AllMovie

The conclusion explores how the European colonization of Africa in the 19th century was "built on the ruins of African civilization," as narrator Peter Coyote puts it. Europeans used their superiority in arms and transport to conquer almost at will and force natives to abandon their traditional, agrarian ways of life. As a result, they lost the immunity to tropical diseases they had built up over millennia, and endemic poverty is its legacy. Jared Diamond hosts.