Earlylands in Conversation

Earlylands Advisory
  • 5.0 (11)
  • News Commentary

A discussion series with leading thinkers focused on issues at the intersection of business, politics, and culture. Whether it be trends in corporate deal-making, shifts in geopolitics, or notable new writing, our aim is to focus on the ideas and themes that drive headlines, inform boardroom conversations, and motivate policymakers.

  1. 3d ago

    Ep. 38 - "A Struggle Over Global Order": Russia Expert Dr. Hanna Notte on Why Moscow's Campaign for Global Legitimacy Runs Through Africa

    At the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg in the summer of 2023, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told an audience of African dignitaries that Russian soldiers were dying in Ukraine so that Africa could be free. Dr. Hanna Notte, in her new book We Shall Outlast Them: Putin's Global Campaign to Defeat the West (W. W. Norton, 2026), explains why a line like that gets a hearing. Once it became clear the Ukraine war would not be short, Moscow largely retired 'denazification' as a justification for its invasion and instead replaced it with a story about a West practising a new colonialism through a Ukrainian proxy, pitched directly at memories of the real thing in the Global South. Notte's argument is that the war is a contest over global order, and Africa is one of the places where Russia is contesting it most aggressively. Dr. Hanna Notte is director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and has written on Russian foreign policy for the New York Times, the Financial Times and Foreign Affairs. She lives in Berlin. Her book is built on reporting from more than a dozen countries, including field work in South Africa with ANC veterans and interviews with Russian officials, businessmen, and propagandists. Former White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan calls the book a 'master class in modern statecraft'. Our conversation cover the channels Moscow uses on the continent, from reopened embassies and Russian Houses to RT and the Africa Corps that replaced Wagner, why Soviet-era gratitude in the Global South has accrued to Russia rather than Ukraine, and what the West and Kyiv should do differently when trying to counter Russia's narrative. If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen. Books Mentioned on the Podcast-We Shall Outlast Them: Putin's Global Campaign to Defeat the West by Hanna Notte-From Sovereigns to Servants: How the War Against Ukraine Reshaped Russia's Elite by Alexandra Prokopenko

  2. Sep 1

    Ep. 37 - "It Wasn't Lack of Conversation, It Was a Lack of Understanding": Bancroft Prize-Winning Historian Odd Arne Westad on What 1914 Teaches Us About 2026

    In 1914 the heads of state of Germany, Russia, and Britain were cousins. They knew each other intimately and they corresponded constantly. What they could not do was understand what the others were actually trying to achieve, and historian Arne Westad thinks that failure is the lesson from 1914 that we have the most to learn from today. Westad's new book is The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict,and Warnings from History, published in March by Henry Holt in the United States and Penguin in the United Kingdom. The book argues that the present arrangement of global power resembles the decades before 1914, when a widening field of countries competed for regional dominance and nationalism and populism rose together. In our conversation we cover how Westad's thesis applies to the myriad conflicts and disputes playing out in the world of 2026. The Financial Times called The Coming Storm fluently written and wide-ranging. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Elizabeth Samet said Westad performs an urgent and inestimable service. Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a fellow of the British Academy and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His earlierbook The Global Cold War won the Bancroft Prize and reset how the Cold War is written by telling it through the interventions in the Global South, Africa most prominently. Restless Empire, his history of Chinese foreign relations since the eighteenth century, won the Asia Society Book Award. Recorded in June 2026. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen. Books Mentioned on the Podcast:-The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad -The Curse of Empire: Ukraine, Poland, and the Fatal Paths in Russian History by Martin Schulze Wessel -The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark -Haunted by Chaos: China's Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping by Sulmaan Wasif Khan

  3. Aug 11

    Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 36 - Good Intentions and Bad Ideas: Historian Bronwen Everill on Two Centuries of Western Economic Advice in Africa

    It can be argued that each generation of Western development expert arrives in Africa convinced the previous generation got it wrong, and leaves having made a version of the same mistake. Trade, then agricultural productivity, then trade again, then structural adjustment, followed by microcredit. Historian Bronwen Everill, in her book Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance (The New Press, 2025; William Collins, 2024), traces that cycle from the abolition of the slave trade to the current competition over critical minerals, and finds one premise sitting underneath every iteration: that African economies would work if only they looked more like Western ones. Africonomics was shortlisted for the 2025 British Academy Book Prize, took second place for the BCA African Business Book of the Year, and drew a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Browen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the former director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. She teaches in the Princeton Writing Program and is a research affiliate at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past at Stellenbosch University. This is our last episode before a short summer break. Wewill be back with a new conversation in September. If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen. Books Mentioned on the Podcast -Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance by Bronwen Everill -Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World by YepokaYeebo -The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! by Keletso E. Atkins -The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana: A Study in Rural Capitalism by Polly Hill

  4. Jul 28

    Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 35 - "Russia Has Leaned Into Its Worst Impulses": RUSI’s Dr. Jack Watling on Ukraine's Changed Battlefield Dynamic

    Russia's military is materially weaker today than it was a year ago, and Ukraine has established an asymmetric approach that drives up the cost of every Russian advance. Yet those facts still do not guarantee Kyiv the ending it wants. Dr. Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and one of the world's leading experts on the war in Ukraine. He is also the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Pan Macmillan, 2026) and has spent the past four and a half years moving between London and Kyiv. His method rests on primary research: time with Ukrainian units at the front rather than reassessment of other people's data points. In this conversation: what the Ukrainians solved between 2024 and the beginning of 2026 and what the Russians did not; Russian force quality and replacement rates; why Jack believes the war has reached a turning point and why that is not the same as a happy ending; and the signposts he is watching over the next six to twelve months. We recorded as the news was breaking out of Kyiv about the replacement of Ukraine's defense minister and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so we do not address those changes directly. If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen. Books Mentioned on the Podcast -Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling-Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott-Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham

  5. Jul 14

    Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 34 - "Do More With Less": Traxtion CEO James Holley on Turning Africa's Rail Bottlenecks Into a Continental Business

    Rail rarely makes headlines, but it may be doing more to shape Africa's economic trajectory than any single mine or trade deal. James ('Jamie') Holley is CEO of Traxtion, the largest privately owned rail operator on the continent, with a deployed fleet of over 55 locomotives across ten countries, from South Africa's core network to the Tazara line linking Zambia to the Tanzanian coast. Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Jamie to unpack what it actually takes to revive neglected rail corridors, why private capital is willing to take on infrastructure risk that governments have struggled to manage, and what a serious Transnet turnaround could mean for South Africa and the wider region. The numbers do the arguing. The Johannesburg-Durban line still runs on 1970s signalling, moving freight over 710 kilometers in roughly three days when it was designed to run trains every 20 minutes on an 18-hour transit. Modern positive train control could cut that to under ten hours and let Traxtion invoice the same train six times more often in a month. That gap between what the infrastructure could do and what it currently does is the essence of the conversation. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please like and follow. Books Mentioned on the Podcast-Railroader: The Unfiltered Genius and Controversy of Four-Time CEO Hunter Harrison by Howard Green-SwitchPoints: Culture Change on the Fast Track to Business Success by Judy Johnson, Les Dakens, Peter Edwards, and Ned Morse

  6. Jun 30

    Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 33 - Whose Dirt Is It Anyway: Chatham House’s Chris Vandome on the Politics of African Mineral Wealth

    Critical minerals have become the connective tissue of modern geopolitics, linking energy security, manufacturing, and great power competition in ways that didn't exist a decade ago. Christopher Vandome leads the Critical Minerals Initiative at Chatham House, the London-based foreign policy think tank, where he's also a senior research fellow with both the Global Economy and Finance Programme and the Africa Programme. Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Chris to unpack the African critical minerals story: the geopolitics, the financing gaps, and the question of who actually captures the value when resource wealth meets global demand. The conversation goes deep on Zambia and the broader southern Africa region, where mining policy, industrial strategy, and great power competition are converging in real time. A sharp, on-the-ground look at one of the defining economic and security stories on the African continent. Books Mentioned on the PodcastMining Is Dead, Long Live Geopolitical Mining by Marta Rivera & Eduardo Zamanillo Digging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa by Jade Davenport

  7. Jun 16

    Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 32 - From Dartmouth to Dar es Salaam: Clementine James on Building Africa's Critical Minerals Supply Chain

    The critical minerals story in Africa is typically told through the lens of geology, geopolitics, and finance. Rarely does anyone talk about the unglamorous reality that sits between the mine and the market: the roads, the trucks, the borders, and the sheer logistical challenge of moving product across some of the world's most difficult operating environments. Clementine James knows that reality better than almost anyone. As a director and owner of Alistair Group, one of Africa's premier logistics operators, she has spent her career moving freight across corridors that would humble most Western supply chain professionals. That she has done soas an American woman in one of the most male-dominated industries on earth makes her story all the more remarkable. Here is a number that puts the challenge in stark relief: a round trip between Dar es Salaam and Kolwezi takes her trucks two months to complete. Two months. In that single data point lives the entire story of what it actually takes to bring critical minerals to market. Clementine is also one of the clearest voices supporting development of the Lobito Corridor but also calling out the gap between the political hype around the initiative and the commercial framework that will determine whether it actually delivers. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please like and follow. Books mentioned on the podcast - The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius The Bang, Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

  8. Jun 2

    Earlylands in Conversation - Ep. 31 - From Zelenskyy's Office to the Frontlines: FT Kyiv Correspondent Christopher Miller on Ukraine's War of National Survival

    Throughout the course of the over four-year full-scale war in Ukraine, one of the most respected Western media outlets covering the conflict has been the Financial Times. The core ofthe FT's coverage has been provided by its Kyiv-based correspondent Chris Miller. Chris has lived and worked in Ukraine since 2010, when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in eastern Ukraine. The country is clearly in his blood, and his understanding of the Ukrainian people and their motivations is unparalleled among Western correspondents. He has probably spent more time with President Zelenskyy than any other journalist, and he continues to maintain a finger on the pulse of national-level Ukrainian politics while not losing sight of the realities of the war and its impacts on the Ukrainian people. Chris is the author of the 2023 book The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine, which won the 2024 Witold Pilecki Special Prize for Ukraine war reporting. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please like and subscribe.

See All (38)

5
out of 5
11 Ratings

About

A discussion series with leading thinkers focused on issues at the intersection of business, politics, and culture. Whether it be trends in corporate deal-making, shifts in geopolitics, or notable new writing, our aim is to focus on the ideas and themes that drive headlines, inform boardroom conversations, and motivate policymakers.

Information

  • Creator
    Earlylands Advisory
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    38
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Earlylands Advisory
  • Show Website
    Earlylands in Conversation