In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machines. Cybernetics was first defined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) and aimed to find a shared universal language which could be used across disciplines. The name drew on an Ancient Greek word for steersman, the person who stands at the helm of a ship to steer or govern its course. Cybernetics saw the world as systems which used loops of information and feedback to adjust their own course of action. Those ideas could be applied to anything from thermostats to the human brain, and arguably laid foundations for the information age.WithJacob Ward Historian of science and technology at Maastricht UniversityJon Agar Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College LondonAndOrit Halpern Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität DresdenProducer: Martha OwenReading list:Peter Galison, 'The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision' (Critical Inquiry 21, 1994)Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2004)Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke University Press, 2015)Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique (Grey Room 68, 2017) Orit Halpern, Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets (e-flux, March 2023)N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999)Steve J. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (MIT Press, 1980)Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age The Information Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011)David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010)Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (first published 1950; Da Capo Press, 1988)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under five year contracts of indenture across the empire from Guyana to Trinidad to Mauritius and Fiji and colonies in between. These indentured labourers were to share vivid accounts of deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. From the outset there were critics and opposition gained pace with Gandhi and others in South Africa arguing the system was close to slavery and calling for the Indian government to stop the practice, which was to happen in 1917 with the last shipments of people in the 1920s. Meanwhile, rather than return after their contracts, a section of indentured labourers stayed where they were for their own reasons, negotiating their new identities alongside formerly enslaved people and the planter culture in a new Indian diaspora.With Purba Hossain Lecturer in Modern History at the University of YorkNeha Hui Associate Professor in Economics at the University of ReadingAnd Clem Seecharan Emeritus Professor of History at London Metropolitan UniversityProduced by Simon TillotsonReading list:Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Hurst and Co., 2013)Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874 (Oxford University Press, 1995)Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (Anthem Press, 2002)Jonathan Connolly, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024)Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and David Dabydeen (eds.), The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire (Pluto Books, 2021)Neha Hui and Uma S. Kambhampati, ‘Between unfreedoms: The role of caste in decisions to repatriate among indentured workers’ (The Economic History Review 75:2, 2022)Neha Hui and Uma Kambhampati, ‘The political economy of Indian indentured labor in the nineteenth century (Journal of the History of Economic Thought 47:2, 2025)Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)Brij V. Lal, Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, 2004)Brij V. Lal, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations’ (Indian Economic & Social History Review 22:1, 1985)Andrea Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38’ (South Asian Studies 33:1, 2017)Basdeo Mangru, Indenture and Abolition: Sacrifice and Survival on the Guyanese Sugar Plantation (TSAR, 1993)Kalathmika Natarajan, Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Oxford University Press, 2026)Clem Seecharan, 'Tiger in the Stars': The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29 (Macmillan, 1997)Clem Seecharan, Finding Myself: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture (Peepal Tree Press, 2015)S. Sen, ‘Indentured labour from India in the age of empire’ (Social Scientist, 44:1/2, 2016)Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1974)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), the graphic artist and printmaker best known for his impossible buildings, paradoxical perspectives, and repeating geometric patterns. Born in Leeuwarden and trained as a printmaker, Escher visited the Alhambra in Granada and found inspiration in the tessellating shapes of Islamic art. Through his career he went on to create some of the most famous images of the twentieth century and has been called a one-man art movement. After his work was exhibited in a 1954 conference, Escher’s work also caught the eye of mathematicians who appreciated his intuitive geometric precision. Escher was influenced by their work, and they were influenced by his – despite Escher never thinking he was actually very good at maths himself.   WithMarcus du Sautoy Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of New College, University of Oxford   Sarah Hart Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London, and Fellow of Gresham College   And   Judith Kadee Exhibitions project manager and public programme curator at Hague Historical Museum   Producer: Martha OwenReading list:Marcus du Sautoy, Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity (Fourth Estate, 2025)Marcus du Sautoy, Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey Into Symmetry (Harper Perennial, 2009)Bruno Ernst, The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher (Taschen, 2007)M.C. Escher, M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work (Taschen America Llc, 1992)Miranda Fellows, The Life and Works of Escher (Siena,1996)Frederico Giudiceandrea, Escher op reis or Escher’s Journey (Publisher Wbooks, 2018, in Dutch)Sarah Hart, Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books, 2023)Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (first published 1979; Basic Books, 1999)Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry (Profile Books, 2007)Claudio Salsi, Paolo Branca and Claudio Bartocci (eds.), M.C. Escher. Tra arte e scienza. Catalogo della mostra (24 Ore Cultura, 2025, in Italian)Doris Schattschneider, “The Mathematical Side of M.C. Escher” (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 57, 6, 2010)Doris Schattschneider, M.C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2004)Wouter van Reek, Nadir & Zenith in the World of Escher (Leopold, 2019)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.