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00:22This show starts against the romantic tropical backdrop of South America and
00:28features swashbuckling daredevils, buried treasure, jungle adventures, brilliant color, philosophy,
00:34art, war, music, science, travel, and megalomaniac evil.
01:01Oh, and I forgot to mention also religion, major disasters, and international skullduggery.
01:09The usual humdrum, run-of-the-mill history story.
01:19And what's it about?
01:21It's about how history sometimes behaves just like your friendly local cinema.
01:27It sometimes does reruns.
01:30You know, an old idea with a new twist.
01:34And when that happens, you find yourself with a definite sense of déjà vu.
01:56If you take a look at one of those old black-and-white adventure movies, you see how we Westerners
02:02used to think that in going out and grabbing bits of the world, we were actually doing all
02:07the people we happened to be taking over a favour.
02:10And since we hardly bothered to learn their languages, most of what they got up to just seemed like
02:16so much jungle mumbo-jumbo.
02:22So when the 16th century Spanish conquistadors got up the South American jungle, without the help
02:29of subtitles or language courses, they tended to take much the same view of the locals they came across.
02:34As far as they were concerned, well, the only good South American Indian was either dead, converted
02:39to Christianity, worked till he dropped, or best of all, sitting on top of a pile of gold and silver
02:44to which he invited you to help yourself.
02:46Which kind of sums up what happened in Peru when Pizarro moved in on the Incas.
02:54Of course, it was all worked out back home before they left.
02:56I mean, even if Columbus had gone back home to Europe without a clear idea of what he really stumbled
03:01across,
03:02it was better to have things properly planned for the conquest of whatever it might turn out to be, no?
03:06So the Pope drew an imaginary line, that one, on an imaginary map of an imaginary world.
03:12And if you were Spanish, everything west of this line was yours.
03:19What a pleasant surprise that turned out to be.
03:29In 1531, fortunately for Pizarro, as he and his men advanced up the jungle, this plan for taking over Inca
03:36real estate met virtually no resistance.
03:38Because after a while, there was virtually nobody around to resist.
03:43Thanks to a devastating disease the Spaniards happened to be carrying at the time, called smallpox,
03:49to which the natives had no immunity, and which conveniently reduced the local population of 30 million to 3 million.
04:05With a little prodding from Rome, Jesuit missionaries destroyed thousands of primitive temples and idols,
04:12and other such religious paraphernalia, and replaced them with this European equivalent.
04:17They moved people out of their villages and into security compounds,
04:21quote, for their own good, unquote, and then baptized them.
04:24As many as 1,500 a day.
04:31They opened colleges and churches to train Indians for the priesthood,
04:34that way you could baptize more locals.
04:36And once baptized, you were legally obliged to do what the Spaniards told you.
04:41Neat trick, eh?
04:42From about 1550, there was an all-out effort to make the settlers arriving from Spain feel really at home
04:47in the New World,
04:48with posh accommodation in specially built imitation Spanish towns,
04:53like Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola.
04:57I mean, if you didn't remind yourself that you were out on the edge of the known world,
05:01you would have sworn you were in downtown Madrid if you came round a corner and bumped into this, eh?
05:08It's the palace of the governor of Hispaniola, who was the son of Christopher Columbus.
05:13Come and take a look.
05:19This would have been like sleeping in your own bed back in Spain.
05:32Classic Spanish dining room.
05:35Spanish food, of course, cooked in a traditional Spanish kitchen.
05:49I wonder if they put the windows up here to hide the fact that out there was the middle of
05:54nowhere.
06:01Of course, those who might have been tempted to hightail it back to home and mother
06:05when nostalgia for the old country got the better of them probably gave it second thought.
06:14Given the death penalty for trying it.
06:20So, by and large, the settlers settled.
06:24In considerable comfort.
06:26Most of them in the gold and silver export business by now pouring billions into the Spanish treasury.
06:33Great news for the government back home in Spain.
06:36I mean, you can't be too rich, can you?
06:56Unfortunately for Spain, what you're looking at now is where most of that Inca money ended up.
07:01Not in Spain, but Belgium.
07:03Here in Antwerp.
07:05With all these beautiful Renaissance palaces that pull the tourists in.
07:09Built with South American money.
07:16Just thinking about the way a place like this looks, I wonder if it's true that a place has a
07:20particular character.
07:22I mean, Roman ruins, Paris boulevards, Viennese baroque, Renaissance palaces.
07:28Because for one brief moment in the past, the place suddenly got loads of cash.
07:32And spent all the money on improving the environment.
07:36Knocking down the mishmash that had been there before,
07:38and doing the whole place up in the same posh style in fashion at the time.
07:43On the basis of, if you've got it, flaunt it.
07:51This is why Antwerp attracted money in the first place.
07:54Because of what you could buy here.
07:56Which was just about anything from just about anywhere.
08:01Now, I expect you're already noticing.
08:03The one word missing from this little showcase is the word Spanish.
08:07See, all those settlers out in South America, with all that Inca money to spend,
08:12couldn't get the luxuries they could now afford from Spain,
08:15because the Spanish domestic economy just wasn't diversified enough to come up with the goods.
08:24But the international port of Antwerp, which at the time belonged to Spain, was.
08:34So, with all the general wheeling and dealing, it won't surprise you to know that Antwerp also kicked off the
08:39stock market.
08:40The first one ever.
08:41Started here, in 1531, with all the discount rates, bills of exchange, commodity prices, promissory notes,
08:50bulk trading, credit transfer, clearing houses, and the general pandemonium and financial gobbledygook
08:56that stock markets have been ever since.
09:15Because what all that Inca silver had done was turn Western life into the money-go-round it is today.
09:20Precious metals poured down the South American rivers, across the Atlantic, and into Antwerp in the form of silver bullion,
09:27and poured out again in the form of mortgages, credit notes, loans, you name it.
09:31For the first time, you could make big money by doing nothing.
09:35All you had to have was money.
09:36And there was now more of that around than ever before.
09:44Which is why colonies were invented, like this English colony in Virginia.
09:49See, at the time, the new way for a European country to be powerful, win wars, and so on,
09:55was to have a new thing called a positive balance of trade.
09:59All that meant was getting your hands on as much as possible of that Inca silver floating around Europe
10:04by selling things to other countries.
10:06And the cheaper your manufacturing costs, of course, the more profit you made,
10:11and the more positive your balance of trade.
10:14Hence the colonies, whose only purpose in life, apart from producing the bare necessities to keep themselves going,
10:20was to produce some commodity or other that you could sell all over Europe for large amounts of money.
10:32The commodity here in Virginia was tobacco, which by law had to be sent only to England,
10:38only on English ships, with only English crews, to only English merchants, in only English ports.
10:45Putting the squeeze on a colony like this meant everybody back in England really made a packet.
10:52The only people who didn't clean up were the colonists,
10:55who didn't get to see any of the profits they had so kindly generated for the mother country.
11:06Actually, come to think of it, some of the money did end up getting back here.
11:12Here, to Williamsburg.
11:14Or to be more exact, to the building behind me.
11:18It's the College of William and Mary.
11:20Nice, isn't it?
11:21The second oldest in the US, and a real pioneer in education.
11:25And more to the point, founded in 1693, with some of those trading profits I was talking about.
11:33Well, trading profits may not be quite the right way to describe them.
11:38Because this is where history makes some really extraordinary connections.
11:47One, two, three, four, five...
11:50There was one other way, besides trade, to get your hands on Inca silver.
11:55Knocking off Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean, on their way back from South America.
12:00And, since anybody else might then take the treasure off you,
12:03burying it temporarily for safekeeping.
12:25Look at that!
12:29Who knows how much treasure is still buried out here that they never came back for, eh?
12:38By they, I mean the kind of criminals who lived in this place.
12:41Port Royal, Jamaica.
12:47It was a certain type of person, with whom otherwise quite respectable governments, especially the English,
12:53made the kind of arrangements that make Watergate look like Sunday School.
12:59I am, of course, talking pirates.
13:02Most of whom were quietly under rob, pillage and plunder contract to the English government,
13:07in return for 50% of whatever it was they managed to knock off.
13:10All strictly deniable, of course.
13:15I said they lived here in Port Royal, but not for long.
13:19Because at 1157 on June the 7th, 1692, everybody's contract was cancelled.
13:26By that thing they always put in small print.
13:28Act of God.
13:30An earthquake that would have been off the rector scale if they'd had one.
13:39They never got the place straightened up since.
13:41Oh, I forgot the payoff.
13:43You remember I mentioned strange connections?
13:45Well, here's one.
13:47Since pirate profits could sometimes go as high as 5,000%,
13:51sometimes some of these privateering characters would do a little freelance work,
13:55and sometimes they'd get caught.
13:57Like a fellow called Wafer, whose punishment was his back pay for three years.
14:02Money which the English government then used to set up the William and Mary College in Virginia.
14:08Remember?
14:10Meanwhile, more strange connections.
14:12One of the other pirates at Port Royal was a fellow called William Dampier,
14:16and at one point he went off down to the Yucatan to recruit a bunch of bloodthirsty buccaneers
14:21for a grand attack on Panama City.
14:28Now, those recruits only did their pirating part-time when they weren't cutting this stuff, logwood.
14:34You find it all over South America.
14:36You can get a great purple dye from logwood because there are crystals of the dye inside the wood.
14:41Worth a fortune back then.
14:43So some of the Spanish galleons that these logwood cutters turned pirates
14:47hit for their gold and silver also carried logwood cargoes.
14:51And the other luxury dye from Mexico, cochineal.
15:01Back in England, the hijacked cochineal was mainly used to dye the First Army uniforms,
15:06kicking off the idea of redcoats and regimentation.
15:18The concept of military discipline was taken several steps further by a distant ancestor of the lady reviewing the British
15:25guards here today.
15:27She's Elizabeth II.
15:28The ancestor was Frederick the Great of Prussia, who practically invented the modern army, with spit and polish, iron discipline,
15:36and permanently clean weapons.
15:39Frederick also introduced compulsory military service, brutal punishment, the slow and quick march, and regular pay.
15:47In 1742, he cut troop formations to three ranks to make them more manoeuvrable and drilled them round the clock.
15:54Not surprisingly, he won every battle he fought.
16:08Now, Fred was also nuts about anything French.
16:11And at this time, they were heavily into education theory.
16:14So being a thorough Prussian, Fred took things to extremes.
16:17Set up the First Ministry of Education, primary school system, regular exams, school inspectors.
16:23Made the whole thing compulsory.
16:25Made German kids what they are today.
16:27Disciplined and knowledgeable.
16:29Which got his in-house philosopher thinking about knowledge.
16:33And in the nutshell this program has to put everything.
16:35Here's what he came up with.
16:37The only way that anything you know, reality out there, has any order to it,
16:42is because your mind gives it order, with categories.
16:45What is something? What does it do? Where is it? When is it?
16:49For instance, fire, heats, here, now.
16:55Once you've put the world into those categories, you can fill in the details.
16:58And he also said, knowledge is really only two things.
17:02History, categorizing everything in time, and geography, categorizing everything in place.
17:08Music to the ears of simplifiers like me.
17:10Thank you, Immanuel Kant.
17:12Whose ideas also persuaded a young man to leave the elegant sitting rooms of Berlin
17:16for the dubious pleasures of the jungle.
17:25The young man's name was Alexander Humboldt, and in 1799, all excited by what Kant had said about categorizing knowledge,
17:33he went off to spend five years in South America, inventing geography and environmentalism.
17:40Everywhere he went, he saw evidence of the intimate relationship between plants and animals and people, and the place where
17:46they lived.
17:47The environment held the key to success for all life forms.
17:52Humans were no different from the nature all around them.
17:57When he got back home, Humboldt wrote the bestseller of all time about his trip, and changed everything people thought
18:04about the world.
18:13In 1874, one of Humboldt's greatest fans, a German travel writer called Ratzel, went on a tour of the United
18:21States.
18:22And it hit him like a ton of bricks.
18:24Humboldt was right. Environment was everything.
18:28A nation was just like an organism in nature.
18:31It needed space to thrive and multiply and spread.
18:35Look at the US, he said. Big country, big future.
18:39What Germany needed was room to breathe.
18:43Colonies.
18:49Fortunately for Ratzel, the theory of evolution has just come out, so he goes home, puts together a mishmash of
18:56Darwin and Humboldt,
18:57and starts laying them in the aisles with public lectures on the subject of human geography.
19:02Totally hits the spot with his German co-nationals, who've just become a united country for the first time,
19:07and are thinking of, well, moving out and taking over here and there.
19:10But Ratzel really blows them away when he starts to talk about how there's only room on the planet for
19:16one super-state.
19:17How nations and nature obey the same rules of survival.
19:23In 1932, the book Ratzel had written about his theory excited a fellow called Haushofer,
19:29one of whose politically radical friends was in jail and writing his own book.
19:33When Haushofer showed him Ratzel's work, this guy read just what he was thinking himself.
19:39Only through expansion could Germany fulfil her destiny as one of history's winners.
19:45Superior organisms like Germany needed room.
19:49So when his book came out, it was all there.
19:52Racial purity, Aryan conquest, world domination.
19:57I presume you've guessed the name of this author.
20:00Ratzel C. Hayes!
20:04Hayes!
20:06Hayes!
20:09Well, that's almost it.
20:12The name of that book that Ratzel was inspired by Humboldt to write when he got back from America,
20:16the one about expand and take over, was Lebensraum.
20:21And thanks to Haushofer and his pals in prison, Lebensraum, expansionism, became part of Nazi policy.
20:46Laban's round plans came in several stages.
20:48After winning the war in 1942, the plan would be, what else, move out and take over.
20:54Make sure of raw material supplies forever by grabbing Central Africa and then South America.
21:00With plans for the locals here almost exactly the same as those of the Spanish conquerors centuries before.
21:08Fortunately for the locals here, and for the rest of us,
21:11that particular example of history repeating itself never made it past the Nazi movie makers.
21:17Hasta la vista.
21:31And on the other side, we would love to come.
21:32Not the size of the European continent.
21:32And on the other side we will see.
21:36For more German shows in our firstjsiros,
21:37They Stella is an odd person here.
21:37I'm gone that way, and you know what I am.
21:37Do one more than that.
21:41What things happen here?
21:44The man she asks.
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