When I got my first full-time job as an academic, a professor that I admired very much took me for lunch, and I said wanted to start a course on ‘enterprise law’. I said it would be about the economic constitution, rights, corporations and public services. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that’, said the professor, ‘what you should really think about is who you want to be.’ I went away and I thought about this carefully. I decided I wasn’t so interested in ‘being’ anybody particular, if that just meant having a title or an office, but rather I wanted to ‘do’ something.

‘Nothing travels faster than the speed of light’, wrote the author Douglas Adams, ‘with the possible exception of bad news.’ Just like our personal communications, the Internet has revolutionised our media, both in speed and nature. With ever-faster technology, public news and entertainment has shifted from print, to radio, to television and now to the web. Each new development widened the audience, and created greater psychological intimacy. Politicians and other performers entered the living room, as personal as a coffee house, a debating club in a pub, or a theatre.

‘If you want peace, prepare for war’, wrote Vegetius in the fourth century. Whether or not this was true in the twilight of Rome’s military empire, it has little evidential basis today. ‘Peace can be established’, wrote the Versailles Treaty, ‘only if it is based upon social justice.’ And as this wisdom went unheeded, as victors demanded reparations, World War Two engulfed the globe in flames again. Humanity’s desire to end war was enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Charter, and the ideals of a just society in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Preamble to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recalled that ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’.

Given enterprise law’s dynamism, and the time to publish a book, many things changed since the Afterword. First, despite the cautious optimism of February 2021, Putin launched a full criminal war in Ukraine in February 2022, lost over 25 per cent of the Russian army’s combat capability in two months, instructed massacres, mass rape, and countless war crimes. This is another fossil fuelled war (Ch. 19). Europe and Germany (with ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as a Gazprom director) bankrolled Putin with imports for years. Now, the EU and UK have begun to eliminate Russian fossil fuels. As must be clear, the law should stop all fossil fuels. Swapping one dictator’s oil or gas for another’s will not reduce geopolitical risk, nor stop climate damage, nor deploy the clean, cheap technology already have.

The central justification for private enterprises, where investors may profit from production, is that competition ensures they serve the public interest. The father of economics, Adam Smith, believed that, with corporations banned, a world of competitive partnerships would ‘make nearly the same distribution’ as if ‘the earth [were] divided into equal portions’, like they were ‘led by an invisible hand’.

‘Of all the occupations’, wrote Cicero in 44 bc, ‘none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a free man’. Growing a garden, the countryside, the shade of trees, the sound of running water, have long been things of romance. But unlike for Roman nobility, over most of human history people’s toil for food and water was a matter of survival. The Industrial Revolution enabled society to live beyond subsistence, sustaining modern towns and cities, and crucially shifting work away from the farm.

‘Don’t you hate to pay taxes!’ said a secretary once to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. ‘No, young feller. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.’ Whether or not we really ‘like’ them, the old American judge had a point. The trouble is we do not yet have a consensus on our measure of ‘civilization’. While most countries have pursued ‘growth’ in ‘Gross Domestic Product’ (GDP), this perversely counts all economic activity as positive, all contracts whatever the effect, even when they damage our health, well-being, environment or security.

‘The power of communication of thoughts and opinions is the gift of God,’ said Lord Eyre CJ in 1794, ‘and the freedom of it is the source of all science, the first fruits and the ultimate happiness of society.’ For those with slow Wi-Fi, a ‘gift of God’ might seem a stretch, but there is no doubt that modern communication is both a source, and a wonder, of science. Historically, most of us communicated in person, or not at all. A post open to everyone and mass literacy only developed in the nineteenth century. Then came telegraph, telephone and now the Internet. The Internet works with devices (like a phone) sending data over the radio spectrum to receivers (like a Wi-Fi box).

The history of enterprise law, the evolution of state and corporate power, is essential to understand why our economic constitution is as we see it today. Why is enterprise financed by a mix of taxes, savings in the stock market or banks, prices and regulatory subsidies, but without any clear consensus on what should be public or privately owned? Why are the votes in our economy partially spread among investors, workers and the public, yet decisively influenced by asset managers and banks? Why are social, economic and political rights enshrined in international law, yet their realisation in national law is so uncertain? Why has enterprise law changed, and where should it go? History does not let us see into the future, but when we learn from the past, we understand our options better for deciding what to change.

Education is probably the most important enterprise for a country’s future because it influences people’s capabilities in almost all of life’s endeavours. At the very centre of a just society is the ‘essential importance of human development in its richest diversity’.1 ‘Everyone has the right to education’ in international law. Elementary education ‘shall be free’, and higher education must be ‘equally accessible to all on the basis of merit’ and ‘in particular by the progressive introduction of free education’.

When God says ‘Let there be light’, the Old Testament refers to one of Earth’s greatest natural resources, but also the hope of human enlightenment itself. Light and heat come to Earth from our Sun. Heat differences create air pressure. Air pressure creates wind. And both light and wind can power the modern world a thousand times. With water, light gives life to plants, trees, algae, plankton and creatures including ourselves. Plants photosynthesise light, they live, they are eaten, they die, and over millions of years they become fossilised. Coal comes from ancient forests, which were buried and compressed before they decayed.

‘Restoration of a sick person to health’, wrote Lord Beveridge in 1942, ‘is a duty of the State and the sick person, prior to any other consideration.’ When the Minister for Health, Nye Bevan, introduced the National Health Service Act 1946, he said it was ‘repugnant to a civilised community for hospitals to have to rely upon private charity’, and that ‘money ought not to be permitted to stand in the way of obtaining an efficient health service’.

‘Dear Tony, I see the Russians have put a space vehicle on the moon’, wrote a voter to their MP in 1959. ‘Is there any chance of a better bus service in Bristol?’ Transport is a wonder of technology, giving us space travel, and sometimes even buses, but its use for good or ill depends on our law. An electric revolution is underway, yet the last shift took fifty years, for petrol motors to replace horses, and today we are out of time. Transport expels 27 per cent of UK greenhouse gas emissions, mainly by road and rail, and 24 per cent of global emissions.