According to Harari, Science, empire, and capitalism are linked together by progress. Progress pushed the Europeans to colonize much of Africa as well as Tasmania in Australia. Native Tasmanians were hunted down and killed because the European settlers pushed them out of their native land and the Native people refused to learn the European customs. The desire for an empire and economic gain through capitalism led the Europeans to Tasmania and Science was used to study the people, typically after death, (Harari 278). The European settlers didn’t care about the native people there, nor did they see what they were doing was wrong. All they knew was progress meant doing anything to get ahead in life and if that meant exploiting an entire isolated culture, then so be it.
An example of how scientific discovery and progress was driven by political and economic forces would probably be the Nazi party in Germany. The scientific discovery that they were trying to achieve for political power was harnessing nuclear energy to make weapons. This discovery would have possibly led to the war ending in a very different way and with nuclear weapons falling somewhere else. The research was being driven by the prospect that if Germany could possess the means of making a nuclear weapon, then it could lead to a much larger, much more powerful Germany. A state that no other nation would try to contest with the possibility of being removed from existence. It’s these major world-altering scientific advancements that are politically and economically driven and could have major consequences on the world as a whole.