Emma Rothschild is Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University and director of the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Harvard and Magdalene College, Cambridge. She has been chairman of the executive committee of the board of the UN Foundation and of the UN Research Institute for Social Development. She is the author of The Inner Life of Empires: an eighteenth-century history (2011), Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (2001) and Paradise Lost: the decline of the auto-industrial age (1973).