Produced by the BBC to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade, this series traces racism from a set of prejudices into an organized system of power. It opens with the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the Americas, where laws and pseudo-science were built to justify treating people as property. The story moves through European colonization of Africa and Asia, the rise of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, and the eugenics movements that fed directly into Nazi Germany's racial laws. Archival photographs, colonial documents, and expert historians carry the argument, showing how ideas developed in learned societies and government offices ended up enforced with violence on plantations, in colonies, and eventually in gas chambers. The series closes by tracing these same ideas into twentieth-century segregation and apartheid. Rather than treating racism as a timeless prejudice, it argues for a specific historical machinery behind it, built and rebuilt by particular people for particular economic and political ends.