From the first Portuguese caravels rounding Cape Bojador in 1434 to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 that carved Africa into colonies, this show traces how a handful of European powers—Portugal, Spain, the Dutch Republic, France, and Britain—projected their rivalries across the globe. Lucas and Luna navigate the trade forts of the Gold Coast, the spice markets of the Moluccas, and the rubber groves of the Congo. They examine the treaties (Tordesillas 1494, Utrecht 1713, Nanking 1842), the ideologies (mercantilism, the 'White Man's Burden'), the technologies (caravels, breech-loading rifles, quinine), and the human catastrophes—the Atlantic slave trade, the Congo Free State atrocities, the Sepoy Rebellion. They ask whether colonialism was an aberration or an extension of Europe's internal power struggles, and how its legacies survive in borders, languages, and global inequality. A show for listeners who want to understand how a few men in European capitals redrew the map and why the world still lives with those lines.

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