Here at the State of power podcast we are interested in how power functions, how it mutates, and how it shapes the world around us. We believe that, if we are to understand the present, we need to put it in its proper historical context and try to understand the historical processes that have led us here.  

 

Our guest on the podcast today, Roger van Zwanenberg is the founder of Pluto books, an independent publisher of radical, left‐wing non­‐fiction books. He’s written a new global history, called Wealth and Power, which he is also sharing in a series of blogs.  Roger’s book traces the roller coaster story of the past 500 years or so of human history, focusing on how Europe and its offshoots amassed great wealth and power at the expense of the rest of the world.

Meant for popular reading, the book focuses on how we have created today’s world, which we all take for granted. Roger insists that the world we live in is unique in world history. He ponders the question of How Europe, a small and rather insignificant part of the world in 1500, became so powerful and dominant across the globe by 1900, and he brings out the mechanisms that were used to establish European dominance.

In this episode, the first of three, we discuss the beginnings of racism, and how it has shaped the world today.

Image source Walter Crane: Wikimedia

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