The top 1 per cent of the global population came to own half the world’s wealth, while the bottom 70 per cent had less than 3 per cent. With the Great Recession that began in 2008–09 and political convulsions in a number of countries, what Metcalf calls ‘the militant parochialism of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America’4 was the result, as was rising ethnonationalism, populist authoritarianism, and illiberal democracy in a slew of countries. As Metcalf puts it, ‘There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in
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