The rise of the Anglosphere economies could be turbo-charged via an entirely unexpected dynamic: vast new domestic energy wealth – in the shape of shale and deepwater oil and gas, and oil sands – across leading Anglosphere nations.
James C. Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge claimed that ‘the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-first century’. Bennett’s contention was that the cultural values endemic across what he termed the ‘Anglosphere’ economies would, via the influence of the Internet’s information highway, prove to be the Next Big Idea.
We only have to review the roots of the Arab Spring to see what Bennett meant in practice, with millions demanding the overthrow of medievalism and dictatorial repression. But I would add that Bennett’s thesis does not depend solely on the ‘influence of the Net’. In the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and global communism, we are now also privy to the collapse of the Gallic culture-inspired European socialist ideal; as the attempt to knit together wildly differing cultures and economies into a homogenous whole begins to unravel. In the face of this, for all its current economic woes, free market capitalism, especially in its Anglosphere form, looks to be a far more culturally stable and durable, wealth-creating, proposition, further buttressing Bennett’s case. But even Bennett did not predict that the rise of the Anglosphere economies could be turbo-charged via an entirely unexpected dynamic: vast new domestic energy wealth – in the shape of shale and deepwater oil and gas, and oil sands – across leading Anglosphere nations.
We only have to review the roots of the Arab Spring to see what Bennett meant in practice, with millions demanding the overthrow of medievalism and dictatorial repression. But I would add that Bennett’s thesis does not depend solely on the ‘influence of the Net’. In the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and global communism, we are now also privy to the collapse of the Gallic culture-inspired European socialist ideal; as the attempt to knit together wildly differing cultures and economies into a homogenous whole begins to unravel. In the face of this, for all its current economic woes, free market capitalism, especially in its Anglosphere form, looks to be a far more culturally stable and durable, wealth-creating, proposition, further buttressing Bennett’s case. But even Bennett did not predict that the rise of the Anglosphere economies could be turbo-charged via an entirely unexpected dynamic: vast new domestic energy wealth – in the shape of shale and deepwater oil and gas, and oil sands – across leading Anglosphere nations.
