Dan Snow
speaker
15,041 appearances
104 recordings
11 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 2d ago
Dan Snow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 101 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 24.
Appearances
By the twenties, they're going to Africa.
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They're going to the what we'd now call the Red Sea, the Arabia.
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It is just extraordinary, the scale.
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They go to what is now Somalia, Mogadishu, Zanzibar, they bring back the animals I always think must be extraordinary.
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How do they try imagine transporting those camels, those rhinos all the way back from there?
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Why do they come to an end?
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Why do the Chinese retreat from these and don't build well the kind of European trading and then colonial empire that does emerge shortly after that?
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Well,
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While Ming power might have seemed absolutely unstoppable on these distant shores, cracks were beginning to show within the palace walls, even in the decades just after the death of the Yongle Emperor in 1424.
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The imperial court became increasingly consumed by political intrigue.
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Officials and powerful palace eunuchs competed for influence, rival factions grew more and more suspicious of one another.
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But the Ming did survive these early crises.
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In fact it would endure for another two centuries.
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But as the fifteenth century gave way to the sixteenth century,
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And the sixteenth, the seventeenth, those pressures would mount.
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The political fighting continued at court.
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While powerful enemies rose to threaten China's frontiers, wars would place great pressure on imperial finances.
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By the early 1600s, the Ming faced a really very dangerous combination of all these crises.
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Financial instability, harvest failure, an increasingly hostile climate.
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External enemies.
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Showing 181–200 of 15,041 · page 10 of 753
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