We're living through the first world cyberwar – but just haven’t called it that | Martin Belam

Nation states have been attacking each other electronically for a decade or more. Historians will eventually give it a name and a start and end date

The job of the historian is often to pull together broad themes and trends, then give them a snappy title that people will easily recognise and understand. That's how we end up with labels like "The decline and fall of the Roman Empire" or "The Rise of Hitler and the Third Reich".

As someone who studied history, I've had this lingering curiosity about how historians of the future will view our times. It is easy to imagine textbooks in a hundred years with chapters that start with Reagan and Thatcher and end with the global financial crisis and called something like The Western Neoliberal Consensus 1979-2008.