What do Ancient Rome, Muslim Spain and Song era China have in common?
Military might, sophisticated legal systems or, perhaps, intellectual brilliance?
All of these things played their part in creating the great empire of the past, but the answer is something a little more abstract.
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In his latest book the Swedish historian Johan Norberg argues that that every truly successful civilisation is defined by one key ingredient – openness. To new ideas, new people and new technology.
At a time when much of that life-enhancing, economy-expanding openness seems under threat from pandemic panic and populist demagoguery, his optimistic message feels particularly urgent.
Our editor John Ashmore sat down with Johan for to discuss his new book, Open:The Story of Human Progress, and what the pandemic means for the future of trade, innovation and human flourishing.
This week saw a south-Atlantic gale of outrage after Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding President Javier Milei repeated his country’s entirely bogus claim to the Falkland Islands, with President Donald Trump twisting the knife by saying the USA’s view of the issue was ‘under review’. It came just weeks after Argentina’s footballers brandished a ‘Malvinas’ banner at the […]
11 Sep 2026
Welfare
Ross Clark
Burnham has chosen to feed the welfare monster
There is a standard response from any Chancellor or Prime Minister asked questions about government finances: ‘I am not going to write the Budget in front of you’. And neither should they. The Budget is a potentially market-moving financial event. The figures it contains have to add up, make sense. The measures have to be […]
10 Sep 2026
AI
James Price
Why Labour are a bigger threat to jobs than AI
The Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons was clearly a worrier. When, in 1863, the Tyneside arms-maker Sir William Armstrong calculated that Britain’s coal would run out in 212 years, Jevons checked the sums. Armstrong had assumed the country’s appetite for coal grew by the same tonnage every year. But it actually grew by the same […]
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