TNI’s State of Power podcast: Understanding Wealth, Power, Colonialism and Slavery

Understanding Wealth and Power 1

Roger van Zwanenberg discusses his book “Wealth and Power”, with host Shaun Matsheza.

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

Understanding Wealth and Power 2. Colonialism (with Roger van Zwanenberg)

This is the second episode of our three part series in which we look at how Europe came to be the dominant global power. In the first episode we looked at Racism and how it was used to justify European imperialism. As the world seeks a decolonial future, it is good to remind ourselves of what colonialism really was, and in this episode we take a closer look at how colonialism actually unfolded.

Shaun Matsheza continues his conversation with Roger van Zwanenberg, who 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 sharing in a series of blogs. Roger’s work 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.