Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. She is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which argues that the sovereign, universalist world orders we associate with the modern West have older precedents in the great Eastern empires — and that understanding how those orders rose and fell tells us something about how our own might end.

In this conversation we discuss the history of large scale political orders, periods of disorder, and the future of the current Western world order in the 21st century. Ayse argues that the 17th century has many lessons that could be relevant for us in the 21st century,

An additional clip from Patrick's discussion with Andy Beckett.

16/04/2026

Why does Western civilization feel lost? What are the underlying beliefs behind our society, and how did they emerge? How will social media and AI impact the way we live? What can we do about it? I’m speaking about all of this with Ryan Avent, author of the new book, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies.

How did the dollar become the dominant global currency? What impact does that have on the US and the global economy? How might this change with the emergence of new global powers, geopolitical uncertainty and technological innovation? To find out more, I spoke with the author Paul Blustein about his latest book King Dollar.

Why is Great Britain divided into England, Scotland and Wales? The answer lies nearly two thousand years ago, in the collapse of Roman rule and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons — a story of migration, cultural replacement and identity that resonates with debates we're having today. Patrick speaks with historian Nicholas J. Higham, author of the new book How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons,  about what happens when a civilian society loses the military power that protected it, how an incoming culture can reshape a country within generations (or not), and what it actually means to be from somewhere.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. What Rhymes With Now? is a podcast, produced by Louis Walsh, that puts today's biggest challenges in historical perspective.

Each episode, host Patrick Cook interviews a leading historian about a period that illuminates something urgent about the present. If you're looking for the bigger picture, this is your show.

You may have heard that inequality today has reached levels not seen since the French Revolution. But what actually happened after 1789 — and what does it teach us about the fragility of political institutions, and populist politics? Patrick speaks with John Hardman, author of The French Revolution: A Political History, about how a group of radical lawyers wrestled control from a king, how revolutionary politics devoured its own, and why the structural design of government matters just as much as the intentions of the people running it.

Why didn't America turn to fascism during the worst economic crisis in modern history? If AI causes mass unemployment in the coming years, what can the 1930s teach us about replacing the social role of work? Patrick speaks with Robert S. McElvaine, historian, political commentator and author of The Great Depression: America 1929–1941, about the wealth inequality and debt-fuelled consumption that caused the crash, Roosevelt's political genius, and why the lessons of the New Deal matter more now than ever.

We are in an era of stagflation. What happened last time? And why do the 1970s cast such a long shadow over British politics? Patrick speaks with Andy Beckett, journalist and author of When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, about the three-day week, the collapse of the post-war consensus, the rise of Thatcherism, and why a country that was more egalitarian than it had ever been still felt like it was falling apart.