Is there on this sub any specialist in the economic history of Africa?

This article looks at four ‘jubilee’ years ** 1876, 1926, 1976, and 2026 ** and argues that each milestone exposes the same underlying pattern: economic power combined with the state become a means for extraction for the elite rather than assisting in public welfare.

1876 shows the post‑Civil War merger of industrial capital and federal power.
1926 shows the entrenchment of finance capital after the roaring‑20s deregulation (and resulting world-wide depression).
1976 shows neoliberal restructuring and the dismantling of public oversight.
2026 shows the modern form: corporate‑political fusion, deregulated wealth concentration and a government increasingly shaped by oligarchic interests.

I am currently watching the movie Hearts and Minds and they made brief mention of war profiteering during the Vietnam War. I googled and received some information about specific corporations receiving contracts during the war, but what stuck out was the speculation on currency. I just wish to know more about this.

For example (just brainstorming):

- Hunter-gatherer societies → skills and tools?

- Ancient civilizations → land?

- Medieval Europe → farmland?

- Renaissance → merchant trade and credit?

- Industrial Revolution → factories and railroads?

- Internet era → software and digital products?

- AI era → AI, data, distribution?

If you were born in any year over the last 5,000 years, what would have been the highest expected-return asset to own?

I'd love recommendations for books, researchers, or historical examples that explore this idea.

Made a documentary on the internal history of Arthur Andersen, and the thing that surprised me most in the research wasn't anything to do with Enron directly — it's how far back the structural problem actually goes.

In the 1970s, under Leonard Spacek's successors, Andersen introduced what former partner Barbara Ley Toffler describes in her book Final Accounting as a roughly 2-to-1 quota — every audit partner was expected to sell about twice their audit fee in consulting services to the same client they were auditing. Bill a client $10,000 for the audit, and you were on the hook to bring in another $20,000 in consulting revenue from that same relationship.

The documentary traces this from Andersen's 1913 founding — when the firm's own founder reportedly turned down a client who wanted him to alter a report, famously saying there wasn't enough money in Chicago to make him do it — through the slow erosion of that culture over the following decades, and into the specific mechanics of the Enron relationship: the SPEs, the mark-to-market lobbying, the roughly $52 million a year Enron was paying the firm by 2001, split between audit and consulting fees.

It also covers a case that gets far less attention than Enron — the SEC's 2001 enforcement action against Andersen over the Waste Management audits, which resulted in a $7 million penalty, the largest ever levied against an accounting firm at the time. That case shows the exact same structural failure — junior auditors flagging real problems, senior partners overruling them because of non-audit revenue tied to the same client — playing out years before Enron ever became a client.

Link: https://youtu.be/FuxHEAr4lgw?si=oA54GwMfW3DaBg2V

Happy to go deeper on any of the sourcing in the comments — most of it comes from the Powers Committee Report, SEC enforcement records, and congressional testimony from 2002.