Shows
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Economy of WarHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today’s episode is The Economy of War—the machinery beneath the speeches, the quiet engine that makes conflict not only possible but increasingly likely. You asked the right questions: who, why, when. And you framed it perfectly: this becomes more and more ardent. It doesn’t stay a background detail. It moves forward until it becomes a kind of gravity.To understand the economy of war after 1918, you have to abandon the comforting idea that war is only a political decision made in a room by...
2026-02-1613 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Victors in Fear: Britain and France Hold the LineHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Four of our buildup arc is The Victors in Fear: Britain and France Hold the Line.If you want to understand the interwar period properly, you have to strip away the victory photographs. The leaders look composed. The flags look proud. The map looks controlled. But underneath, Britain and France are not walking into peace—they’re walking into fragility. They have won, and they are terrified. Not theatrically. Structurally. Because they can feel, in their bones, that the old European order has been damage...
2026-02-1509 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallRussia: Retreat, Revolution, and the New EmpireHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Three of our buildup arc is Russia: Retreat, Revolution, and the New Empire.If Germany is the story of a crown falling and a republic trying to stand upright in a storm, Russia is something else entirely. Russia is what happens when an empire doesn’t merely lose a war, but loses the right to command reality. It is the moment a state’s voice stops sounding like fate and starts sounding like a weak man pleading. And once that happens, the world changes shape...
2026-02-0911 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Crown Falls-The Republic Bleeds.Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Two of our buildup arc is Germany: The Crown Falls, the Republic Bleeds.The most dangerous moment in a collapsing empire is not the day it loses. It’s the day it loses and then must decide what the loss means. Because meaning is power. Meaning determines who is blamed, who is trusted, who is allowed to rule, and what violence is permitted in the name of restoration.Germany in late 1918 is not simply defeated. It is unmade.The Kaiser is g...
2026-02-0508 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall1918–1919: The Peace That Continued the WarHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode One of our buildup arc is 1918–1919: The Peace That Continued the War.The first thing to understand about the armistice is that it doesn’t feel like victory in the bodies of the people who survived. It feels like the gun finally stopping after you’ve lived so long with noise that silence itself is suspicious. The world in late 1918 is not a relieved world. It’s a stunned world. A world of men trying to walk on legs that aren’t there. A world of wom...
2026-02-0410 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-Hitler and ChurchillHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve just walked out of Versailles—the great paper ending that doesn’t end anything—and now we take the next step exactly where you want it: into two men who had every reason, as human beings, to understand what modern war really is… and who still carried the old dreams forward anyway.This is not an episode about “great men” in the flattering sense. It’s an episode about a frightening continuity: the way an industrial slaughter can make people more addicted to myth, not less. Th...
2026-02-0106 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-Coming HomeHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today’s episode is called After the Guns: The War That Stayed in the Mind. Because the deeper claim is simple and brutal: 1914–1918 doesn’t end. It mutates. It changes the nervous system, the language, the politics, the moral imagination. The armistice stops the artillery. It does not stop the war inside the people who had to live under it.Let’s begin with one survivor coming home.He steps off a train into a station that looks ordinary, almost boring, and it hits him l...
2026-01-2911 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall.-After the WarHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today’s episode is about what the war did after the war. About how 1914 to 1918 didn’t just end with an armistice. It went underground. It moved into language, into nerves, into politics, into the way whole societies learned to see the world. It became a new operating system for humanity.Because war on this scale doesn’t only kill bodies. It kills assumptions.Before 1914, there is a belief—sometimes explicit, sometimes just felt—that modernity means improvement. That education makes people better. That science...
2026-01-2911 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The MailbagHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’re keeping the format, keeping the big machine in view, but we’re going to keep pressing the ear to the envelope—because the ugly truth isn’t in the treaty language, it’s in what a person can barely bring themselves to write.Picture the mail bag moving in the opposite direction of the front. It is the strangest artery of the war: paper carrying love and reassurance and small domestic facts through a world where flesh is being torn apart. A soldier writes becau...
2026-01-2910 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The AttackHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Lets keep the larger format, keep the bigger-picture engine running, but deepen the personal enough that the disgrace and terror can’t be politely ignored. Not “war is hell” as a slogan. The lived thing. The human nervous system inside the machine.Lets do this in one continuous flow, with the war’s voices pressed closer to the ear. Not a list. Not a collage. Just the sense of a few ordinary people moving through the same system that politicians called “necessary.”Imagine a young infant...
2026-01-2915 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The LettersHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today we’re going to listen to the war the way most people actually encountered it at the time: through letters, speeches, headlines, sermons, royal proclamations, casualty lists, and rumors that moved faster than truth. We’re going to sit inside the gap between what the empires said and what the ordinary person lived. Because that gap is where the machine hides.It’s hard now to remember how quickly Europe moved from peace into a kind of collective trance. Not because people were stupid. Because...
2026-01-2914 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The SlaughterHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And today we’re going to do what polite history often avoids. We’re going to go down into the slaughter field and stay there long enough that it stops being “strategy” and becomes what it really was for the people who lived it: noise, mud, waiting, terror, and the steady realization that the state had turned the human body into raw material.Abstraction is how empires get away with it. Abstraction is how millions die while speeches remain elegant.So let’s say it plain...
2026-01-2916 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-Why Soldiers WentHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And before we step into the July Crisis and the opening months of 1914 and something that deserves to be said plainly, without flinching: the ordinary human being—young men especially, but also the families, the workers, the civilians—became cannon fodder in the millions and millions for imperial calculations and nationalist stories. And at the beginning, many went willingly. Not because they loved death, but because they didn’t understand what modern war had become. Because they were naïve about the scale. Because they trusted t...
2026-01-2910 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall - The RehearsalsHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve moved into the Balkans, into the seam where old empires crack and new nations sharpen themselves like blades. And now we come to something that feels, at first, almost reassuring: the crises before 1914, the near misses, the moments when Europe comes close to the abyss and then steps back.But here is the cruel truth. Near misses don’t always teach caution. Sometimes they teach confidence. Sometimes they teach that escalation works. Sometimes they teach that you can mobilize and threaten and posture and st...
2026-01-2912 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Age of Attrition 1918 — The Armistice and the Peace That Wasn’t Peace1918 — The Armistice and the Peace That Wasn’t PeaceBy the time the guns stopped, the war had already done its deepest work. Not only on borders, but on minds. What ended in November 1918 was the shooting. What did not end was the pressure that produced the shooting in the first place. That pressure simply changed form. It moved into treaties, reparations, revolutions, resentments, and the private aftermath carried by millions of damaged people who returned home to countries that no longer felt like the countries they had left.In the autumn of 1918, Germany was coll...
2026-01-2814 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Age of Attrition 1918 — The Last Gamble 1918 — The Last GambleIn early 1918 the war reached a strange moment of imbalance. Russia was out. The Eastern Front, which had consumed German divisions for years, had vanished. German leaders believed they finally had what they had been missing since 1914: a temporary window—just a few months—when they could concentrate force in the west before the United States could fully arrive. It was not optimism. It was calculation. A final throw of the dice.The treaty that sealed Russia’s exit, Brest-Litovsk, had freed German troops, but it had not freed Germany from hunger. The Brit...
2026-01-2509 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Age of Attrition 1917 — Mutiny, Submarines, and the Breaking Point1917 — Mutiny, Submarines, and the Breaking PointBy 1917, the war had entered a phase no one had planned for and no one could control. The optimism of 1914 was long dead, and even the grim determination of 1916 had begun to rot from within. The armies still faced each other across the Western Front, but beneath the surface, the foundations of the war effort were cracking. This was no longer only a struggle of armies. It was a struggle of societies—of food, morale, discipline, belief, and patience.On the Western Front, the trenches remained largely where they had...
2026-01-2006 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Age of Attrition 1917: The War Breaks the World By 1917 the war no longer pretended to be about glory. Whatever illusions survived 1914 had been buried in mud, wire, and arithmetic. This was now a war of exhaustion, and everyone involved knew it, even if they could not yet say it aloud. The question was no longer who would win quickly, but who could endure longer—economically, politically, psychologically.On the Western Front the lines still ran like scars across France and Belgium. Millions of men had rotated through the trenches, but the geography barely moved. The great battles of the previous year—Verdun and the Somme—had pr...
2026-01-2006 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThe Age of Attrition. 1916 — Verdun, The Somme, and the Arithmetic of Endurance.Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Three: 1916 — Verdun, The Somme, and the Arithmetic of Endurance.By 1916, the war has stopped pretending. The speeches can still use the old words—honor, duty, glory—but the battlefield is now speaking a newer language, colder and more precise. It speaks in tonnage, in supply lines, in shell production, in rail schedules, in replacement drafts, in body counts. It speaks in the logic of systems. And the most frightening thing about that logic is that it do...
2026-01-2011 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall The Age of Attrition. 1915 — Trenches, Stalemate, and the Invention of Modern Suffering.Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Two: 1915 — Trenches, Stalemate, and the Invention of Modern Suffering.By the start of 1915 the great illusion of 1914 had already collapsed, but it hadn’t been replaced by clarity. What replaced it was something worse: a kind of stubborn fog. Leaders, generals, newspapers, and ordinary people all felt—without quite saying it out loud—that the war was going to be longer and darker than promised. But nobody yet had a new story strong enough to hold what...
2026-01-2011 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWorld War One — The Age of Attrition 1914 — The Illusion of a Short WarIn the summer of 1914, Europe did not feel like a continent about to commit suicide. It felt like a machine that had been running smoothly for decades, loud but familiar, proud of its engineering, proud of its empires, proud of its armies, and confident that history belonged to it. The cities were electric with modern life: trains, telegraphs, newspapers, factories, parliaments, stock exchanges, cafés. The educated classes argued about art and science and nationalism as if those things were distinct categories. The working classes lived closer to the ground, closer to hunger and fatigue, but even there the m...
2026-01-2013 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWar 1870 - 1949 How Empires Rise and Fall 1914: Ultimatum and Mobilizations1914: Ultimatum and MobilizationHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve moved into the Balkans, into the seam where old empires crack and new nations sharpen themselves like blades. And now we come to something that feels, at first, almost reassuring: the crises before 1914, the near misses, the moments when Europe comes close to the abyss and then steps back.But here is the cruel truth. Near misses don’t always teach caution. Sometimes they teach confidence. Sometimes they teach that escalation works. Sometimes they teach that you can mobili...
2026-01-1512 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWar 1870 - 1949 How Empires Rise and Fall The Balkans: The Loaded CornerHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Last time we built the alliance machine—how fear becomes commitment, how commitment becomes credibility, and how credibility becomes a trap. Today we move to the place where that machine is most likely to seize and throw sparks.The Balkans.I want you to picture the Balkans not as a simple region on a map, but as a fault line. A seam in the world. A place where empires overlap, where identities tangle, where languages and religions and memories live on top of each...
2026-01-1511 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallWar 1870 - 1949 How Empires Rise and Fall Alliances: Promises That Become TrapsWar 1870 - 1949 How Empires Rise and Fall Alliances: Promises That Become TrapsHello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve walked through nationalism as faith, empire as prestige addiction, and the naval race as fear made visible. And now we come to the architecture that ties all of it together—the thing that turns anxiety into obligation, and obligation into catastrophe.Alliances.At first glance, alliances look like common sense. If you are a state that fears a stronger neighbor, you find friends. If you are a state...
2026-01-1512 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallEmpires Overseas, Rivalries at Home (colonies, prestige, and the pressure valve that fails)Empires Overseas, Rivalries at Home (colonies, prestige, and the pressure valve that fails)Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Last time we talked about the new religion—nationalism—and how modern states learn to shape identity through schools, flags, rituals, and mass politics. That was the inner engine, the part that lives inside the chest.Today we’re going to talk about the outer engine. The world beyond Europe. The maps painted in colors. The flags planted in distant soil. The idea that a nation’s greatness can be measured b...
2026-01-1515 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallSteel, Coal, Rail: When Industry Changes War (why the scale becomes unstoppable)Steel, Coal, Rail: When Industry Changes War (why the scale becomes unstoppable)Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And if you’ve been listening to the first steps of this season, you can already feel what’s happening: the map is changing, the alliances are beginning to stiffen, the great powers are recalibrating around a new Germany, and everyone is quietly preparing for a future they claim they don’t want.But none of that works—none of it scales to millions—unless something deeper is happening inside ordinary people. Insi...
2026-01-1514 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallGermany Rises, France Remembers (humiliation, revanche, and the psychology of a wounded nation)Germany Rises, France Remembers (humiliation, revanche, and the psychology of a wounded nation)Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Last time we began in 1870 because the catastrophe doesn’t begin with a match. It begins with a room filling with powder. And in 1871, that powder doesn’t just sit there. It settles into the lungs of Europe. It becomes memory. It becomes policy. It becomes a new geometry of fear.If you want a simple story, you can say the Franco–Prussian War ends and a new Germany...
2026-01-1514 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall 1870: The Spark Before the Fire (Franco-Prussian War and the birth of a new Germany)1870: The Spark Before the Fire (Franco-Prussian War and the birth of a new Germany)Hello and welcome. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And today we begin where the modern catastrophe starts to take shape—not with a gunshot in Sarajevo, not with a trench, not with a dictator on a balcony, but with a war that looks, on the surface, almost old-fashioned. Two armies, two states, a campaign that moves fast, a victory that seems decisive. And yet, underneath, you can feel the floor shifting. Because the Franco–Prussian War is not just a confli...
2026-01-1419 min
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallAbout WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallAbout WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and FallThis is a story about why war happens when nobody truly wants it—until suddenly, everyone does.If you grew up with the usual explanation, you were told the First World War begins with a gunshot in Sarajevo. A young man steps forward, fires two rounds, and the world falls apart. It’s neat. It’s cinematic. It has a villain, a victim, a turning point, and a date you can underline. It also has the comforting illusion that history is a line of dominoes and that one pushed t...
2026-01-1412 min