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trial at shopify.com slash setup Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnham.

And me, William Turimple.

We are starting a brand new series today.

So welcome.

And if this is your first time dipping into Empire, welcome, welcome. And if you are

one of the people who follows us all the way through, I hope you really enjoyed the opium series that

we did. But what we normally do on Empire is we talk about the rise and fall of Empires. It does what

it says on the tin. We talk about history, but Empire has suddenly become current affairs. This is

the problem.

It really has. I mean, any time you turn on the news, you'll hear about trade wars, hot wars, expansion of territory, spheres of influence, and the end of an old world order.

And what you've got is a situation where you've got powerful men, they are men, hovering around maps with

sharpie pens and they're drawing circles around territory that they would like to expand

into either physically or with spheres of influence. So what we thought was a good idea,

because we look at history, that's what we're obsessed with, is we were going to look at the last time you had this kind of situation where you had men around a map

...