The first direct train service from China to the UK arrived in London last month. As part of China’s new silk road, The East Wind crossed 10 countries in only 17 days. While the globe is horrified by Donald Trump, we might be witnessing the deepest reshifting of global geopolitics since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

When a Trump phone call or tweet can lead to serious tensions with China or Australia, geopolitics becomes tangible even to those who wouldn’t usually care about the world as an interconnected place. Add in Brexit, Russia, Turkey, the refugee crisis, new walls and fences from Hungary to Calais, terrorism from Paris to Baghdad, and the globe starts to look like a mosaic from the board game Risk.

Naysayers be damned! Tom Hardy's Taboo is a work of Wicker Man genius Read more

It is in these times of global realignment that BBC launched Tom Hardy’s TV series Taboo. It depicts the struggle of James Delaney, who returns to 1814 London after 10 years in Africa to discover that he has inherited a small strip of land on America’s west coast – of crucial geopolitical interest for the East India Company, the crown and the Americans. Delaney worked for the notorious East India Company – the first to have its own army, of some 200,000 men – so he is an insider, but becomes a whistleblower avant la lettre. There is even a line of Delaney’s that could be uttered right out of the mouth of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden: “I do know the evil that you do because I was once part of it.”

Many have already written about the show’s plethora of brutal killings, exorcism, even incest. But what if its real taboo is actually something else, something much more troubling and revealing about our current dark times?

According to Hardy, the inspiration behind his character was Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like Delaney, Marlow was appointed by a trading company to exploit Africa; and once he returns to Europe, he becomes contemptuous of the “civilised” world. If Conrad’s book has one lesson, it’s that colonialism doesn’t cause misery only in poorer countires, it boomerangs back to rich countries with their rising inequality.

What Taboo shows so beautifully is the London of the early 19th century and its spirit of imperialism, contrasting the spacious rooms of the East India Company and decadent palace of the king with the utter despair of the working class living in mud and dust. The programme demonstrates that there is little difference between so-called civilised people and those described as savages: the real savages are not the African slaves, but the British king eating giant ostrich eggs like a pig and the East India Company ready to kill everyone in order to gain new territory and extract capital.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Taboo recalls the spirit of Lenin’s classic essay, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism.’ Photograph: Hulton Getty

But in the year of the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution, Taboo recalls the spirit of Lenin’s classic essay, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He was writing this in Zürich in 1916 in the middle of the first world war, just before departing to Russia. Lenin’s influential insight was that financial capital profits from the exploitation and “extractivism” of the global periphery by the countries of the centre. Lenin’s main lesson – that economy (namely, imperialism) and not nationalism was the origin of the first world war – still holds true in the era of Trump and Brexit.

In today’s world of nationalists like Trump, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen, one could ask if perhaps the opposite holds true: don’t we live in an era of strong leaders and a resurrection of the nation state? However, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of seeing international capitalism as something opposed to these international nationalists – who work across borders with each other for their own aims. They are actually two sides of the same coin. Taboo shows this in this week’s penultimate episode, when the crown and the company join forces in order to gain monopoly over the land and trade.

Don’t we have something similar in Trump’s era, with Elon Musk or Peter Thiel?

And don’t we have something similar in Trump’s era, with Elon Musk using Nasa to consolidate his monopoly over space exploration, or Peter Thiel using the CIA to build a monopoly over big data and surveillance? It is the same old crown and company relationship. Once upon a time it was the colonisation of new territories on Earth, today it is the colonisation of Mars. Yesterday it was the privatisation of natural resources, today it is the privatisation of cities (so-called smart cities). Once again accumulation by dispossession wouldn’t function without the help of the state, and vice versa.

What Taboo succeeds in is not only showing the origin of today’s imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, but also what might be the consequence of it – the bloody universe of Tom Hardy’s not so fictional taboo.