnected on a global scale, processes that are examined in this chapter. Major economic and political changes, such as industrialization and de-industrialization, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the rise and collapse of communism, and the expansion of nationalism, have intersected with social and cultural changes within a framework of rapidly increasing population and human impact on the environment. International movements for social justice have called for greater egalitarianism and understanding, while ethnic, religious, and social divisions have led to brutality, genocides, and war. Technological developments in agriculture, medicine, and weaponry have both extended human life and extinguished it at levels unimagined in earlier eras, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing long-standing social hierarchies and cultural patterns.

Most of the classical empires collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, but despite this collapse various regions of the world became more culturally, commercially, and politically integrated in the millennium that followed, a process traced in this chapter. Mercantile and religious networks, including Islam, linked growing cities and glittering courts, where hereditary rulers and their entourages of elites developed institutions and ceremonies that strengthened royal authority, and created courtly cultures with distinctive codes of behavior. All of these relied for their wealth on a spread and intensification of agriculture, which happened in both the eastern and western hemispheres, and was interwoven with changes in social and gender structures. Cites such as Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, and Hangzhou grew into large metropolises, and religion, trade, and diplomacy motivated people to travel, creating regional and transregional zones of exchange in goods and ideas.

This chapter provides an overview of the EU company law directives that have shaped corporate regulation across Member States. It examines the harmonization efforts undertaken through directives on company formation, capital maintenance, disclosure, mergers and divisions and shareholder rights. The chapter analyses the legal objectives behind these directives, their implementation challenges and their impact on legal certainty and cross-border corporate activity. It also discusses recent reforms and future directions in aligning national company laws with evolving EU policy goals.

This chapter focuses on topics in syntax. It first introduces a general but important topic—part of speech—and how linguists determine part of speech in general and for Chinese. It then delves deeper to examine syntactic features of Chinese nouns and noun phrases. Measure words and classifiers are distinguished; types of classifiers and dialectal variations in classifiers are discussed. In describing Chinese verbs and verb phrases, important notions such as verb arguments, syntactic and semantic roles, verbal complements and verbal aspects are introduced. Syntactic behaviors of Chinese adjectives and verbs are also compared. Finally, this chapter discusses the word order of Mandarin.

This chapter explores the concept of secondary establishment as interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) within the framework of Articles 49 and 54 TFEU. It examines how the CJEU distinguishes secondary establishments – branches or subsidiaries – from primary establishments, emphasizing their role in enabling companies to operate across Member States without full relocation. Key cases such as Inspire Art and Centros are analysed to highlight the legal boundaries and protections afforded to secondary establishments. The chapter also discusses the practical implications for cross-border corporate presence and the evolving dynamics of EU company law.