The world is changing, and businesses must change also or face extinction. Forty corporate leaders and entrepreneurs from the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Asia offer their visions of how businesses can lead the world into an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable future. Photos.

Why did the Roman Church wage a centuries-long campaign to destroy Classical culture and all previous spiritual traditions? What was the secret at the heart of these traditions that was so powerful that an organization would feel justified in torturing and murdering men, women, and children; in burning Christian gospels, Gnostic texts, Jewish texts, Arabic manuscripts; and in destroying temples, monasteries, sanctuaries, Mystery Schools and academies of higher learning? This persistent repression of the shaman-mystic-scientist traditions has left Western culture addicted to a tragically limited and negative worldview that now threatens to destroy the world. Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That is Changing the World returns to us Our soul stories that carry the blueprint for our evolution The sacred knowledge that we are immortal, divine, and creative The wisdom of the heart that was nurtured by the ancient shaman-mystic-scientist cultures and is now being validated by the new science

The way merchants trade, think about business and represent commerce in art forms define merchant culture. The world between 1500 and 1800 encompassed different merchant cultures that stood alone and in contact with others. Culture, power relations and institutions framed similarities and differences and outlined the global outcome of these exchanges.

From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin's history details the novel ways in which Zigong merchants mobilized capital through financial-industrial networks and spurred growth by developing new technologies, capturing markets, and building integrated business organizations. She provides new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped Chinese economic and social development (independent of Western or Japanese influence) and challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, state extraction, the absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.