At the end of the 1800s a group of Utopianist Australians decided to set off to build a worker's paradise in the remote Paraguayan hinterlands. It didn't quite go to plan, but their story is one of those bizarre and unexpected one that Latin American history frequently throws up.

In the first episode we look at the political, social, and economic context of the scheme to understand why it happened. We introduce its main proponent, and the idealistic laws which would govern the colony.

In the final episode of the series, we look at how Potosi declined from being the rich source of most of the world's silver, to a forgotten and impoverished place. We track the town through the late colonial era, the wars of independence, and the 20th century.

Today we discuss one of the greatest incidents in Potosi's history - the Great Mint Fraud. This story reads partially like a political investigative thriller, and partially like a mafia expose. It's effects will reverberate around the world, disrupting the global economy, and it will damage Potosi itself for decades.

Potosi was an archetypal mining boomtown, filled with hard-working and hard-living characters hoping to make their fortune, and attempting to drown out their tough and dangerous existence with wild parties while they waited. To get a sense of what it might have been like to live there, in today's episode we discuss the city's growth, its population - both rich and poor, and the escapades of some of its most outlandish residents.

In today's episode we zoom out and look at the astounding impact Potosi had on even the furthest flung reaches of the world. Among other things, its silver helped provoke dynastic regime change in China, wars in Iran, and a 500% increase in the price of bread in France. It helped create the golden age of piracy, globalisation, and the birth of the study of economics. It's no exaggeration to say that Potosi changed the course of history and therefore the world we live in today.

In this episode we take a closer look at the mines themselves, as well as the ore refining industry which surrounded it. We examine the terrible toll it took on those who worked in these jobs, as well as who was actually doing this work, and who owned the mining enterprises. Along the way we discuss who the Spanish adapted and re-used a couple of existing Inca social systems.

It is hard to overstate the impact one lonely peak high up on the Bolivian altiplano had on world history - the silver which was dug from within it changed the world. It is however, largely forgotten today.

In this first part of a short series on the subject, I describe Potosi today using my observations from when I visited. It is a strange place, haunted by it's history and marked by poverty. Crumbling Spanish buildings hint at its former wealth, and the miners still enter the hill and work in dangerous conditions which feel like they haven't changed much since the colonial era.

In the final part in our series on Brazil and World War 2, we look at what happened after war. We examine if the country achieved the geo-political, military and economic aims it had set out as its reason for participating, and how their involvement influenced the following decades of internal politics. We also discuss what life was like the soldiers of the Expeditionary Force themselves upon their return home - unfortunately the answer to that last question was often not particularly good.