essay
Education
Hitozukuri
Japan’s Cold War education policy used religion to ‘make’ the ideal humans needed by its nascent economy. Did it work?
Jolyon Baraka Thomas
essay
Economic history
The golden fuel
Asia’s rise to economic power and food security has been powered not by rice but by American maize, the ultimate flex-crop
Peter A Coclanis
essay
Economic history
Jesuits in the boardroom
As corporations struggle to survive in a more uncertain world, they should look to the success of the Society of Jesus
Paolo Quattrone
essay
Global history
Ever more land and labour
Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost?
Sven Beckert & Ulbe Bosma
video
History of ideas
Peter Singer charts the path from Hegelian philosophy to Marxist revolution
43 minutes
essay
History
History by numbers
Is history a matter of individual agency and action, or of finding and quantifying underpinning structures and patterns?
Claire Lemercier & Claire Zalc
essay
Demography and migration
The ungreat replacement
Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants. The policies of their own governments are to blame
John Rapley
essay
Anthropology
Primitive communism
Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong
Manvir Singh
essay
Ethics
The Midas Disease
Corruption is a truly global crisis and the wealth addiction that feeds it is hiding in plain sight
Sarah Chayes
video
Economic history
The perilous lives of the ‘climbing boys’ who swept chimneys in 19th-century London
5 minutes
essay
Economics
The worldly turn
After generations of ‘blackboard economics’, Berkeley and MIT are leading a return to economics that studies the real world
Tom Bergin
essay
Economic history
How we became weekly
The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it
David Henkin
essay
Economic history
A fourth globalisation
A new form of trade is reshaping our world, and it’s driven by the movement of bits and bytes, not goods, around the globe
Marc Levinson
essay
Thinkers and theories
In praise of possibility
For the political economist Albert O Hirschman, democracy thrives not on strong opinions but on doubt and flexibility
Michele Alacevich
essay
Global history
After slavery
Abolition in Africa brought longed-for freedoms, but also political turmoil, economic collapse and rising enslavement
Toby Green
essay
History
Rich witches
How a flawed logic of economic scarcity and social climbing spurred witch hunts in early modern Germany
Johannes Dillinger
essay
Work
The tyranny of work
Jobs have become, for so many, a relentless, unsatisfying toil. Why then does the work ethic still hold so much sway?
Jamie McCallum
video
Architecture
A world of shacks and shanties is a place of makeshift beauty on England’s margins
12 minutes
essay
Economic history
Economics for the people
Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view
Dirk Philipsen
essay
Economic history
Thirty glorious years
Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back?
Jonathan Hopkin
video
Economic history
One banknote per hour of work – Robert Owen’s utopian reboot of money
4 minutes
essay
Poverty and development
The billionaire curse
Philanthropy is vital – but its mechanisms are as intricate and troubling as the baroque structures of high finance
Katharyne Mitchell
essay
Economic history
Counting China
By rejecting sampling in favour of exhaustive enumeration, communist China’s dream of total information became a nightmare
Arunabh Ghosh
video
Progress and modernity
Modern policing was set up to protect the powerful from a ‘criminal underclass’
22 minutes