It can be argued that each generation of Western development expert arrives in Africa convinced the previous generation got it wrong, and leaves having made a version of the same mistake. Trade, then agricultural productivity, then trade again, then structural adjustment, followed by microcredit.

Historian Bronwen Everill, in her book Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance (The New Press, 2025; William Collins, 2024), traces that cycle from the abolition of the slave trade to the current competition over critical minerals, and finds one premise sitting underneath every iteration: that African economies would work if only they looked more like Western ones.

Africonomics was shortlisted for the 2025 British Academy Book Prize, took second place for the BCA African Business Book of the Year, and drew a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Browen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the former director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. She teaches in the Princeton Writing Program and is a research affiliate at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past at Stellenbosch University.

This is our last episode before a short summer break. Wewill be back with a new conversation in September. If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen.

Books Mentioned on the Podcast

-Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance by Bronwen Everill

-Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World by YepokaYeebo

-The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! by Keletso E. Atkins

-The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana: A Study in Rural Capitalism by Polly Hill

Russia's military is materially weaker today than it was a year ago, and Ukraine has established an asymmetric approach that drives up the cost of every Russian advance. Yet those facts still do not guarantee Kyiv the ending it wants.

Dr. Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and one of the world's leading experts on the war in Ukraine. He is also the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Pan Macmillan, 2026) and has spent the past four and a half years moving between London and Kyiv. His method rests on primary research: time with Ukrainian units at the front rather than reassessment of other people's data points.

In this conversation: what the Ukrainians solved between 2024 and the beginning of 2026 and what the Russians did not; Russian force quality and replacement rates; why Jack believes the war has reached a turning point and why that is not the same as a happy ending; and the signposts he is watching over the next six to twelve months.

We recorded as the news was breaking out of Kyiv about the replacement of Ukraine's defense minister and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so we do not address those changes directly.

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Books Mentioned on the Podcast

-Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling
-Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
-Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham

Rail rarely makes headlines, but it may be doing more to shape Africa's economic trajectory than any single mine or trade deal. James ('Jamie') Holley is CEO of Traxtion, the largest privately owned rail operator on the continent, with a deployed fleet of over 55 locomotives across ten countries, from South Africa's core network to the Tazara line linking Zambia to the Tanzanian coast. Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Jamie to unpack what it actually takes to revive neglected rail corridors, why private capital is willing to take on infrastructure risk that governments have struggled to manage, and what a serious Transnet turnaround could mean for South Africa and the wider region.

The numbers do the arguing. The Johannesburg-Durban line still runs on 1970s signalling, moving freight over 710 kilometers in roughly three days when it was designed to run trains every 20 minutes on an 18-hour transit. Modern positive train control could cut that to under ten hours and let Traxtion invoice the same train six times more often in a month. That gap between what the infrastructure could do and what it currently does is the essence of the conversation.

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Books Mentioned on the Podcast-Railroader: The Unfiltered Genius and Controversy of Four-Time CEO Hunter Harrison by Howard Green-SwitchPoints: Culture Change on the Fast Track to Business Success by Judy Johnson, Les Dakens, Peter Edwards, and Ned Morse

Critical minerals have become the connective tissue of modern geopolitics, linking energy security, manufacturing, and great power competition in ways that didn't exist a decade ago. Christopher Vandome leads the Critical Minerals Initiative at Chatham House, the London-based foreign policy think tank, where he's also a senior research fellow with both the Global Economy and Finance Programme and the Africa Programme.

Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Chris to unpack the African critical minerals story: the geopolitics, the financing gaps, and the question of who actually captures the value when resource wealth meets global demand. The conversation goes deep on Zambia and the broader southern Africa region, where mining policy, industrial strategy, and great power competition are converging in real time.

A sharp, on-the-ground look at one of the defining economic and security stories on the African continent.

Books Mentioned on the PodcastMining Is Dead, Long Live Geopolitical Mining by Marta Rivera & Eduardo Zamanillo

Digging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa by Jade Davenport

The critical minerals story in Africa is typically told through the lens of geology, geopolitics, and finance. Rarely does anyone talk about the unglamorous reality that sits between the mine and the market: the roads, the trucks, the borders, and the sheer logistical challenge of moving product across some of the world's most difficult operating environments.

Clementine James knows that reality better than almost anyone. As a director and owner of Alistair Group, one of Africa's premier logistics operators, she has spent her career moving freight across corridors that would humble most Western supply chain professionals. That she has done soas an American woman in one of the most male-dominated industries on earth makes her story all the more remarkable.

Here is a number that puts the challenge in stark relief: a round trip between Dar es Salaam and Kolwezi takes her trucks two months to complete. Two months. In that single data point lives the entire story of what it actually takes to bring critical minerals to market. Clementine is also one of the clearest voices supporting development of the Lobito Corridor but also calling out the gap between the political hype around the initiative and the commercial framework that will determine whether it actually delivers.

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Books mentioned on the podcast -

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The Bang, Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Throughout the course of the over four-year full-scale war in Ukraine, one of the most respected Western media outlets covering the conflict has been the Financial Times. The core ofthe FT's coverage has been provided by its Kyiv-based correspondent Chris Miller. Chris has lived and worked in Ukraine since 2010, when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in eastern Ukraine. The country is clearly in his blood, and his understanding of the Ukrainian people and their motivations is unparalleled among Western correspondents. He has probably spent more time with President Zelenskyy than any other journalist, and he continues to maintain a finger on the pulse of national-level Ukrainian politics while not losing sight of the realities of the war and its impacts on the Ukrainian people. Chris is the author of the 2023 book The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine, which won the 2024 Witold Pilecki Special Prize for Ukraine war reporting.

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For this episode, we are joined by award-winning historian and author Tim Bouverie. Tim has recently received widespread acclaim for his book Allies at War, which some listeners may have spotted prominently positioned beside Prime Minister Netanyahu in the now widely circulated photograph of the Israeli leader speaking with President Trump on the night of the first military strikes on Iran.

The book does exactly what it promises: it delivers a sweeping narrative history of the alliance that defeated Hitler. While one might reasonably ask what new could still be written about the Second World War, Tim answers that question on nearly every page. Critics have overwhelmingly agreed. The book won the prestigious 2026 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, while The Economist named it one of its Books of the Year for 2025, calling it “a masterful diplomatic history of the second world war… packed with fresh detail and gossipy anecdotes.”

While we spend plenty of time discussing the fascinating personalities and rivalries of Churchill, Stalin, and FDR, Tim also draws out broader lessons from history’s most successful political and military alliance — lessons that remain deeply relevant to today’s increasingly turbulent global order.

Books Mentioned on the Podcast

--All of Tim's non-fiction histories can be found at Penguin

--Perfect Pitch by Tim can be found here

--Jock Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955

--Lord Alan Francis Brooke, War Diaries, 1939-1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke

We’ve spent multiple episodes discussing the Ukrainian perspective on Russia’s brutal war. For this episode we shift our focus to a look at how the average Russian views not only the war, but more broadly life in Putin’s autocratic state. Our guest is the journalist Howard Amos, whose book Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire, tries to understand life in modern Russia not by looking at the high politics and motivations of the Putin regime, but instead what life is like in the Pskov region of Russia, an economically struggling area that encompasses the country’s frontier with the Baltic states. The book has received wide acclaim, with Foreign Affairs stating that, “Amos sketches Pskov’s residents with deep interest and sympathy, yet without condescension or sentimentality.” And The Times of London notes that, “Few westerners venture into this tragic, frustrating world, separated from the hurly-burly of Moscow or St Petersburg by chasms of experience and expectation. Even fewer would be able to describe it as well as Amos.”

Books Mentioned in the Episode

High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia's Haunted Hinterland by Tom Parfitt

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Jonathan Slaght

Black Earth City by Charlotte Hobson

Stork's Nest by Laura Lynne Williams

For this episode of the podcast we go back to Ukraine. Our guest today sets a new standard for what a highly intelligent, motivated, and deeply patriotic young person can do. Although only 25-years old, Maryna Hrytsenko has established herself as one of the leading advocates for Ukraine and its military in the global halls of power. She is a co-founder of the Snake Island Institute (SII), which in the matter of less than two years has become Ukraine’s leading security-focused think tank and also plays a hands-on role in linking Western defense manufacturers with Ukrainian military units and local Ukrainian defense technology companies. Equally at home in the halls of the US Congress or working alongside Ukraine’s men and women in uniform, Maryna is a force of nature in the very best sense of the phrase and we’re very lucky to have her on the podcast to tell her story.

As always, if you enjoy this conversation, please check out our full catalogue of episodes – we have just passed our one-year anniversary – and like and subscribe. Also, we’re now available on YouTube along with all the usual podcast platforms.

Publications Mentioned on the Podcast

-SII's analytic library-Oleksandr Ivantsov (profile in The Guardian - author of the Ukrainian language Flashback: Mariupol)

For this episode of the podcast we turn our attention back to Africa and roll back the clock to the 19th century. Our guest today is Professor Richard Reid of St. Cross College, Oxford.Richard is a specialist in 19th and 20th century African history and author of the 2025 book The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century. In the book, Richard makes the case for a new lens through which to view African history, notably arguing that the infamous “Scramble for Africa” and the follow-on period of colonialism can’t be understood without an in-depth appreciation of Africa’s own transformative nineteenth century, independent of Europe. The book has met high critical praise ranging from Foreign Affairs calling it an “an authoritative survey” to The Irish Times labelling it “clever, full of ideas and insights and stimulating, as well as provocative.”

Books Mentioned in the Podcast

The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century, Richard Reid

How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa, Olúfémi Táíwò

Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, Michelle Moyd

Empire of Sentiment, Joanna Lewis