How to avoid a fatal backlash against globalisation

IN 1920 JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES reflected on the Britain he knew before the outbreak of the first world war. “The inhabitant of London”, he wrote, “could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth.” Keynes’s Londoner “regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent”, and not long ago the globalisation of the present age seemed a similarly inexorable force. A new world war remains unlikely, but the uncomfortable echoes of the past in recent history suggest that a closer look at the rise and retreat of 19th-century globalisation might yield valuable lessons.