"This show starts against the romantic tropical backdrop of South America and features swashbuckIing daredeviIs, buried treasure, jungle adventures, brilliant color, philosophy, art, war, music, science, travel, and a megalomaniac evil." "Oh, and I forgot to mention, also religion, major disasters, and international skuIIduggery." "The usual humdrum run-of-the-miII history story." "And what's it about?" "It's about how history sometimes behaves just like your friendly local cinema." "It sometimes does reruns." "You know, an old idea with a new twist." "And when that happens, you find yourself with a definite sense of deja vu." "If you take a look at one of those old bIack-and-white adventure movies, you see how we Westerners used to think that, in going out and grabbing bits of the world, we were actually doing all the people" "we happened to be taking over a favor." "And since we hardly bothered to Iearn their languages, most of what they got up to just seemed like so much jungle mumbo jumbo." "So when the 16th-century Spanish conquistadors got up the South American jungle, without the help of subtitles or language courses, they tended to take much the same view of the locals they came across." "As far as they were concerned, well, the only good South American Indian was either dead, converted to Christianity, worked till he dropped, or best of all, sitting on top of a pile of gold and silver" "to which he invited you to help yourself, which kind of sums up what happened in Peru when Pizarro moved in on the Incas." "Of course, it was all worked out back home before they left." "I mean, even if columbus had gone back home to Europe without a clear idea of what he really stumbled across, it was better to have things properly planned for the conquest of whatever it might turn out to be, you know?" "So the Pope drew an imaginary Iine-- that one-- on an imaginary map of an imaginary world." "And if you were Spanish, everything west of this line was yours." "What a pleasant surprise that turned out to be." "In 1531 , fortunately for Pizarro, as he and his men advanced up the jungle, this plan for taking over Inca real estate met virtually no resistance, because, after a while, there was virtually nobody around to resist," "thanks to a devastating disease the Spaniards happened to be carrying at the time called smallpox to which the natives had no immunity and which conveniently reduced the local population of 30 million to 3 million." "With a little prodding from Rome," "Jesuit missionaries destroyed thousands of primitive temples and idols and other such religious paraphernalia and replaced them with this European equivalent." "They moved people out of their villages and into security compounds "for their own good"" "and then baptized them, as many as 1 ,500 a day." "They opened colleges and churches to train Indians for the priesthood." "That way, you could baptize more locals." "And once baptized, you were legally obliged to do what the Spaniards told you." "Neat trick, eh?" "From about 1550, there was an aII-out effort to make the settlers arriving from Spain feel really at home in the New world with posh accommodation in specially built imitation Spanish towns," "like Santo Domingo on the island of HispanioIa." "I mean, if you didn't remind yourself that you were out on the edge of the known world, you would've sworn you were in downtown Madrid if you came around a corner and bumped into this, eh?" "It's the palace of the governor of HispanioIa who was the son of Christopher columbus." "Come and take a look." "This would've been like sleeping in your own bed back in Spain." "classic Spanish dining room." "Spanish food of course, cooked in a traditional Spanish kitchen." "I wonder if they put the windows up here to hide the fact that out there was the middle of nowhere." "Of course, those who might have been tempted to hightail it back to home and mother when nostalgia for the old country got the better of them probably gave it second thoughts... given the death penalty for trying it." "So by and large, the settlers settled in considerable comfort, most of them in the gold and silver export business, by now pouring billions into the Spanish treasury." "Great news for the government back home in Spain." "I mean, you can't be too rich, can you?" "unfortunately for Spain, what you're looking at now is where most of that Inca money ended up, not in Spain, but belgium, here in Antwerp, with all these beautiful Renaissance palaces that pull the tourists in" "built with South American money." "Just thinking about the way a place like this looks," "I wonder if it's true that a place has a particular character." "I mean, Roman ruins, Paris boulevards," "Viennese baroque," "Renaissance palaces." "Because for one brief moment in the past, the place suddenly got loads of cash and spent all the money on improving the environment, knocking down the mishmash that had been there before, and doing the whole place up" "in the same posh style in fashion at the time on the basis of, if you've got it, flaunt it." "This is why Antwerp attracted money in the first place, because of what you could buy here, which was just about anything from just about anywhere." "Now, I expect you're already noticing the one word missing from this little showcase is the word "Spanish."" "See, all those settlers out in South America with all that Inca money to spend couldn't get the luxuries they could now afford from Spain because the Spanish domestic economy just wasn't diversified enough to come up with the goods." "But the international port of Antwerp, which, at the time, belonged to Spain, was." "So with all the general wheeling and dealing, it won't surprise you to know that Antwerp also kicked off the stock market." "The first one ever started here in 1531 with all the discount rates, bills of exchange, commodity prices, promissory notes, bulk trading, credit transfer, clearing houses, and the general pandemonium and financial gobbIedygook that stock markets have been ever since." "Because what all that Inca silver had done was turn Western life into the money-go-round it is today." "Precious metals poured down these South American rivers, across the atlantic, and into Antwerp in the form of silver bullion and poured out again in the form of mortgages, credit notes, loans, you name it." "For the first time, you could make big money by doing nothing." "AII you had to have was money." "And there was now more of that around than ever before... which is why colonies were invented, Iike this english colony in Virginia." "See, at the time, the new way for a European country to be powerful, win wars, and so on was to have a new thing called a positive balance of trade." "AII that meant was getting your hands on as much as possible of that Inca silver floating around Europe by selling things to other countries, and the cheaper your manufacturing costs, of course, the more profit you made" "and the more positive your balance of trade." "Hence, the colonies, whose only purpose in life, apart from producing the bare necessities to keep themselves going, was to produce some commodity or other that you could sell all over Europe for large amounts of money." "The commodity here in Virginia was tobacco, which, by law, had to be sent only to england only on english ships with only english crews to only english merchants in only english ports." "Putting the squeeze on a colony like this meant everybody back in england really made a packet." "The only people who didn't clean up were the colonists who didn't get to see any of the profits they had so kindly generated for the mother country." "actually, come to think of it, some of the money did end up getting back here." "Here, to williamsburg or, to be more exact, to the building behind me." "It's the college of william and Mary." "Nice, isn't it?" "The second oldest in the U.S." "and a real pioneer in education and, more to the point, founded in 1693 with some of those trading profits I was talking about." "well, trading profits may not be quite the right way to describe them because this is where history makes some really extraordinary connections." "One, two, three, four, five" "There was one other way besides trade to get your hands on Inca silver:" "knocking off Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean on their way back from South America and, since anybody else might then take the treasure off you, burying it temporarily for safekeeping." "Look at that." "Who knows how much treasure is still buried out here that they never came back for, eh?" "By "they," I mean the kind of criminals who lived in this place:" "Port royal, Jamaica." "It was a certain type of person with whom otherwise quite respectable governments, especially the english, made the kind of arrangements that make Watergate look like Sunday school." "I am, of course, talking pirates, most of whom were quietly under rob, pillage, and plunder contract to the english government in return for 50%/ of whatever it was they managed to knock off," "all strictly deniabIe of course." "I said they lived here in Port royal, but not for long, because at 1 1 :57 on June the 7th, 1692, everybody's contract was cancelled by that thing they always put in small print:" ""Act of God,"" "an earthquake that would have been off the Richter scale if they'd had one." "They never got the place straightened up since." "Oh, I forgot the payoff." "You remember I mentioned strange connections?" "well, here's one." "Since pirate profits could sometimes go as high as 5,000%/ , sometimes, some of these privateering characters would do a little freelance work, and sometimes, they'd get caught," "like a fellow called Wafer, whose punishment was his back pay for three years, money which the english government then used to set up the william and Mary college in Virginia." "Remember?" "meanwhile, more strange connections." "One of the other pirates at Port royal was a fellow called william Dampier, and at one point, he went off down to the Yucatan to recruit a bunch of bloodthirsty buccaneers for a grand attack on Panama City." "Now, those recruits only did their pirating part-time when they weren't cutting this stuff:" "Iogwood." "You find it all over South America." "You can get a great purple dye from Iogwood because there are crystals of the dye inside the wood, worth a fortune back then." "So some of the Spanish galleons that these Iogwood cutters turned pirates hit for their gold and silver also carried Iogwood cargos and the other luxury dye for Mexico, cochineaI." "Back in england, the hijacked cochineaI was mainly used to dye the First Army uniforms, kicking off the idea of redcoats and regimentation." "The concept of military discipline was taken several steps further by a distant ancestor of the lady reviewing the British guards here today." "She's elizabeth II." "The ancestor was Frederick the Great of Prussia, who practically invented the modern army with spit and polish, iron discipline, and permanently clean weapons." "Frederick also introduced compulsory military service, brutal punishment, the slow and quick march, and regular pay." "In 17 42, he cut troop formations to three ranks to make them more maneuverable and to drill them round the clock." "Not surprisingly, he won every battle he fought." "Now, Fred was also nuts about anything French, and at this time, they were heavily into education theory." "So being a thorough Prussian, Fred took things to extremes, set up the first ministry of education, primary school system, regular exams, school inspectors, made the whole thing compulsory, made German kids what they are today," "disciplined and knowledgeable, which got his in-house philosopher thinking about knowledge." "And in the nutshell this program has to put everything, here's what he came up with." "The only way that anything you know-- reality out there-- has any order to it is because your mind gives it order with categories." "What is something?" "What does it do?" "Where is it?" "When is it?" "For instance, fire heats here now." "Once you've put the world into those categories, you can fill in the details." "And he also said, knowledge is really only two things:" "history--categorizing everything in time-- and geography--categorizing everything in place, music to the ears of simpIifiers like me." "Thank you, ImmanueI Kant, whose ideas also persuaded a young man to leave the elegant sitting rooms of berlin for the dubious pleasures of the jungle." "The young man's name was alexander HumboIdt, and in 1799, all excited by what Kant had said about categorizing knowledge, he went off to spend five years in South America inventing geography and environmentalism." "Everywhere he went, he saw evidence of the intimate relationship between plants and animals and people and the place where they lived." "The environment held the key to success for all Iife-forms." "Humans were no different from the nature all around them." "When he got back home," "HumboIdt wrote the best seller of all time about his trip and changed everything people thought about the world." "In 187 4, one of HumboIdt's greatest fans, a German travel writer called RatzeI, went on a tour of the United States, and it hit him like a ton of bricks." "HumboIdt was right." "Environment was everything." "A nation was just like an organism in nature." "It needed space to thrive and multiply and spread." ""Look at the U.S.," he said." "" Big country, big future."" "What Germany needed was room to breathe-- colonies." "fortunately for RatzeI, the theory of evolution has just come out, so he goes home, puts together a mishmash of Darwin and HumboIdt, and starts laying them in the aisles with public lectures on the subject of human geography." "totally hits the spot with his German conationaIs who've just become a united country for the first time and are thinking of, well, moving out and taking over here and there." "But RatzeI really blows them away when he starts to talk about how there's only room on the planet for one superstate, how nations and nature obey the same rules of survival." "In 1932, the book RatzeI had written about his theory excited a fellow called Haushofer, one of whose politically radical friends was in jail and writing his own book." "When Haushofer showed him RatzeI's work, this guy read just what he was thinking himself." "only through expansion could Germany fulfill her destiny as one of history's winners." "Superior organisms like Germany needed room." "So when his book came out, it was all there:" "racial purity, Aryan conquest, world domination." "I presume you've guessed the name of this author." "deutschland, Sieg heil!" "hell!" "well, that's almost it." "The name of that book that RatzeI was inspired by HumboIdt to write when he got back from America, the one about expand and take over, was "Lebensraum."" "And thanks to Haushofer and his pals in prison," ""Lebensraum"-- "Expansionism"-- became part of Nazi policy." ""Lebensraum" plans came in several stages." "After winning the war in 1942, the plan would be-- what else?" "Move out and take over." "Make sure of raw material supplies forever by grabbing central Africa and then South America, with plans for the locals here almost exactly the same as those of the Spanish conquerors centuries before." "fortunately for the locals here and for the rest of us, that particular example of history repeating itself never made it past the Nazi moviemakers." "Hasta Ia vista."