It would appear that “former Tory MP Antoinette Sandbach has threatened the University of Cambridge with legal action after a historian named her as a descendant of merchants who enslaved his ancestors.”
Testing the #academia outreach here on Mastodon. Please boost if you think you know others who might know.
I'm looking for some good light undergraduate-level books/articles in English about Taiwan under the Japanese and during the White Terror. History, culture, I would even love recommendations of short fiction if you have any.
Y’know, maybe if you think everyone is in the wrong but you, it’s time to consider what the chances of that are versus the chances that you’re the one in the wrong.
Excellent piece on the British roots of the conflict in #Palestine and the impact of colonial “divide and rule” strategies here and elsewhere:
“In British India, they pushed the Hindu-Muslim divide, sometimes favoring one population, sometimes the other. In Cyprus, they pitted the Greeks against the Turks. In Sri Lanka, it was the Tamils against the Sinhalese. In Ireland, it was the Catholics against the Protestants. The list goes on.“
Areas of the Apurinã territory in the Lower Seruini area, in southern Amazonas state, were sold by Nemus under an NFT project that promises to preserve the forest and generate carbon credits.
As someone from the Global South, in a country that has suffered and been exploited by Spanish imperialism, British imperialism, and then US neoimperialism, I find it a bit amusing that the tone of this article is: "China is dangerously and alarmingly building bases and strongholds all over the world, some of which are close to OUR bases and strongholds!"
You see, only America gets to be a global superpower with imperialist reach.
(To forestall the certain bad faith arguments that are inevitable to pop up, I think Chinese imperialism is also bad).
Brilliant article by Alka Raman demonstrating that it was 'recognition of British spinners' lack of adequate spinning skills [that] motivated the move to mechanization, in order to match the quality of cotton products created & perfected over centuries by anonymous & highly skilled Indian artisans'
I’m tired of land acknowledgments. I’m tired of people saying they live on stolen land. I’m tired of them saying they acknowledge this as an act of reconciliation. That’s not reconciliation. That’s rubbing it in. If they want it to mean anything, they should include what they are doing to fight colonialism. At the very least they could make their services affordable for Indigenous Peoples. #LandBack#Indigenous#LandAcknowledgement#colonialism
"Your occassional reminder that in 2016 alone, America dropped nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. A staggering 26,171 bombs rained down on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Pakistan - that’s seven Muslim-majority territories. The USA was running special operations in no less than 138 countries, 70% of the world’s nations. Since the so-called War on Terror was launched in 2002, the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" has been responsible for the deaths of at least four million civilians, and the maiming or displacement of tens of millions more."
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
(a thread of threads, quotes, and links)
This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done to us, and what has been taken from us.
By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities.
By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality and exploitation, hunger and starvation; a world of fences, walls, tollbooths, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable diseases; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital.
Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall:
"After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned."
Here's an angry, bitter rant about colonialism by Indi Samarajiva that really resonates with me...
"Why Renewables Won’t End Environmental Destruction"
Colonialism began with renewable energy: wind to sail across the world, solar to grow cash crops, and human blood, sweat, and tears to grow them. By this logic, you could say that early colonialism was ‘sustainable’ but it obviously wasn’t. Because the problem isn’t the energy source, it’s what you use that energy for.
Colonialism actively destroyed natural ecosystems to plant cash mono-crops. They brutally hunted land cousins for their skin and ocean cousins for their bodily oils, bringing many species to the brink of extinction, and quite a few over it. To accomplish this without energy slaves, they trafficked human slaves across the world, leaving millions at the bottom of the ocean.
Colonialism both actively and passively spread disease across the world, leading to genocidal levels of depopulation. Then of course there was the outright killing, raping, and stealing.
Most perniciously, they framed all this as ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’, which is still the frame we live in. We call this ongoing process ‘capitalism’ or ‘development’ now, but it’s the same thing — destroying the natural world to make artificial profits. The truth is that colonialism never ended. We’re still in it, just with different branding.
Today we think we can switch from ripping coal and oil out of the Earth, and just rip out lithium and copper instead. But ‘renewable’ rape does not change the fundamental raping going on. An electric bulldozer rips up the earth as much as a diesel one.
The process of exploitation might change names and change colors, but the process remains the same. Early colonialism started with renewable energy and late capitalism is ending there. There’s nothing new under the sun, not even ‘renewables’. I’ll repeat myself because history repeats. Same shit, different day.
If this isn't a perfect example modern #colonialism, I don't know what is. A company headed by a Saudi prince grabbing 20% of Zimbabwe and 10% of Liberia in order to sell carbon offsets that'll no doubt be used by firms to continue burning fossil fuels.
This isn't helping fight #climateChange, it's doing exactly the opposite.
I am a historian of nuclear science & technology at Hiroshima Peace Inst & Grad School of Peace Studies. My book Nuclear bodies: the global hibakusha (Yale 2022) surveys harm from #nuclear production, weapon testing, & reactor accidents across the globe, & medical models that obscure harm from fallout particles.
Collecting oral histories in 20+ countries , I examine how communities, families and interior psychology suffer via exposures.
I track nuclear #colonialism (selecting the irradiated) arguing the #ColdWar was a limited nuclear war against these populations.
I also explore our relationship to our HL nuclear waste, asserting it is how our descendants will know us. Our choices now reveal our lack of consideration of the 1000s of generations of living beings for whom this waste is already a part of their world.
Previous life: l was a chef & worked w/ #organic food
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
New publication. Probably the most accessible academic writing I've done. Featuring interviews and conversations with #Indigenous environmental leaders, like my main man, Clayton Thomas-Muller.
EDIT: it's not open source, but I hear that certain unscrupulous individuals may be willing to send copies, if asked. Can you believe that shameful behaviour smh
I'm not a scholar of #Australia, so I'll refrain from commenting on the specifics of the failed constitutional referendum there. As a historian of #Canada, however, I will point out that here, at least, what we call #SettlerColonialism might just as effectively be called democratic #colonialism. Over the past few centuries, the electorate - by no means everyone who lives in the country - has repeatedly and overwhelmingly favoured Indigenous dispossession while opposing Indigenous empowerment.
Watchdog examining claims key details have not been disclosed about altar tablets it is facing calls to return The British Museum is being investigated by the information watchdog over claims it has been overly secretive about some of the most sensitive items in its collection – a group of sacred Ethiopian altar tablets that...
Company sells Indigenous land in Amazonas as NFTs without community’s knowledge (news.mongabay.com)
Areas of the Apurinã territory in the Lower Seruini area, in southern Amazonas state, were sold by Nemus under an NFT project that promises to preserve the forest and generate carbon credits.
British Museum investigated over Ethiopian artefacts hidden from view for 150 years (www.theguardian.com)
Watchdog examining claims key details have not been disclosed about altar tablets it is facing calls to return The British Museum is being investigated by the information watchdog over claims it has been overly secretive about some of the most sensitive items in its collection – a group of sacred Ethiopian altar tablets that...
New Caledonia: Kanak revolt confronts French state and settler militias - Freedom News (freedomnews.org.uk)
The revolt started a week ago in the south Pacific territory, after a series of disputed independence referenda.