Simon Johnson
speaker
295 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Simon Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Which strategy did the Europeans choose to pursue for their own self-interest?
You actually made two points there, Robert.
Let me take them separately because they're both very important.
The first is on the caveat.
Yes, you're absolutely right that indigenous people were not treated well in North America, Australia, or other places.
They were pushed aside.
They also suffered from the diseases the Europeans brought.
I think everybody's heard about the impact of smallpox, for example.
Yeah.
And there were many tragedies that happened with long lasting impacts, including on the lives of people descended from indigenous Americans, native Americans today.
But in addition to that, Robert, I would want to emphasize that slavery in the United States is a very strong counter to,
the idea that somehow the US got only good institutions and it was only fair for everybody and so on and so forth.
It was for the Europeans who were almost entirely white Europeans.
That was the setup.
That was who they were trying to bring over.
And of course, many of them would come with no money.
The Irish who came after the potato famine, the Italians who came later in the 19th century, but they were eventually able to establish themselves with more or less equal rights with other white people who'd arrived earlier.
For slaves and former slaves, it has been a lot more difficult.
for reasons you understand.
And of course, what's interesting and important and terrible is that even after the end of slavery, a lot of the mechanisms of oppression for black people in many American states, including the deep South, persisted.
Showing 81–100 of 295 · page 5 of 15
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