Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the book. I articulate, first, why it is useful to think in terms of social imaginaries, rather than alternative sociological concepts (such as paradigms or ideologies), for analysing social integration in modern societies. I then explore why, in modernity, it was imaginaries of prosperity that provided the most stable foundations for social integration. These imaginaries can bridge, I argue, the plurality of worldviews and identities, while at the same time play into modernity’s strengths, namely democracy and knowledge governance. However, any particular imaginary of prosperity can provide only a temporary foundation, because it will sooner or later produce too many problems and contradictions to continue fulfilling its integrative role. When such problems mount, imaginaries of prosperity become subject to their own dialectics, having to shift eventually between privatised and collective routes to prosperity. If, however, the pressures for change cannot be institutionalised through democratic channels, we have seen in the past – and are seeing again today – that illiberal and undemocratic tribal imaginaries may take hold, making identity (rather than prosperity) the main vector of politics.

The 1950s is known as a time of great prosperity as the gap between the richest and the poorest narrowed to its lowest point in history and as social mobility was at its highest. It was also a time in which an extraordinary array of commercial products entered our economy as the result of federal research and development programs. After America’s development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project supported the transformation of the technology into more productive commercial uses. This role was repeated in the 1950s when the space race contributed to the federal development of the internet, together with a vast array of technologies such as cell phones and GPS services that we use today. However, there was a dark side to the 1950s. Racism was rampant and anxiety about nuclear disaster increased. In response to that anxiety, there were two movements in the United States. On the left there were movements for student democracy, civil rights, women’s rights, and the like. On the right, a new style of economics was emerging with great allegiance to markets and a commitment to reduce the size of government. Once again, we see the tension between markets and government which remains with us.

In Chapter 6, the bioeconomy is examined in light of basic notions from the field of ecological economics and sustainability science, such as natural capital substitutability, planetary boundaries, social needs, growth and de/post-growth, justice, and equity. Overall, such notions highlight the need to pursue sustainability solutions that are simultaneously safe for planetary ecological health and just for people across space and time.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, members of an established, English-speaking middle class built a new category of work for themselves. This book uses US, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand occupation statistics, archives, professional journals, and newspapers to understand what the history of nursing, accountancy, teaching, medicine, law, engineering, journalism, and social work can tell us about class in the ‘long twentieth century’. This chapter gives a historical and theoretical introduction to the rise of the professional class as a distinctly transnational event. The Anglo world is not a matter of comparative ‘case studies’, but a network of English-speaking communities that were regionally distinctive but operated as part of a shared cultural and economic world. It was a world built on Indigenous dispossession. Settlers brought their moral frameworks to bear on the ‘civilizing’ that they believed they needed. The virtues that they built into each profession, such as duty, probity, and charity, were performed as real, embodied work in every settlement. Their morality was made material and invested for social and economic profit. They became virtue capitalists.

The selections in this chapter discuss the management of the realm and the importance of specific royal practices. Ensuring the prosperity of the rural and urban populations, the productivity of the land, the proper maintenance of the army and sound financial management feature prominently among the king’s responsibilities. Many mirrors emphasise the necessity of constant royal oversight, particularly of the officials involved in the collection of taxes. Strict and consistent oversight, accompanied by swift dismissal when cases of abuse came to light, were the only measures that would protect the revenue-producing categories on whose labour the entire edifice of government depended. In cases of injustice, it was the ruler’s obligation to provide a means of redress, through the practice of listening to the petitions of his subjects and restoring to them any property that had been wrongfully seized. In many instances, the practices of good governance urged upon the wise and virtuous ruler reflect the principle of maṣlaḥa, the common good. The texts are drawn from al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

Since the board game Settlers of Catan was first released in 1995 it has sold more than 25 million copies. It works like this. Play starts after tiles of different land types – mountains producing iron ore, pastures sustaining sheep, and so on – are laid out – and numbers between 2 and 12 are randomly assigned to each tile. Every player picks a spot on the board to establish his or her first village. When the dice is rolled, a player receives a resource that matches the number on the dice if his or her village is located next to that resource. So, if the pasture next to my village has 9 on it, and the two dice thrown add up to 9, I receive one sheep. Those resources I then use to buy roads and villages and cities – and so expand my empire.

What was the contribution of European integration to the economic history of Western Europe? Also on this issue, the EU often claims to have been both important and successful while, in fact, there is surprisingly little research on its economic effects. This chapter argues that the EC did indeed contribute to growing material prosperity in the member states during the Cold War. However, this contribution remained rather modest, at well below half of 1 per cent additional GDP growth per annum. The European Community had greater weight in relative terms during the 1970s and 1980s than during the 1950s and 1960s, even this has been generally overlooked to date. It thus played a greater role once the post-war boom was over, and, without it, the slump would have been even worse. Those aspects aside, the location of the economic within the integration process remained curiously vague during the Cold War. Economic integration was on the one hand an end in itself to promote prosperity; on the other it was always just a means to achieve overarching political objectives.