Ninety years ago, on April 3, 1936, The Spectator published a letter to the editor by Owen Barfield, which it headlined “Nationalism and Economics”. The letter, about the reality of the world’s economic life and the failure of that reality to be reflected in relations between nation-states, repays attention in 2026. The states uppermost in our minds have changed, and to some extent so have the raw materials being sought and the products being sold. But the failure remains the same.