Economic history
Will robots simply bore us to extinction?
In an attempt to relieve the drudgery of warehouse work, technology has now eliminated all need for human decision-making, Sarah O’Connor discovers
How the 18th-century Panopticon inspired today’s giant distribution hubs
The Bentham brothers’ invention is strikingly reflected in the ‘precisely engineered system of surveillance and optimisation’ at Amazon’s ‘exploitative’ fulfilment centres, says Henry Snow
An idyllic vision of the future
The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the…
John Law: the Scottish gambler who rescued France from bankruptcy
John Law was by any standards a quite remarkable man. At the apogee of his power in 1720, he was…
