Nick Mackenzie

Global Blueprint: Extraction Goes Global

Society EN ↓ 5 episodes

The extraction models perfected in Latin America — the enclave economy, corporate-state collusion, infrastructure monopolies, and violent labor suppression — became the worldwide blueprint. The global sibling to Backyard Empire: deeply researched deep-dives into Shell in the Niger Delta, the pipelines of Myanmar, King Leopold's Congo, Firestone in Liberia, the cobalt of the Congo, and more — each tied back to its Latin American predecessor. We work from primary documents and peer-reviewed scholarship and keep contested history contested. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed resea...

Author

Nick Mackenzie

Episodes

A Child's Hand in a Clean Battery: The Human Cost of Congo's Cobalt 16.06.2026 51:27

The Congo has, for more than a century, been the place the world goes to dig up what it needs next — copper, uranium, and diamonds under Belgian rule; today cobalt and coltan, the metals in every smartphone battery and electric car. This finale of Global Blueprint traces the arc from Belgium's colonial giant Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (whose Katanga uranium fueled the first atomic bombs) to tod...

From Severed Hands to Firestone: The Tire Company That Funded a Warlord 16.06.2026 40:22

In 1926 an American tire company rented a tenth of a country. Firestone took up to a million acres of Liberia on a 99-year lease for almost nothing and turned it into the largest rubber plantation on earth. This episode of Global Blueprint follows it as a company-town enclave straight out of the United Fruit playbook — its own roads, stores, schools, and hospitals; American managers in comfortable...

How King Leopold Privately Owned the Congo: The Rubber Terror 15.06.2026 34:19

For twenty-three years, one man owned a country. The Congo Free State was not a Belgian colony — it was the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, run as a private enterprise to extract ivory and then wild rubber. This episode of Global Blueprint tells how Leopold's regime and its concession companies (like the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company) imposed brutal quotas on Congolese villag...

A Pipeline Built on Forced Labor: How Villagers Sued an Oil Company 15.06.2026 39:34

Off Myanmar's coast lies a field of natural gas, and to bring it ashore in the 1990s a French oil giant and an American one went into business with one of the world's most repressive militaries. This episode of Global Blueprint tells how TotalEnergies and Unocal — later absorbed by Chevron — partnered with the Burmese junta, through the state company MOGE, to build the Yadana gas project and its p...

Shell's Toxic Legacy in the Niger Delta 15.06.2026 37:21

Nigeria sits on some of the richest oil in Africa, and for most of the petroleum age a single Anglo-Dutch company pumped the largest share of it. The opening episode of Global Blueprint — the worldwide sibling to Backyard Empire — tells how Royal Dutch Shell, from the late 1950s, built an oil enclave in Nigeria's Niger Delta that drew billions of dollars in crude out of the ground while the commun...