History Unplugged Podcast

For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single legal canopy. The nation-state as we know it is barely a century old for most of the world's population. In 1900, maybe 25 percent of humanity lived under nation. Today, 99 percent live in nation-states — and almost all of them were created in a single, compressed rush after 1945. And this world order could already be giving way to the next. Amazon has a larger GDP than most countries, the Bitcoin network operates outside any central bank's reach, and a 19-year-old with a smartphone can reach more people than most governments. The monopoly is gone. The question is what replaces it. Today’s guest is Rana Dasgupta, author of After Nations. We trace how different nations came into existence and the reasons their nations formed the way they did. France built its national identity through theology, Britain through property, the United States through law, and China through controlling its massive rivers and sidestepping local rulers in the process. We see why all four models are now straining under the weight of planetary problems no border can contain. The post-1945 liberal order wasn't the natural culmination of history but a brief, unusual window of stability between eras of great-power competition. The question isn't whether the nation-state will survive, but what forms of citizenship, governance, and legitimacy can be invented to replace the functions it can no longer perform. If the last great transition produced the nation, the next one will have to produce something we don't yet have a name for.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Washington was the perfect man for an impossible moment — aristocratic enough to command the respect of erudite founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, yet only a mid-level Virginia planter who understood ordinary life and could relate to common soldiers because his ancestors had fled the English Civil War with nothing and spent generations clawing their way back into respectability. That family history gave him something neither Hamilton's brilliance nor Jefferson's philosophy could manufacture: a bone-deep understanding of what it felt like to have status, lose it, and rebuild it through sheer force of will. This goes alone with his earliest military experiences in the French-Indian War: he suffered a string of frontier humiliations in the Ohio Valley that taught him the one lesson that would win the Revolution: how to survive losing. Today’s guest is H.W. Brands, author of American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington. We see how Washington's most important acts were preserving through impossible hardships like he did at Valley Forge but also in the moments he chose not to act: not to seize power, not to crown himself, not to serve a third term. He managed Hamilton and Jefferson's explosive feud the way a patriarch manages feuding sons — with exhausted patience and the quiet authority of a man who had already outlasted everything. He ended his presidency with the most radical thing a powerful man could do in 1797, which was to simply go home. All of this made him a patriarch -- a father of an extended family that encompassed the United States -- and crafted the norms that would steady America as a nation for generations to follow.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman empire: Rome could not function without slavery as it underpinned every single part of their economy. Without the millions of people snatched from their homes in the aftermath of war, kidnapped from the streets, sold into slavery as punishment, or born into it as “home bred slaves”, the Roman empire’s great aqueducts and temples could never have been built. There would be no coins or tiles to find in fields, no limitless manpower for the army and navy that conquered the Mediterranean, no marble palaces or underfloor heating, and certainly no life of unimaginable luxury for the top of Roman society. Slavery in Rome could be very good or bad depending on the job. Highly educated Greek slaves served as physicians, accountants, architects, and tutors for aristocratic sons and daughters. At the bottom of the hierarchy were sulfur mine workers, who worked in toxic, collapsing tunnels and were often blinded by their masters to remind them they would be there for the rest of their short miserable lives. Today's guest is Emma Southon, author of Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire. We discuss how Rome evolved from a sanctuary for men fleeing slavery into the most extensive chattel slave system in history, and how Spartacus horrified Rome not by winning battles but by forcing 300 Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators at his co-commander's funeral. We also look at why there was never a Roman abolition movement because Romans understood that slavery destroyed people but concluded this was the slaves' problem, not theirs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Of the millions of victims of the Black Death, one was a teenager named Joseph ben Meir Abulafia, who died of the plague in Toledo in 1349 alongside his new wife. His tombstone was inscribed as a conversation with the dead: "I am the man who has seen desolation and destruction, blood and pestilence. The days of my youth were cut short suddenly, in the prime of my life." His unnamed mother survived, left alone and childless, her days filled with "bitter weeping." That inscription is one of seventy-six medieval tombstones from Toledo's Jewish cemetery that preserve the most personal voices of history's deadliest pandemic, a catastrophe that killed an estimated 100 million people in six years and whose aftershocks lasted for centuries. Today's guest is Thomas Asbridge, author of The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic. We discuss how a minor Venetian merchant's business papers, preserved by his widow in a convent, reveal that the medieval trade networks which kept cities fed were also purpose-built to spread epidemic disease across thousands of miles. We look at why the Byzantine emperor wrote about his fourteen-year-old son's death with clinical detachment, how a Franciscan intellectual who had questioned whether other worlds existed died carrying holy water through plague-ravaged Messina, and why the only European king killed by the Black Death was besieging Gibraltar with dreams of marching to Jerusalem when the plague found his camp. The pandemic's most devastating long-term consequences were felt not in Europe but in the Muslim world, where the once-invincible Mamluk Empire was broken by recurrent outbreaks and eventually conquered by the Ottomans, and that this forgotten collapse may have been the true hinge point that set the West on its path to global dominance.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more than 1400 years, the history of Jewish and Muslim engagement has been a complex story of cooperation and conflict. The best known events are hostile encounters (like the 1066 Granada massacre or modern Arab-Israeli wars), they’ve had a multifaceted relationship, from Muhammad’s dealings with Jewish tribes in Arabia in the 600s, Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sending his navy to rescue Jews from the 1492 expulsion from Spain, to the contemporary tensions currently unfolding in the Middle East. Today’s guest is Marc David Baer: Author of “Children of Abraham:   The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations.” We discuss how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and common cultural practices, and for centuries afterward, they were often allies. We also discuss Muslim warriors fighting for a medieval Turkish Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea, Jewish viziers leading the Muslim sultan’s troops in Spain, and Jewish literary lights and political party leaders in modern Egypt and Iraq. At the same time, religious tolerance did not mean a lack of hierarchy and discrimination. For most of history, Muslims held power over Jews and Islam was promoted as the superior religion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.