Pillar route
Production and labor
How farms, factories, corporations, unions, extraction, and trade turn land, labor, and commodities into wealth or dependency.
Production and labor
Firms, factories, accounting, industrial organization, state capitalism, multinationals, asset stripping, and the labor order.
- economic system
The Plaza Accord and the endaka turn
The hinge before the bubble: US pressure, market opening, the Plaza Accord yen surge, endaka recession, and the Maekawa reports that push Japan toward domestic-demand and structural reform.
economypoliticsdiplomacy - conflict
The Boer War: gold, the camps, and the making of South Africa
Britain's war for the gold and diamonds of the Boer republics, and the concentration camps that killed tens of thousands of Boers and, in separate camps, Black Africans.
warpoliticssocietyeconomy - politics
Françafrique: how France kept its African colonies after independence
France granted flag independence around 1960 but kept real control: the CFA franc that held fourteen countries' reserves in Paris, permanent military bases and interventions, propped-up presidents like Bongo and Bokassa...
politicseconomywardiplomacy - nation
The Portuguese Empire: from Sagres to the Carnation Revolution
The first and last of the seaborne empires: Prince Henry's voyages, Dias rounding the Cape and da Gama reaching India; the Estado da India of Goa, Malacca, and Macau...
politicseconomywarsociety - conflict
The Great War of Africa: the Congo wars
The deadliest conflict since the Second World War, fought over the ruins of Mobutu's Zaire: how the Rwandan genocide spilled east, the First Congo War that put Laurent Kabila in power...
warpoliticsdiplomacyeconomy - conflict
The Scramble for Africa
The partition of a continent in a single generation: the industrial hunger for raw materials, the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, and the machine-gun conquest from Isandlwana and Omdurman to Fashoda and the Boer Wars...
politicswareconomysociety - economic system
Asset stripping and the corporate raiders
Buying a company to sell it for parts: the 1980s corporate raiders and greenmail, Milken's junk bonds and the leveraged-buyout boom that peaked with RJR Nabisco, private equity as its modern successor...
economypoliticsculture - nation
Freemasonry in South Africa
Masonry at the southern tip of Africa: the Dutch Lodge de Goede Hoop founded at the Cape in 1772, the British lodges that followed, the craft among the colonial and mining elite of Kimberley and Johannesburg...
societypoliticseconomywar - economic system
De Beers and the diamond model of extraction
How diamonds set the template for mineral extraction in Africa: the Kimberley rush, Rhodes and Barnato's consolidation of De Beers, the migrant-labor compound system later generalized under apartheid...
economypoliticswardiplomacy - nation
South Africa: a deep history
The long arc of South Africa: the San and Khoikhoi and the Bantu migrations, the Dutch Cape and slavery, the Zulu kingdom, the diamond and gold mineral revolution that drew Rhodes and the British...
politicssocietywareconomy - movement
The Renaissance: the rebirth of antiquity
Europe's rebirth as the return of pagan antiquity: Greek scholars and manuscripts scattered west by the fall of Constantinople, Medici gold funding the recovery of Plato...
culturereligiontechnologypolitics - pillar
The pillars of modern power
The load-bearing power blocks of modern society, read off the data itself: money and finance; state, law, and coercion; military and security; production and labor; land and resources; infrastructure and logistics...
pillarpoliticseconomysociety - movement
Colonialism: the conquest of the world
The age of European colonial empires: the conquests and plantations, the administration and extraction, the resistance, and the long process of decolonization, across the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
politicswarsocietyeconomy - nation
The Gulf and the oil monarchies
The Arabian peninsula from the Saud-Wahhab pact through the discovery of oil, the founding of the petro-states, OPEC, and the modern hubs.
politicseconomywarreligion - economic system
Capitalism, liberalism, and the isms
The Wealth of Nations, free trade, Keynes, the welfare state, the neoliberal turn, and the critics from anarchism to Occupy.
politicseconomysocietyculture - economic system
The corporation
From the chartered trading monopolies to the industrial giants and the platform companies: how the company became a world-shaping institution.
economytechnologypoliticsculture - movement
The Internationals
The organized attempts to unite labor and revolution across borders: the First through Fourth Internationals and the union federations that outlived them.
politicsdiplomacysocietywar - politics
Regional pacts and communities
The regional agreements that organized continents: from the Organization of American States to ASEAN, ECOWAS, and the African continental market.
politicsdiplomacyeconomyreligion