Summary: Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was written around 1592 and was based on an earlier German work about Dr Faustus, a talented German scholar at Wittenburg University who was frustrated by the limits of human knowledge. Feeling that he understood everything humanly possible, he made a bargain with Lu- cifer that for 24 years he would have access to knowledge that had hereto been hidden from humanity. In re- turn, he would give his soul to the devil. The devil lived up to his side of the bargain and, 24 years later, comes to claim Faustus’ soul. Faustus, realising his mistake, is horrified and begs for mercy from God and the devil. But it is too late and he is dragged off. His friends later find his body, torn to pieces. In 1992 the West signed its own Faustian bargain. Not exactly with the devil, but for a promise of unparal- leled wealth and a monopoly of power over the entire world. In return for this bargain we would leave our economies and societies in ruin and usher in the possible end of the West’s dominance over the world that it had enjoyed since the 1500s. History Future Now looks at what happened. This article covers a lot of ground – 500 years of history rang- ing from the Age of Discovery to the Opium Wars; a geographical reach over the entire globe, from Edo to Constantinople and Beijing to Washington; economic thought, from mercantilism to free trade; regulation and deregulation; and the impact of the financial services sector on jobs and our economies. It even includes an action list of what we need to do to escape from this Faustian bargain. While there is never a real beginning to a story in history – there is always a possible prequel – we first need to go back to the traumatic events of 1917 and then look forward all the way to 2013 and beyond.
