Why history is key to understanding 2023

LEGENDARY UK wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, a keen historian, famously said that “the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see”.

Churchill’s maxim has high relevance today given the large number of key anniversaries in late 2022 and 2023 of major historical events that still shape the modern world. A good example was the recent 75th anniversary on Jan 1 of the implementation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Seen from the vantage point of the last three-quarters of a century, the GATT process became a key driver of global prosperity. For since the end of World War II, global trade has grown far faster than overall economic growth.