How stupid and ignorant is a historian who thinks Venice and Genoa fought wars in the Aegean in the Nineteenth century?
Very fucking stupid and ignorant. Does this fact change when we are asked to take account of the fact that the historian in question is a historic victim of Colonialism, Racism, and lack-of-penism? No. There are plenty of black women who teach grade school history who know Venice and Genoa fought in the fourteenth, not the nineteenth, Century.
Priya Satia is a Professor of History at Stanford. She lives in a country where colonist from across the Ocean slaughtered the indigenous people and took their land. Her own ancestors, however, were immigrants to America from a place which had been a British possession, just as the 13 colonies which originally formed the USA had been British possessions. However, the British did not want to settle in India. They did want to settle in America and Australia and New Zealand and so forth. Since the Brits were smart and hardworking, places where they dominate are prosperous. For that reason, people like Priya are happy to live in those countries,
As the Israeli assault on Gaza yet again makes painfully clear, anticolonial movements of the last century won many of their battles, but they lost the war.
Neither the Jews nor the Arabs wanted the Brits to stick around as the mandatory power. Their 'anti-colonial' (more precisely, anti-Imperial) movements succeeded because Imperialism was too costly and too boring. Israel hasn't lost wars. Palestinian leaders have grown very very rich attacking Israel and then standing back to watch gleefully as their own people are slaughtered. Hamas is currently laughing all the way to the bank- as is Iran. I suppose Israel will compensate itself, for the blood of its innocents, with real estate which it will develop well enough. However, the real pay-off for Israel will come from the new types of defensive technology it will be exporting by the end of the decade. What will it feature? Robots to police Gaza type ghettos? Those could have a lucrative global market. Why put the rich in gated communities when it is becoming cheaper to have AI enhanced drones shadow the poor as they go about their tasks delivering groceries or doing the landscaping?
The decolonisation of the minds of both colonisers and colonised that thinkers like Frantz Fanon
Fanon's Martinique decided to stay under French rule. Algeria turned out to be more dangerous for Arab Islamists than France. Why is this cretin mentioning Fanon? He was shit at psychiatry and just trying to be accepted as a Satrean type babbler of bullshit.
and Gandhi called for failed to transpire.
Gandhi said nothing about decolonizing minds. He just wanted everybody to give up sex. Also, they shouldn't fight back against invaders. Bertrand Russell was an even more extreme pacificist but he was cool with nookie.
Even as demands for reparations, restitution, apologies, memorialisation and consecration of new human and educational values have crescendoed,
but they emanated from woke nutters. If they play up, there are plenty of 'proud boys' or whatever who will happily fight them in the streets.
many remain susceptible to the notion that modern empire is a legitimate civilising enterprise that can be evaluated neutrally.
There is no 'modern empire'. There is a modern Church. I suppose there are people who think the Church should be cancelled because of the Spanish Inquisition. But, there is also the Modern History Department in Universities. It isn't a legitimate epistemic enterprise. Its aim is to destroy civilization and put in its place the ignorant Voodoo of Grievance Studies.
Besides its obvious racist foundations,
Priya's ancestors wanted to immigrate to places which had a long record of racism towards darkies. Why? Such places were more affluent- if not civilized. There are smart Jews who will emigrate to Israel and take up residence on land grabbed from Palestinian olive farmers. But those Jews will work in high value adding knowledge industry. About a 100,000 poorer Indians will come in to do the menial jobs previously done by Palestinians. This might be their family's first step up towards the sort of education and affluence Priya enjoys.
that sticky presumption draws sustenance from easy conflation of modern empires with earlier empires: the British empire was no different from the earlier Roman, Ottoman, or Mughal empires – why should it be singled out to make repair for what was simply more water under the historical bridge?
Priya is claiming to be a victim of white racism. If California is going to give reparations to African Americans, why not to dot Indians whom the Brits raised up? Did you know Biden has Indian relatives? True, they look a bit brown but that proves that Whitey raped and sodomized Priya's ancestors and 'sold them down the river'. BTW Kamala Harris's father's owned slaves though they were themselves 'free people of colour'. Her mother was from a Brahmin family in South India which did well under the British. Yet Kamala being made Veep was supposed to be part and parcel of 'reparations' to the descendants of African slaves- not Indian professionals who migrated to America so as to enjoy the affluent life-style of the White majority.
On the other hand, Vivek Ramaswamy definitely deserves a big fat reparations check because he is much darker than Priya or Kamala.
Anticolonial thinkers and activists long ago disproved this theory,
by screaming loudly and shitting themselves copiously
exposing the particular moral and political indefensibility of European empire,
did you know many Europeans are White? What is more, many of them have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately!
but its enduring allure compels fresh reminder of how, even apart from the logical fallacy of “whataboutery”, it fails on empirical grounds:
empirically speaking, Priya's parents tried to emigrate to Bangladesh, not Boston. Cruel slave-traders transported them across the Atlantic and sold them down the river. Priya vividly recalls being forced to pluck cotton under Southern trees which bore strange fruit.
British colonialism (and modern European and American empire generally) departed dramatically from the goals, workings and effects of earlier empires.
Because there was no sacred Emperor or aristocratic governing class. The Brits ended the slave trade. Where they settled, or where the natives decided to retain British institutions- e.g. Singapore- foreigners were glad to reside or take up domicile and citizenship. Britain has an Indian origin Prime Minister. It was good to his ancestors and it was even better to his parents and then to himself. However, higher taxes may cause his family to emigrate after he loses office.
Clearly, something very different had to have happened in modern history to land us at the unprecedented existential climate crisis in which we find ourselves.
The Spanish Armada should have prevailed. The Inquisition should have hunted down scientists and technologist and guys who wanted to build steam engines or internal combustion engines.
In their particular preoccupations with materialism, territorial control, and managing social differences and similarities, modern European empires created the world anew.
The West Europeans dominated much of America by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Save in certain maritime matters, their technology wasn't greatly superior to what was found elsewhere.
This is not to say that the Mughal or Roman empires were not oppressive in their own ways – their histories are full of stories of contestation and resistance (most famously, Jesus’s anticolonial challenge to Roman rule in Judea
There was no such thing. This silly woman is thinking of the Maccabees. But second Maccabees is written in Koine Greek. Alexander's imperialism had been successful enough.
) – but European empire reshaped the world in specific ways that need to be addressed for new, freer futures to become possible.
No. European empires- Spain's, Portugal's, Holland's, Britain's, France's- tended to feature technological stagnation. It was the post-war Developmental State (which was generally anti-Imperialist) which went in for big dams and capital intensive projects. This was Lenin's formula of 'Soviet Power plus universal Electrification'. I suppose, if India had remained Gandhian and China, Maoist, there would be no global warming now.
Anticolonial thinkers in the last century recognised that modern empire focused on material desire in a new way as the key to progress, enslaving both colonised and coloniser.
No they didn't. The last century began in 1923. Anti-Imperialists accepted Lenin's dictum that Imperialism was the final stage of Capitalism. Getting rid of that obsolete regime would unleash productive forces as never before. There would be rapid growth thanks to scientific planning. As 'scarcity' disappeared, the State would wither away and Socialism would prevail.
After all, it began with the invention of a new kind of commercial institution: the limited-liability, joint-stock corporation.
India and China and ancient Rome and everywhere else had something similar, or a workaround for something similar. Even in Ottoman Turkey, pace Kuran, if a bunch of guys could agree on a particular juristic lineage to arbitrate, then they could have any type of arrangement.
Priya is babbling ignorant nonsense. What matters is whether contracts are honoured. Justiciability or Enforcement don't matter in themselves.
From the late 15th century, Portuguese and Dutch trading companies introduced a type of state-backed armed trade aimed at monopoly that was utterly foreign and disruptive to the commercial traditions and survival practices of the Indian Ocean.
The Chinese had sent a big armada before the Portuguese arrived. What was important about West Europe was that it found new markets and high value to weight commodities. Changes in preferences and endowments change the 'substructure'. Economic forces matter. The 'superstructure' doesn't matter because there is always a workaround to achieve incentive compatibility. Studying History makes people like Priya stupider than nature intended. Still, we pity her because of all the whippings she received while picking cotton. Hilary Clinton, sipping a mint julep, would sometimes ask Priya to sing a nice coon song to her and, on one occasion, gave her the loan of a gingham gown. Priya was so happy! She said to her mother 'I iz gonna be White! You jus' see! I will go to Cali-for-nai-A and become Professor of History by sitting on Leland Stanford's face!' Her mother- who had been beaten to death some years previously- was non-committal but Franz Fanon flew down from the Sky and said 'Yea! Verily, the spirit of Sartre compels thee! All shall be as you have uttered!' Then Mahatma Gandhi turned up and he bestowed celestial boon of full-full knowledge of colonial history on the darling child.
This aggressive, warlike mode of business was the only way the Portuguese could elbow their way into the tangle of Venetian, Egyptian and Indian commercial networks of the time.
Portuguese were very naughty. They were doing fighting and biting. Venetians and Egyptians never played rough games. Also Portuguese men had dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Cancel them immediately!
Their intrusion
they found an alternative route to India and even got to China and Japan.
launched a new era of racial and colonial capitalism
because the old era of racial and colonial capitalism had sunk off the coast of Coney Island
in which mass extraction and commodification of botanical and earthly matter, including human beings, entailed devastation of entire peoples and landscapes – epitomised early on by Dutch devastation of the Banda Islands for nutmeg and Portuguese ruin of Madeira in the name of sugar.
Ban nutmeg and sugar. But only after you ban dicks.
The Dutch empire became yet another of the empires that inspired, and justified, British efforts to build their own.
The American Republic was inspired and justified by the efforts made by those early settlers of New Amsterdam and the 13 colonies. It is not true that Indians who emigrate to US want to live lives of affluence. They want to become Professors of History urging Americans to give up nutmeg and sugar and electricity. But first they should ban dicks. Also Whiteness. I iz totes triggered by White peeps. It's like they iz ghosts or somefin'!
In the subsequent era of British dominance, while officials in the high corridors of power regularly contrasted the humanity of British rule to the oppression of the regimes they displaced, their policies produced famine and desolation that forced officials on the spot to question their self-congratulating rhetoric.
But there were bigger famines in non-British controlled lands. Just as they ended the slave trade, the Brits put an end to famine in India- till the Indians took control of food after 1937
The empire continued to depend on unfree labor well after abolition in 1833.
The descendants of indentured labourers in the West Indies, South Africa, Fiji, etc. did very much better than their brethren back in the Malthusian shithole that was much of rural India.
By the late 19th century, the British ruling elite came to stoically accept that the ruin of certain peoples and landscapes was historical necessity for the sake of global material progress.
Nope. They thought it a good thing if backward people on other continents were killed and replaced by their own kith and kin. They somewhat reluctantly accepted that parts of their home country had become ugly and polluted and very very smelly. But this made the locals much richer. Still, it was only after about 1950, that the home islands started to improve ecologically and aesthetically.
In 1868, noting “the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians”, the British politician Charles Dilke
at that time, a Republican
explained that the “true moral of America” was “the vigor of the English race – the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four pence”.
This was a silly thing to say in a country where people still remembered the Corn Laws. The horny bugger should have stuck to Radicalism and ignored an adultery case in which he had already been exonerated.
Worse still, if you read the whole passage, what the guy was saying that the sort of artisan who in England was a radical, became a contented homesteader in America. Basically, Dilke was a dickhead.
This type of empire asked its agents and subjects to suppress ordinary ethical instincts to engage in “necessary evil” for the sake of future vindication in the form of progress measured in material terms.
This stupid woman just told us that Dilke was speaking of a Republic- the American Republic- and he was saying something which Priya's parents knew very well- Americans are materialistic. They like eating nice food. They think affluence is better than impoverishment. That's why Priya's parents paid good money to get to Boston. If Priya hates 'progress measured in material terms' why does she not quit America for some nice leper colony in India?
Hence did anticolonial leaders like Gandhi counter that freedom lay in the capacity for moral accountability in the present, regardless of consequences (a definition lately echoed by the London-based political theoris Lea Ypi).
Gandhi said nothing about 'moral accountability'. He said you must give up sex otherwise you could not follow Ahimsa. Lea Ypi is from Albania. Londoners would be very happy if she got the Albanian gangsters who ran amok in Leicester Square to develop a bit of 'moral accountability'.
Such ideas contest the seductive notion propagated by modern empires,
which don't exist.
that material wealth is a measure of civilisation.
Chairman Deng said 'to get rich is glorious'. Is this lady declaring war on the Chinese Communist Party? Its treatment of Uighurs and Tibetans is plenty Imperialist.
(Even the non-capitalist Soviet empire was anchored in this assumption, planning and measuring “development” in terms of industrial output.)
Fuck does Priya think the Chinese are doing now?
Certainly, earlier empires were extractive in their own right, often excessively so. However, unlike the indigenous or indigenised imperial rulers they displaced, European colonisers did not typically invest the wealth they extracted back into the country. In the 18th century, the Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan
who was very happy to see the wealth of Oudh drained to benefit his ancestral Iraq. But it was a poisoned gift and contributed to the current sectarian conflict in that country.
called out the traits that distinguished British colonialism: a disinterest in putting down roots and a sense of “divine obligation” to scrape “together as much money as they can in this country” and carry it home.
As Ghalib and Sir Syed Ahmed pointed out, the Brits brought in new technology- stuff like railways- while the Native Rulers just built themselves Palaces and sent money off to Iraq or Mecca or wherever.
Mughal trends in managing food security and water are known to have been better.
But they were shit at keeping out invaders or suppressing insurgents. The Brits excelled at both.
The greed-driven British “craze” for machines, Gandhi argued, atrophied the limbs of man and encroached on his individuality (unlike, say, the spinning wheel).
Indians laughed heartily at the crackpot because they knew he was taking money from Indian industrialists who profited by the boycott on foreign cloth.
There are empires and there are empires.
Priya is for Muslim Empires because they kill Hindus. She is against the British Empire because her ancestors did well under it.
As Raj Patel and Jason Moore put it, “There had been massive empires before capitalism – think of the Romans or the Mongols. But never before in world history had there been transoceanic empires that scoured the globe for profit-making opportunities.”
Or they became too lazy to bother and their Empires, like that of the Spanish and the Portuguese, declined.
Britain alone ruled over a quarter of the planet.
Which is why this lady's parents spoke good English and thus had a head start in America.
This materialism depended on new notions of state power and territorial occupation.
No. The notions were very old indeed.
Earlier empires had typically depended on layered notions of sovereignty and suzerainty.
Which was the case with the British Raj
In borderlands, the power of adjacent states might overlap, and in various regions state power might be shared with powerful local authorities and institutions. The British empire took shape in this world: with the British East India Company allowing the Mughal emperor to retain de jure sovereignty while it held de facto sovereignty.
So, there was no 'new notion' here whatsoever.
In addition, the British Crown held ultimate sovereignty over company territories, but whether it could claim their revenue depended on whether they were understood to have been conquered or purchased. Affirmation of property as a natural law and moral principle helped manage the confusion between conquest and commerce. To guarantee the “permanency” of their acquisitions (mindful of the fate of the Roman empire), British imperialists established regimes of property rights in their domains.
No. It was because of stupid claims of this sort that Calcutta Uni refused to give Ranajit Guha a PhD. Many Indians are descended from long lines of lawyer-landowners. The fact is those who wanted to assert title to land paid some money for that privilege even if enforcing that title cost them much more. This is because there is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' to do with 'who owns what' such that there is a bourgeois strategy which reduces rent contestation.
Priya is babbling ignorant nonsense because she knows no economics or history or anything save what Fanon said to Gandhi as both were being raped by Viceroy Mountbatten.
The empire came to treat sovereignty, too, as something held exclusively and thus transferable as a commodity.
The American Republic bought vast territories from the Tzar and Emperor Napoleon. Why does this stupid American historian not know this?
British government and private entities bought, sold, and leased sovereignty over places as diverse as Jammu and Kashmir, northern Borneo, Hong Kong and beyond.
Who were the counterparties? Not Europeans in the above cases. Where there was a tribute obligation it could be capitalized. This is like converting a lease to a freehold.
Modern European empires idealised clear, policeable borders,
Just like ancient non-European political entities of every sort. The border is where you put the octroi booth and collect revenue. How fucking stupid is Satia?
traceable on a map – indeed, often first defined on a map and then realised on the ground.
Or not. You could always have a boundary commission and make adjustments.
Fixed boundaries and exclusive title were considered essential to the fiscal and demographic legibility that enabled extractive policies.
When Priya buys or rents a property she doesn't insist it have a fixed boundary or wall. She likes it when people step into her bathroom to watch her pee. She becomes ecstatic when they tell her they also have a title to the property. Priya is very puzzled that other people are different from her in this respect. Probably, the reason is that White peeps used their evil dicks to create Empires. Fanon and Gandhi said this was naughty but White peeps didn't even ban dicks though dicks cause RAPE!
Today’s world order based on the unit of the nation-state has consecrated this form of territorial control as a universal norm.
But so did yesterday's world order. Empires ceased to exist before Priya was born.
The nation-state was coeval with modern empire.
No Empire exists. Nation-states do exist. A dead person can't be coeval with a living person.
The internal colonialism through which “Britain” was forged as a political space from its constituent regions of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England informed and was informed by colonialism abroad.
No. There were English speaking 'colonies' in Ireland- e.g Ulster or 'the pale'- and one may speak of demographic replacement in certain districts. But this had been happening for thousands of years. It had nothing to do with trans-oceanic colonialism.
The new form of political territoriality abroad was tied to the rise of private land ownership in England, too.
No. British property law was wholly autochthonous. Moreover, there was a separate regime in Scotland etc.
Early modern English elites had held land, but ordinary people had also had substantial use rights and power to negotiate rents, nurturing inter-generational attachment to land even among tenant farmers.
Serfs. Enclosures begin in the 12th century.
In the modern period, thousands of enclosure acts turned common lands, heaths, greens, and “wastes” that were used by all, into private property, while settlers (many drawn from among those pushed off English land) and administrators conquered and privatised land around the world.
Because the local people didn't believe in boundaries or exclusive titles. So, according to this fairy story, evil capitalists took away land from the English by saying 'it's exclusively mine!' and the English, being too polite to disagree, crossed perilous seas and took land from yet more polite people.
Now, if only everybody attended Priya's history lectures, they will see that everybody owns everything. This means you can sell your neighbour's house. Even if you are prosecuted for fraud, Priya will testify on your behalf and you will be acquitted without a stain on your character.
The making of France was similarly a process of imperial conquest from Paris outwards to the regions
Nonsense! France is named for the Salian Franks who invaded Gaul. The book this silly bint links to is about how the spread of railways and roads and schools and factories turned peasants into citizens between 1870 and 1914.
that make up the familiar hexagon today, and the formation of the United States and Germany was inseparable from their expansion both overseas
Germany didn't bother with colonies till the Kaiser got rid of Bismarck. But, by then, Germany was united and industrializing rapidly. The creation of the Zollverein in the 1830s had made a big difference even though political union occurred much later.
and within their immediate regions.
Meanwhile, according to this fairy story, the indigenous people of the Americas kept getting fucked over.
However- as Coase's theorem predicts- who says they own what matters less than who can get possession of property and make it yield more. There's always a workaround to make this arrangement 'incentive compatible'.
This new culture of exclusive claims to territory
like the new culture of exclusive claims to your own arsehole- which is what caused the decline of anal rape
constituted a dramatic change in how humans and states related to the land. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind write, “Land ceased to be the existential and spiritual foundation of the community, and instead was turned into exclusionary and alienable pieces of property, existing solely for the purpose of accumulation.”
It took two cretins to tell this cretinous falsehood probably because they did not claim exclusive ownership of their assholes and thus those assholes were being rented out to all and sundry.
Land has to yield a subsistence or else provide an amenity. But it is costly to protect. If you can't protect it, you lose it one way or another. But this is also true of control of your asshole. If you can't defend it, everybody may use it for sodomitical purposes. This is so not what Gandhi had in mind when he advocated Ahimsa.
The philosopher Thomas More discerned when this process began 500 years ago, that enclosed, privately held land had unleashed an unprecedented social reality, driving elites into an insatiable quest for wealth to gratify false pleasures and driving everyone else, stalked by the threat of poverty, to forever seek more.
Wealth should only be accumulated by the Church. Otherwise, they'd lose the incentive to burn heretics.
Philosophers like John Locke responded to the resistance triggered by this new reality by arguing that those who did not cultivate the land with a view to improving it forfeited any entitlement to it.
Unless they could kill you. In that case they were entitled to everything.
For Europeans, explains Gili Kliger, sovereignty came to mean “power over land”, while many indigenous peoples conceived of it as “power shared with land.”
Sadly, when the indigenous people called upon their ancestral land to rise up and sodomize the invaders, the land refused to oblige. That's when the indigenous people switched to sharing power with the wind. The breeze may not bugger the Brits but it can make them feel a bit nippy.
It is difficult to know what indigenous peoples understood by signing away their “sovereignty” in treaties with the British or the United States;
probably it was the right of the breeze to bugger them when if felt a bit nippy.
colonialism was enabled by European translation of words that lacked indigenous conceptual equivalents, because they emerged from a radically different view of the working of human and divine power in the world.
Very true. Had Priya's ancestors got the Russians to sign some piece of paper written in a language they didn't understand, then Putin would hand over the whole country to her.
Only foolish people think military superiority is required to grab and keep territory.
Certainly, practical reality on the ground in European empires often remained marked by porous borders
all borders are porous at some points. Perhaps this cretin means that there may have been 'terra nullis' wildernesses where the border was not well defined. But Shakespeare's Fortinbras was fighting over such borders in medieval Denmark!
a cacophony of legal regimes,
jurisdictions not regimes which, on the Continent, were almost always Roman or 'Civil'.
and political fragmentation,
enclaves? They didn't matter greatly. Indian and Bangladesh have enclaves.
but from the late eighteenth century, these empires fostered the geopolitical and linguistic proliferation of the idea of sovereignty as territorial statehood
Talleyrand's 'natural frontiers' claim? But that was about securing a lasting peace. Still, it wasn't practical. There would the problem of French speakers in Belgium and Switzerland.
– exclusive claim to and power over bordered space.
What was the alternative? Letting the place became the hideout of bandits or pirates.
An instrumental view of land, and earthly resources more broadly, was necessary to their terraforming goals.
Sadly, an instrumental view of land is necessary for agriculture and hunter gathering. Even apes have it. BTW, they are extremely territorial- probably because they don't teach History at Stanford.
In fact, as climate and environmental experts now recognise, indigenous ways of relating to the land were more sustainable, grounded in careful husbandry of land, forests, and water resources with a view to perpetual mutual preservation of land and life.
It was much less sustainable because the place could easily be taken over by pirates or drug traffickers or mercs of various sorts.
Thirdly, ideas about racial difference reshaped human relations under European empire. Slavery and violence were integral to the Roman empire, but prejudice based on distinctions of skin tone, features, and hair texture was not a defining feature of the system. Moreover, the Romans maintained diplomatic, military and commercial ties even with the Germanic peoples they considered “barbarians”.
Ideas about racial difference reshaped History Departments during Priya's life-time. The subject has now reduced itself to complaining that White peeps continue to be White despite this being totes triggering for a lot of black folk.
The British and French empires, however, embedded racial distinctions in structures of governance and the social hierarchies on which they depended, including military recruitment, practices of war, policing and criminal punishment, urban planning, public health and labor policies, education, and beyond.
This stupid cunt won't say that America was WAY more racist till about 1965. But that's why it was rich. Satia's parents paid good money to get to emigrate there.
Their imperialism was premised on the notion that non-white peoples (including the Irish), lacking conscience and virtue, required paternalistic government by Europeans.
Satia's parents preferred to live under the rule of White people. De-colonization tended to be followed by the flight of smarter natives to some degree or another.
In the second half of the 19th century, the cultivation of “scientific” racism (and persistent resistance to European rule) cast doubt on whether this civilising mission could ever be accomplished, fostering support for conclusions like Dilke’s, that the “extinction of the inferior races” was “not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind”.
Satia doesn't mention that the country her parents migrated to had done genocide on an industrial scale. Who the fuck does she think she is fooling?
If belief in human difference justified colonial rule and its violence, the goal of reforming colonial societies by fostering uniformity within them added further legitimacy.
Nonsense! Britain did encourage settler colonies to adopt a Federal structure so as to become self-garrisoning and self-governing but this was not done by 'fostering uniformity'. This silly woman must have heard of Quebec.
Earlier empires, like the Mughal empire, sought power and revenue but did not seek to homogenise their subjects; they did not dream of turning all Hindus into Muslims (despite myths dating to the British era of forced mass conversions).
Why did Priya's people run away from Pakistan? Was it because they knew actual history whereas there idiot daughter can only repeat politically correct myths?
Their outlook was pragmatic, focused on cultivating loyalty and revenue, not some utopian end.
They were utterly shit. That's why a handful of foreign merchants took over and did such an excellent job that Indians still have to know English to get into the Civil Service or to practice law.
Europeans, however, sought to transform the people they ruled in the name of a “civilising mission” – turning Indians into Englishmen and Africans into Frenchmen and so on (however infinitely long the imagined timescale for that process).
The French may have said things of that sort. The Brits never did. After Independence, India and Pakistan got rid of the requirement to know Indian languages to graduate.
Coexistence with the alien was impossible in the British imperial mindset,
Unlike the Stanford History Professor's mindset which coexists with shit emitted by aliens from Planet Priya.
but anticolonial rebellions like the 1857 uprising in India refused the modernising uniformity the British were imposing in defense of a social order offering the opportunity and obligation for ethical navigation of difference.
by raping and killing Whites. This turned out to be a bad thing for the natives. The Whites were useful and productive. Sensible Indians helped the Whites win the war and impose a reign of terror on rebellious districts
As Rabindranath Tagore put it in 1921, “[O]nly those who are different can unite.”
The Hindus and Muslims were united at the time. That didn't last. Why? They were too fucking different.
Likewise, no homogenising end justified the Ottoman empire, even despite the sultan’s status as caliph; such empires did not purvey a narrative of suffering for the sake of historical progress.
Satia has never heard of the Armenian genocide.
To be sure, by the 19th century, European power had intruded so much into the Ottoman empire that it began to adopt European-inspired practices and goals in the hope of recuperating a measure of autonomy and fending off further dominance and territorial loss.
The Ottomans were a big European power for almost five centuries.
Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 prompted “modernisation” efforts that testified to the way European ideas of sovereignty, economic development, militarism, national identity, and governance were becoming global norms.
Nope. It just shows that the Turks, who had been allied with the French, were playing catch-up with a fellow European power.
The Ottoman Empire took an increasingly “civilising” approach towards certain communities, such as nomadic Arabs, Albanians, and Kurds. Turkification policies became powerful in the 20th century. The relentless encroachment and aggressively asserted norms of European empire fed perceptions and policies that culminated in the Armenian genocide.
The fact that the Armenians were Christian, not Muslim, didn't matter at all- right?
We can consider the post-19th-century Ottoman empire among the group of European empires that today owe apologies and reparations, while understanding that it was itself in a colonial relationship with European empires.
Turks are less White than Brits. Fuck you Britain! Fuck you very much!
Whatever Ottoman elites’ “civilising” vision, the state’s ability to fulfill it remained curtailed, preventing them, for instance, from eradicating pastoral life in the Syrian interior as the British did in Malwa Punjab.
The Brits did make Punjab more prosperous. But Punjab more than repaid the debt by providing the Brits with superb soldiers. The greatly enjoyed suppressing the Mutiny. Still, I suppose Priya is hinting that the Victorians reduced the incidence of camel fucking in territory they ruled. No doubt, she has a Syrian colleague who looks like she might be the product of some such cross-species liaison.
This is why the iconic scholar of Western imperialism Edward Said
the guy was a fucking Literature professor. He knew shit about history.
acknowledged the imperialist nature of Istanbul’s dominance of the Arab world
Arab Christians like Said's family had earned a little money taking the WS Blunt 'Arab Caliphate' line though they generally changed their coat if it paid better.
but stressed the “unique coherence and…special cultural centrality” of the “British, French, and American imperial experience”. For him, Napoleon’s invasion, accompanied by the team of scholars who produced the encyclopedic Description de l’Egypte, exemplified the “scientific appropriation of one culture by another,” announcing orientalist scholarship’s new mission of not merely representing but constructing “the Orient”.
There was this Foucauldian notion that Knowledge produced Power. Napoleon brought some savants to Egypt with him. But the fucker lost. Money matters and sinking the other guy's fleet matters. Scientific appropriation doesn't matter at all. Nor does saying mean things about furriners.
Like the Ottoman empire, the nation-states that emerged from the rubble of European empires hewed to their inherited norms.
What this stupid bint means is 'like the nation-states that emerged from the collapse of European empires, those of the MENA hewed to their inherited norms' . However, this statement is completely false. Ataturk's Turkey didn't inherit any norms from the Ottomans. Arab countries under League Mandates were politically sophisticated. True, State-building was difficult for historic reasons, but it wasn't that the Arabs were stupid or backward.
Priya, however, may believe they were busy fucking camels unlike the good Punjabis of the Malwa whom the Brits had re-educated in this matter.
Indeed, the goal of nation-statehood provided the alibi for colonialism: the British often protested that they were merely shepherding that universal process along in places lacking the innate capacity for historical evolution – empire as the handmaiden of national progress.
Some silly arses may have said so. Smart people understood that countries needed three things
1) economic viability- i.e. enough revenue to cover necessary expenditure
2) political cohesiveness
3) defensive capacity- though this could be outsourced to a certain extent.
It didn't matter if racists said they needed to stop the natives fucking camels. What mattered is if the natives could cobble together a viable polity. What followed would be a bargaining game. A 'hegemon' might pay a subsidy in order to keep up a pretence of paramountcy. Alternatively, there might be a 'veiled protectorate' based on shared revenue from a natural resource.
The nation-state would embody the principles of sovereignty, material progress, homogeneity, and righteousness propagated by modern empire.
No. The nation-state- which is what America became after the Civil War- wouldn't really have dual sovereignty. However, it would not be concerned with homogeneity or righteousness or sexiness or the righteous fucking of sexy camels. On the other hand, it might have a specific ideology or ethnic or religious allegiance.
The critical distinction between European empires and the Asian empires they destroyed is not that the former were land-based and the latter straddled seas. It is rather the homogenising attitude towards people and territory that has come to define nationalism and the modern state everywhere.
Portugal had a big sea-based Empire. What do Brazil and Angola and Macau have in common? Where is the 'homogenisation' between Mozambique and Goa? What about Burma and Pakistan? Both were ruled by the Brits. What do they have in common?
The postcolonial Indian and Nigerian states preserved much of their inherited imperial state structures and outlook and have faced repeated separatist challenges from those who refuse their homogenising visions and the poisonous forms of exclusion they entail.
This silly lady doesn't mention that Pakistan separated from India on the basis of hatred of kaffirs. It then broke in two on the basis of hatred of Bengalis.
Nigeria was soldered together because the Brits thought the North would not be financially viable. I wonder what Priya means by 'poisonous forms of exclusion'? Boko Haram? ISIS? I'm joking. She means whichever bunch of Nigerians are nicest and are doing most for all the people of their wonderful country.
Likewise, the People’s Republic of China functions less like the Qing empire did in the same territory than like European empires did in their territories.
No. It functions like Stalin's Russia. This woman truly is as thick as shit.
It was the anticipation of these continuities that caused many major anticolonial thinkers
there were none. It was obvious that Empires depend on money and the balance of power- nothing else.
to reject nation-statehood as the goal of their struggle,
if they were Islamists, they were struggling for a Global Caliphate. If they were Commies, they were struggling for a Global Communist State. If they were Gandhians, they were merely lying. On the other hand, there was a potentially very promising notion of a common homeland and citizenship for all sub-Saharan people. This would have allowed people from the African diaspora to participate in the construction of a United States of Africa. I suppose the exigencies of the Cold War and the very unequal distribution of precious raw materials put paid to that dream.
recognising it as an extension of the imperial outlook and the destructive force it had proved in successive world wars.
The power of Imperialists and then of Fascists was destroyed in those two worlds. This silly lady disapproves of them for that reason.
As they focused on freedom from state oppression
they read Ayn Rand and joined a militia
rather than national emancipation, they imagined and struggled to realise federal or otherwise decentralised alternative futures.
What is to prevent some States in the Federation doing ethnic cleansing or voter suppression?
This is what made their tactics useful even in struggles against oppression within states, such as the African American struggle for racial equality in the United States.
This involved a Civil War just to get rid of slavery.
The impulse to justify modern empire by insisting on its continuity with earlier empires is not new.
But it is an impulse only shitheads teaching worthless shit to utter retards ever give in to.
In empire’s very heyday, British policymakers themselves used analogies to earlier empires to soothe their uneasy consciences.
Their consciences were just fine.
Edward Gibbon’s classic 1776 account of the “decline and fall” of the Roman empire appeared when Britain’s relations with its American colonies were in crisis, bolstering hopes that Britain might avoid the decadence and corrupting contact at the margins of the empire that, Gibbon believed, had led to its predecessors’ downfall.
Fuck off! Gibbon was hinting that it was Christianity, with its crazy doctrinal disputes and which had festered in the Roman catacombs, which destroyed the great Republican tradition which someone like Julian might have restored.
For modern Britons, history itself, the chance at renewing, indeed redeeming, the epic Roman past, elevated their own imperial aspirations.
No. Britain needed a kick ass Navy to avoid an invasion from the Continent. It needed the Empire because 'Trade follows the Flag' unless, as in India, the natives will pay you to defend them and maintain a justice system. In that case the Flag followed Trade.
In Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, the sailor Marlow, comparing the British empire to the Romans, admits that “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only…something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…”
But Conrad was talking about the Congo Free State. That wasn't an Imperial territory. Kurtz isn't really English. He is a mongrelized European. But it is his mention of 'efficiency' as a creed which gives the game away. Conrad is taking aim at the fucking Americans- more particularly at Henry Morton Stanley, who was actually Welsh. Still, there were a lot of stories about him back then and he was considered a bit of a cad. The truth was probably quite different. Still 'efficient' was the mot juste to damn that upstart.
The British found salvation not only in walking in imperial steps hallowed by time
No. The Brits were Christian. They found salvation in the Bible.
but in flattering comparison of their “devotion to efficiency”, whatever its results, to their predecessors’ naked greed. Conrad skewered this self-deception, exposing the “darkness” masked by empire’s cover story of “civilising mission”.
How the fuck could he do that by writing about shit happening in the Congo which Britain did not rule? Belgium had to take over in order for the administration of the Congo to improve a little.
He and other 19th-century Britons
the guy was Polish and had good reason to hate the Tzar.
knew their empire was doing something new.
No. The Brits knew they had displaced the Dutch who had displaced the Portuguese
Reflecting on invasions since ancient times and “the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians…of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists,” Dilke realised, “The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth.”
I may as well give the full quotation to show that Dilke meant the opposite of what this stupid woman is suggesting.
The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York is the apparent Latinization of the English in America; but before he leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigor of the English race—the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples,
in New York some people eat spaghetti. Elsewhere they are chewing bacon as is right and proper.
the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four pence.
this is the victory of the constipated over those who have a healthy high-fibre diet
Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, destroying the Red Indians, and checking the advance of the Chinese.
But it was the Atlantic cities that mattered. Immigrants gained skills and capital there before moving inland.
The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader. The Danes and Saxons amalgamated with the Britons, the Normans with the English, the Tartars with the Chinese, the Goths and Burgundians with the Gauls: the Spaniards not only never annihilated a people, but have themselves been all but completely expelled by the Indians, in Mexico and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria, have conquered but not killed off the native peoples. Hitherto it has been nature‘s rule, that the race that peopled a country in the earliest historic days should people it to the end of time. The American problem is this: does the law, in a modified shape, hold good, in spite of the destruction of the native population? Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free, are commencing slowly to die out? that the New Englanders are dying fast, and their places being supplied by immigrants? Can the English in America, in the long run, survive the common fate of all migrating races? Is it true that, if the American settlers continue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian? It is certain that the English families long in the land have the features of the extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroes there is at present no trace of any change, save in their becoming dark brown instead of black.
This is crazy Lamarckian shite like Prince Phillip warning English people in China not to stay long otherwise they'd get slitty eyed. Essentially, Dilke in his boneheaded manner is saying, don't worry too much if your son migrates to America or Australia. He won't turn black or slitty eyed. This is because the Anglo-Saxons are magical. They weren't absorbed by the Welsh and they won't be absorbed in New South Wales.
The Maories—an immigrant race—were dying off in New Zealand when we landed there. The Indians of Mexico—another immigrant people—had themselves undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first became acquainted with them. Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great natural law forbidding change? It is easy to say that the English in Old England are not a native but an immigrant race; that they show no symptoms of decline. There, however, the change was slight, the distance short, the difference of climate small.
Why does Priya bother quoting this nonsense? Dilke was writing about Brits living in far off places. He wasn't critiquing Imperialism- though he took some digs at the Dutch in Indonesia.
In World War One, though the British camouflaged their conquest of the Ottoman empire’s Arab provinces as a resurrection of the tradition of imperial improvement embodied by the Persians, Seleucids, and Parthians,
Nope. They were pretending to be supporting the Hashemite as Pan-Arabs from places like Tikrit. WS Blunt and other pro-Arab authors had laid down the groundwork for this. To be frank, it was Iran, not the Arab lands which had its worst during the Great War. I suppose the Brits could always shift the blame to the Rooskis for the Persian famine.
they knew their government used “armed forces to do with explosives what should be done by policemen and sticks”.
This was a Wing Commander's reference to dropping bombs from planes in Iraq and India. But, it worked well. It gave tribal chiefs an excuse to refuse to launch a raiding party without looking weak.
We can’t draw the same analogies to a “new Rome” today to justify the new imperial practices they enabled.
Perhaps this stupid woman thinks America is a imperialist power in the Middle East. It is occupying Iraq with a couple of thousand soldiers.
Though empire has always been integral to human history,
It hasn't been for 70 years. Why does this stupid woman not know this?
we have only once – now – been on the brink of environmental collapse: a unique type of imperial formation and global order led to this unique historical moment.
No. Imperialism had disappeared long before anybody thought there might be a problem.
This is not to say that modern empires had nothing in common with preceding imperial formations. Glimmers of their dynamics are evident in even earlier polities – take Venice and Genoa’s 19th-century armed contest over trade in the Aegean Sea.
This woman is utterly ignorant! There was conflict between Venice and Genoa is the thirteenth and fourteenth century just as there had been naval conflicts between the Romans and the Carthaginians 1500 years previously . Neither Venice nor Genoa were independent by the start of the nineteenth century.
The British looked often enough to (a mythical version of) ancient history for it to have had real influence.
Nonsense! The Brits were way smarter than this ignorant nutter. They didn't go for a 'Pro-Consular' system- unless Cromer counts.
History is always a story of continuity and change. But no previous imperial formation embraced all these four features (material measures of progress, exclusive sovereignty, racial hierarchy, and homogenisation), which together radically distorted our relations to the earth and one another, leading to our present planetary crisis.
There is no such 'imperial formation' anywhere nor has there ever been. If this crazy fool is thinking of the British Raj, it didn't have exclusive sovereignty- indeed still doesn't- or racial hierarchy or homogenization. The Scottish legal system is different from that of England and Wales. Anyway, it ended long ago.
As for planetary crises- how about a fucking all out nuclear war between the US and the USSR? That might have ended almost all life on the planet. But neither of the principals to the conflict were Imperial powers. Indeed, both had anti-Imperialist policies in South Asia and the MENA.
To say this is not to say that European people were especially bad and that British and French people today must don hairshirts. That is not the point of understanding this past (whatever politicians like former UK home secretary Suella Braverman may opportunistically claim). It merely helps us grasp the origins of dominant cultural notions that have not served us (including British and French people) so that, by redistributing financial, moral, and cultural capital, we might recover alternate notions and make new history going forward.
This crazy nutter and her ignorant students will never be allowed to redistribute anything. Let them concentrate on eating their own shit.
The stakes for such understanding are high for relations between societies but also within them. If failure to reckon with the imperial past allowed nostalgic and xenophobic sentiments to fuel the disaster of Brexit in the United Kingdom,
It didn't. Don't be silly.
failure to address the Ottoman Empire’s evolution in its last decades enabled the rise of Erdogan’s right-wing Justice and Development Party in Turkey.
It didn't. You are utterly mad.
In his address to the US Congress in June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India had attained freedom after “one thousand years of foreign rule”, a pernicious elision of British with Mughal rule that has enabled his government’s erasure and distortion of Muslim presence in India.
This mad cunt hasn't noticed that Hindus have been ethnically cleansed from Pak and Bangladesh not to mention Kashmir Valley. Thousand years of Muslim rule was thousand years of suffering for Hindus. British rule was quite good but was predicated on the Royal Navy's ability to fight a two front war.
Failure to recognise the novelties of European colonialism has abetted continued settler colonial violence in Palestine.
Nope. The settlers want land and if the Palestinians go in for 'pay-for-slay', the settlers are allowed to proceed. This has nothing to co with colonialism. Israel is good at developing property such that smart and affluent people come to live there. The French got the fuck out of Algeria because the game was not worth the candle.
The qualities that distinguished modern European empires from history’s earlier empires are material
they are irrelevant. America and the Soviet Union created the model for rapid industrialization such that exponential increase in demand for fossil fuel energy could occur.
and persist in structuring our world and are the ground from which we must make new history as we stand on the precipice of survival.
Priya didn't know the old history. She was so ignorant she thought Venice and Genoa were fighting in the Aegean in the Nineteenth century. She demonstrates that History should no longer be taught at University because the only people it attracts are utterly cretinous nutters.
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