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.A work of economic history published in 1999 provides a great starting point. “Globalisation and History”, by Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, hit shelves at a time of growing unease about the effects of deepening economic integration. Then, anti-trade activists swarmed meetings of the World Trade Organisation, while a few economists began to draw attention to the occasionally troubling distributional effects of globalisation. It roared on nonetheless over the first decade after the book’s publication. But in the years since, economic nationalism has become a potent political force, and the book has come to seem eerily prescient.