History Reconsidered is a weekly podcast dedicated to taking a deep dive into historical issues and events and relating them to the modern world. It is hosted by Sumantra Maitra and Jarrett Stepman.
Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a senior editor at The American Conservative, a senior contributor to The Federalist, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, and an elected, Associate Fellow at the Royal Historical Society, London. His book, “Sources of Russian Aggression” (Lexington-Rowman & Littlefield) is scheduled to be published in 2024.
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal and was a 2018 Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute. He’s spent over a decade in media and wrote “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” a book about how a cultural revolution aims at discrediting the foundations of the United States and the West.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
History Reconsidered is a weekly podcast dedicated to taking a deep dive into historical issues and events and relating them to the modern world. It is hosted by Sumantra Maitra and Jarrett Stepman.
Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a senior editor at The American Conservative, a senior contributor to The Federalist, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, and an elected, Associate Fellow at the Royal Historical Society, London. His book, “Sources of Russian Aggression” (Lexington-Rowman & Littlefield) is scheduled to be published in 2024.
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal and was a 2018 Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute. He’s spent over a decade in media and wrote “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” a book about how a cultural revolution aims at discrediting the foundations of the United States and the West.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this week's episode of History Reconsidered, Sumantra Maitra and Jarrett Stepman discuss the Opium Wars. In this case, not just the 19th century struggle between Great Britain and China, but the modern conflict between China and the West.
The Opium Wars are often pointed out as examples of Western colonial rapaciousness. The Chinese Communist Party frequently points to the conflicts in propaganda to justify its actions against the West, especially the United States. Many now contend that the flow of illicit fentanyl from China to the U.S. is "payback."
However, as Maitra and Stepman explain, the wars were much more complicated than the simple, modern narrative of oppressor country versus oppressed. It was a conflict sparked by vast cultural and legal differences between Eastern and Western regimes as well as a fair amount of weakness and folly from the Chinese government under the Qing dynasty.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.