Gambling for Profit

Download or read book Gambling for Profit written by Kerry Chambers and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past forty years, Western governments have increasingly liberalized and deregulated gambling, which is now used to deliver state revenues and commercial profit in many jurisdictions. Gambling for Profit is a cross-national history of the emergence of legal gambling, including lotteries, gaming machines, and casinos. Gambling for Profit is unique among studies of gambling's twentieth-century growth thanks to Kerry G.E. Chambers's strong analytical framework — investigating not only the political aspects of legalization, but also the sociocultural factors that influence popular adoption. Chambers provides a useful chronological examination of the electronic gambling phenomenon, as well as comparative data on dates of introduction and revenues across twenty-three countries. Gambling for Profit provides a dynamic model to explore the legalization of gambling and stresses the inadequacy of seeking universal explanations for gambling's entrenchment within particular cultures.