https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-joseph-conrad-the-one-dead-white-guy-worth-listening-to
Konrad Korzeniowski was born a landlocked Pole and went to sea. He traveled throughout Southeast Asia in an era of multicultural, racial, and political change, when sail was giving way to the new technology of steam. Made his way up the Congo River at the height of racist imperialism. Settled in England as an immigrant with sketchy English-language skills, at a time when terrorists had London on edge.
Imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, terrorism, nationalism, immigration, the rise of America as a world power. All these subjects became fodder for books written by Korzeniowski, whose nom de plume was Joseph Conrad. Writing at the tail end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Conrad, who became one of the English language’s foremost authors, not only experienced many of the forces that still affect us today, but those influences made him the first novelist with a truly global perspective.
“Conrad’s experiences as an immigrant and working as a sailor give him an outlook different from his peers,” says Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad In A Global World, a new book tracing Conrad’s concerns from his time to the present day. “He’s writing about international connections of different kinds, routes of trade, migration, capital, which determine our life today.”
