Nick Robins – författare

Sustainable Investing is fast becoming an essential method of generating long-term returns, moving beyond the negative approaches to socially responsible investing that have dominated the field.  This book, our second on the subject, provides over 15 case studies of leading global investors and companies demonstrating how they successfully apply sustainability aspects to their core strategies.  Learn from prominent thought leaders Dan Esty and Paul Hawken among others who have contributed key chapters.  Our chapter on performance shows clearly how these strategies have been working once negative approaches are parsed out by those examining fund returns.  This book also examines in great depth what data exists, and what's on the horizon, to best measure & capture sustainability successfully.  Regional perspectives, including 3 chapters on Asia, and focuses on Canada, Australia, Africa & India are also included, as is a look across asset classes.   Sustainable Investing, when performed with a positive perspective, has been outperforming the mainstream, unlike negative approaches designed to match benchmark returns.  From eco-efficiency to sustainability-driven innovation and beyond, investors of all shapes & sizes need to know how best to position themselves for the radical market shifts underway.

This is the history of the East India Company and its enduring legacy as a corporation, dealing in exploitation and violence.The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. This story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.

This is the history of the East India Company and its enduring legacy as a corporation, dealing in exploitation and violence.The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. This story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.

_From War to Peace_ tells the story of the adaptation from White Ensign to Red Ensign, and to flags of other nations, of the numerous classes of naval ships mainly built during the two world wars and surplus to requirements with the advent of peace. It also describes ships sourced from the United States Navy and elsewhere that were converted for commercial use.The most successful classes to transfer to the merchant service were the Hunt-class minesweepers of the Great War, Landing Craft, Tank, the salvage tugs of World War Two, and the wooden-hulled Fairmile launches which became familiar at seaside resorts in the 1950s and '60s; and, of course, the MFV classes that helped the fishing industry in the postwar years. The story includes the successful commercial conversions of many of the Flower and Castle Class corvettes and River Class frigates, notably the 1954 conversion of HMCS _Stormont_ to a luxury yacht for the Greek shipping magnate Onassis. It describes why HMS _Charybdis_ became a passenger liner in the Great War, and how HMS _Albatross_ nearly became a luxury liner after World War Two, but in fact was transformed into a very unpopular emigrant ship and ended her days as a floating casino based at Cape Town.The author reveals the military antecedents of numerous commercial vessels that many would have thought were built especially for the service that they later maintained, and it illustrates just how many Royal Navy vessels ended up in private ownership. And the question is asked: if the military had not built so many ships that were eminently suitable for commercial adaptation, would the technical development of merchant shipping have progressed at a faster rate than it did? The answer is a definite 'no', and is illustrated in several ways. It was former naval vessels that promoted the early development of the Ro-Ro ferry; former naval ships introduced numerous design innovations, for example, the raised foredeck common for so many years on salvage tugs, and, above all, stripped of their military hardware, ex naval ships provided opportunities for modest investment where otherwise there would have been none.Copiously illustrated throughout, the book tells a fascinating story of invention and ingenious ship conversion, and of pragmatic adaptation in the financially stringent years after two world wars.

Sustainable Investing is fast becoming the smart way of generating long-term returns. With conventional investors now scrambling to factor in issues such as climate change, this book captures a turning point in the evolution of global finance. Bringing together leading practitioners of Sustainable Investing from across the globe, this book charts how this agenda has evolved, what impact it has today, and what prospects are emerging for the years ahead. Sustainable Investing has already been outperforming the mainstream, and concerned investors need to know how best to position themselves for potentially radical market change.

The Cruise Ship was a British idea, first proposed in the late 1830s and the first cruise ships were British too. From the 1840s, P&O encouraged passengers to take holidays on its line voyages, even getting William Makepeace Thackeray to extol the virtues of the Mediterranean sea route to Egypt. In The Cruise Ship: A Very British Institution Nick Robins looks at the 160 year history of the British cruise ship and explains how the industry grew from its very small beginnings to become of the most popular holiday type for Britons, with over 1.1 million of us taking a cruise holiday per year.