Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast.

I'm John Galaher, and this edition is part of our series

New Thinking, looking at new research in UK universities. Today we're talking about first

encounters. We're talking Columbus and Gwakanagari in 1492, the meeting of Cortez and

Magtizuma in 1519. We're thinking about the year 1616 when the Englishman Thomas Rowe met the

Mughal Emperor Jahangir the same year that Pocahontas first set foot in Plymouth. With me today

are Dr. Claudio Rogers, formerly of the University of Sheffield and now at the University

of Leeds and Professor Nandini Das of the University of Oxford. Nandini, what is a first encounter

and is the idea as simple as it sounds? It's a tricky question really because it depends on

which perspective you're taking when you're asking about first encounters. Who's at a first

fall? The viewer who's looking at this inhabitant of a new world for the first time,

and for that matter, what's a new world anyway? How long does it stay new? One of the things

that keep coming up, and I think this is really exciting at the moment, is that people are really

drilling down into those questions. I mean, asking the really naively useful questions

about that term, first encounter. So just to give you an example, if you're looking at South Asia,

for instance, it's very easy to imagine that the first encounter then becomes an encounter between the English and

the Indians in the Indian subcontinent. But of course, there's a huge range of global trade

that was already going on in that world. The Portuguese were already there. The Dutch were casting

sideways eyes at it. There were a few kind of inklings of other foreign traders

...