colonial rule

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Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

The declaration described foreign rule as a violation of human rights, reiterated the right to self-­determination, and called for the immediate end of all forms of colonial rule.1 Resolution 1514 offered a complete repudiation of foreign rule and rejected any prerequisites for the attainment of independence. Soon after its passage, the resolution formed the basis of a new committee with broad powers to investigate colonial rule and hear petitions from colonial subjects, making colonial rule subject to international scrutiny and to the demands for self-­determination.2 While 1960 marked a radical rupture in the history of modern international society, it has largely been subsumed in a standard account of decolonization where the transition from empire to nation and the expansion of international society to include new states is a seamless and inevitable development.

In this context, anticolonial nationalists refashioned self-­determination as a right, positioned it as a prerequisite to other human rights, and argued that it entailed an immediate end to colonial rule. Understood as a claim to independence and equality, the right to self-­determination served as the foundation for a domination-­free and postimperial international order. This refashioning of the UN and self-­determination set the stage for anticolonial nationalists to challenge the remnants of colonial rule and to legitimize new postcolonial states on the international stage. This chapter takes up the question of how self-­determination emerged as a right and examines the political and theoretical implications of this transformation.

The critique of domination and exploitation led anticolonial nationalists to endorse domestic self-­government and international nondomination in the right to self-­determination. Anticolonial critics highlighted the problem of empire as enslavement by exposing the hypocritical nature of liberal and humanitarian justifications of colonial rule. The 1885 General Act of the Berlin Conference, the League of Nations Covenant, and the United Nations Charter all described colonial rule as a form of trusteeship where the colonial power functioned as a “trustee” who exercised political power for the benefit of the colonized subjects. Azikiwe pointed out the Burkean origins of this account of political rule as trusteeship.43 In his early critique of British rule in India, Edmund Burke had argued that “all political power which is set over men . . . ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit,” and described the rights and privileges of rule as a trust.44 While Burke invoked trusteeship to argue for limitations on imperial rule, by the late nineteenth century, this language was redeployed in service of expanding imperial power.


pages: 370 words: 111,129

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate raider, deindustrialization, European colonialism, global village, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Parkinson's law, trade route

Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.’ Stealing From Indian Steel The story of the Indian steel industry demonstrates how the exploitation continued into the late colonial period, which has sometimes been represented by apologists for Empire as a more enlightened episode of colonial rule. Oppression and discrimination had merely become more sophisticated. The British were unalterably opposed to India developing its own steel industry. India had, of course, been a pioneer of steel; as early as the sixth century, crucible-formed steel, which came to be known as ‘wootz’ (a corruption of the Kannada word ‘ukku’, mistranscribed in English as ‘wook’ and mangled into ‘wootz’) steel was made in the country, and Indian steel acquired global renown as the world’s finest.

Some scholars have recently demonstrated, with impressive statistics (based on analyses of the aggregate correlates of political regimes), that a large number of former British colonies are democracies, and, indeed, that having once been a British colony is the variable most highly correlated with democracy. Myron Weiner has pointed out that, except for countries in the Americas, ‘every country with a population of at least 1 million (and almost all the smaller countries as well) that has emerged from colonial rule and has had a continuous democratic experience is a former British colony’. (There have also been former British colonies whose democratic experience has not been continuous, but featured bouts of military dictatorship, including both Pakistan and Bangladesh.) So it would seem that however much they failed to live up to their own ideas—however strongly they denied to Indians, as they had to Americans before 1776, ‘the rights of Englishmen’—the British did instil sufficient doses of the ethos of democracy into their former colonies that it outlived their tutelage.

As the British expanded across northern India, The Pioneer established itself in Lucknow as the third in a colonial triumvirate of newspapers whose views could be taken as broadly representative of the British community in India. It must, therefore, be acknowledged that it was the British who first established newspapers in India, which had been unknown before colonial rule, and it is to their credit that they allowed Indians to emulate them in doing so both in English, catering to the tiny English-educated elite (and its aspirational imitators) and in Indian vernacular languages. The Bombay Samachar, in Gujarati, was founded in 1822 (it is still running, and proudly calls itself the oldest newspaper in Asia still in print) and a few decades later, two Bengali-owned newspapers followed suit in Calcutta, The Bengalee in 1879 (later purchased, and edited for thirty-seven years, by Surendra Nath Banerjea after he left the ICS) and the formidable Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1868 (which, after being founded as a Bengali-language publication, then became a bilingual weekly for a time, before turning into an English-language newspaper in 1878 to advocate nationalist interests.


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

Post-colonial history takes a generally sceptical view of the European impact and an even more sceptical view of the ‘improvements’ once claimed for colonial rule. It treats ‘colonial’ history as myopic and biased, perhaps even delusory, and its claims as so much propaganda aimed at opinion at home. Indeed, closer inspection has suggested an ironic reversal of the colonialist case. Far from dragging backward peoples towards European-style modernity, colonial rule was more likely to impose a form of ‘antimodernity’. Caste in India symbolized Indian backwardness. Yet British rulers, for their own convenience, struck a bargain with Brahmins to harden caste status into an administrative system (formalized in the census).16 In colonial Africa a parallel process took place as clans and followings were reinvented as ‘tribes’, with chiefly rulers as their ancestral leaders.17 Here, as in India, a political gambit was carefully packaged as an act of respect to local tradition.

Europe’s colonization of Asia had been a patchy affair, only shallowly rooted in much of South East Asia (where colonial rule had gained limited purchase before the 1890s). It was much more impressive on the continent’s maritime fringes than it was inland. (In this respect, as in others, India was different.) It was partly this that explained why it fell apart so quickly in 1941–2, and staged only a brief recovery after 1945. Yet change after 1945 was real enough. Less than ten years later, colonial rule had all but vanished from South, East and South East Asia. Where it still persisted, the timetable for independence wasalready drawn up, or the territory concerned was of trivial importance.

It took nearly three hundred years for the corner of India where Vasco da Gama had landed to fall under European rule (Calicut was annexed by the British in 1792). The rush started only at the turn of the nineteenth century. Not just the timing, but the form and direction of Europe’s expansion need more explanation. Why did the Ottoman Empire and Iran preserve their autonomy long after India, which was much further away? Why was India subjected to colonial rule while China was able to keep its sovereign status, though much hedged about, and Japan had become a colonial power by 1914? If industrial capitalism was the key to the spread of European influence, why did its impact take so long to be felt across so much of the world, and with such variable consequences?


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

., 64, 68 Bayly, Susan, 7 Beames, John, 94, 95, 104, 106, 110–11, 120 beauty contests, 283–4 Bedi, Kiran, 279 Benares, 21, 83, 103 Bengal adda, 89 bhadralok, 88–9, 156, 178 British conquest, 51–5 communists, 243, 252 famines, 78, 209 independence migrations, 222 independence negotiations, 215, 216, 219 Mughal period, 15, 31, 35 Muslims, 7, 215 nationalist movements, 197, 206 Naxalite movement, 253 nineteenth-century, 93 partition (1905), 155–62, 175 Permanent Settlement, 78–9, 88, 103 pre-colonial period, 2, 8, 14 princely sovereignties, 96 reform movements, 142 rice growing, 250 Santals, 86 Tebhaga movement, 223 women, 146–7 Bengali language, 120 324 Index Bentham, Jeremy, 81 Bentick, Lord William, 82, 88, 89, 305 Berat, 12 Besantm Annie, 164 bhadradok, 88–9, 156, 178 Bhagalpur, 277 Bhairagis, 42 Bhakti, xxi, 8, 13, 14, 143 Bharat, 275–6 Bharati, Uma, 279 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 264, 266–7, 272, 273, 275, 280, 281–3, 287–95, 296, 298, 299–300 Bharatiya Lok Dal, 258 Bharatput, 35 Bharris, 80 Bhave, Vinoba, 245 Bhils tribe, 80, 86 Bhimsen, 29–30 Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail Singh, 259 Bhonsle, 44 Bhopal, 261–2 Bhubaneshwar, 235 Bhutan, 226 Bidar, 12 Bihar, 53, 126, 153–4, 156, 161, 165, 176, 177, 189, 196, 206, 217, 255, 280 Bijapur, 12, 23 Bijnor, 100 Birbal, 18 Birla family, 126 Blavatsky, Madame, 164 Bofors affair, 264 Bollywood, 237–9, 266 Bombay, 47, 48, 91, 126, 127, 135, 157, 196, 212 Bombay Plan 1944, 216 Bombay Presidency, xxiii, 241–2 Bombay Presidency Association, 136 Bose, Subhas Chandra, xiv, 189, 204, 210 boundaries, post-independence, 240–2 Boxer rebellion, 131 Brahmans, xviii, xxi, 3, 5, 15, 18, 24, 59, 91, 141, 179 Brahmo Samaj, 86, 88, 114, 139, 142 bribery, 265 Brindaban, 22 British rule, see colonial rule Buchanan, Francis, 64 Buddhism, xviii, xxi, xxvii, 63 Bulhe Shah, 42 bungalows, 109, 110 Burke, Edmund, 57, 67 Burma, 90, 95, 131, 154, 204, 209, 210 Buxar, battle of (1764) Calcutta Bengal partition, 157 bhadralok, 88–9, 178 British conquest, 51–2 British settlement, 66 capital of India, 68, 160, 161 English education, 83, 89 Fort William College, 60, 88, 89 Great Calcutta Killing 1946, 217 independence settlement, 219 Mahakali Pathshala, 148–9 nineteenth-century society, 88–9 trade, 47, 51 World War II, 209 Calcutta Presidency, xxiii, 56 Canada, 167, 190 canals, 97–9 Canning, Lord Charles John, 103, 105 castes, xvii and army, 61 colonial era, 91, 112, 117, 138–9 Communal Award 1932, 194–5 dals, 89 and Gandhi, 173, 176 Mandal Commission, 267, 274–5, 289–90 non-Brahmans, 119, 141, 179, 191 Other Backward Castes (OBC), 270, 274 pre-colonial India, 3, 24 reform, 142, 302 scheduled castes and tribes, 232–3, 274, 278 untouchables, see dalits and VHP, 289 Cawnpore (Kanpur), 103, 106, 107, 163 censuses, 112, 138, 270 Central Provinces, 196 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 131, 263 Index Chadwick Report 1842, 108 Chaitanya (1486–1533), 13 Chandigarh, 235–7, 259, 260–1 Chapekar, Balkrishna, 154 Chapekar, Damodar, 154 Charles II, 48 Chartism, 93 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 122, 135, 144, 156, 159 Chatterjee, Joya, 219 Chatterjee, Partha, xvi Chattopadhyay, Swati, 148 Chauhanm Rajput Prithviraj, 4 Chauri Chaura killings, 178, 182, 183 Chettiars, 199 Chettiars, Nattukottai, 131 China, 75–6, 126, 189, 244, 247–8, 253, 286, 291, 296 Chingiz Khan, 14 Chisti, 8, 43 Chitral, 154 Cholas, xviii, xxvii Chowdhry, Nawab ’Ali, 159–60 Christian Indians, 288 Christianity, xxvii, 18, 47–8, 81, 83, 143, 289 Churchill, Winston, 169, 182, 193, 205, 212 cinema, 73, 237–9, 256, 279 civil disobedience, see non-cooperation civil service 1945, 212 British administration, 59–60, 110–11, 120 Cornwallis reforms, 60, 66 Indian Administrative Service, 60, 83, 232, 254–5, 274 class and Gandhi, 187–8 peasants, see peasants and VHP, 289–90 Clinton, Bill, 294 Clive, Robert, 51–4, 59, 60–1, 72, 305–6 Coca-Cola, 271 Cohn, Bernard, 29, 57, 105 Cold War, 247, 267, 301 colonial rule 1890s calamities, 150–3 325 Bengal conquest, 51–5 burden of past, 265–70, 301, 303, 304 collaborators, 131–7 conquest and settlement, 68–81, 90–1 Dalhousie administration, 94–9 East India Company, 44–55 English-educated Indians, 118–20 foundation of colonial rule, 57–68 global British imperialism, 124–31 historiography, 302–3 Indian society under Company rule, 81–91 indirect rule, 75 interwar period, 167–202 ‘modern state’, 92–4 modernity, 114–18 ‘natural’ Indian leaders, 114–16, 133 pre-World War I society, 123–66 revolts, see revolts social structures, 108–14, 133–4 transfer of authority to crown, 103–4 World War I, 162–6 Communal Award 1932, 194–5 communalism, 303 communists, 188–9, 223, 243, 252, 264, 273, 281 Congress Socialist Party, 243 Constitution abolition of colonial categories, 270 amendments, 255, 278, 291 federalism, 191, 232 independent India, 231–3 Cornwallis, Lord, 56, 59, 60, 66, 78 corruption, 261, 265, 287, 288 cotton, 75, 119, 155 counter-terrorism, 301 cow protection, 152–3, 228 Cripps, Stafford, 205 culture colonial era, 62–6, 139 Mughals, 40–3 Curzon, Lord George, 123–4, 131, 155–7, 306 Dacca, 51, 76, 159 Dadu (1544–1603), 13 Dalai Lama, 247 Dale, Stephen, 14–15 326 Index Dalhousie administration, 94–9, 104 dalits, xxi Communal Award 1932, 194–5 definition, xxi and Gandhi, 173, 194 independent India, 232–3, 265, 270, 302 and self-rule movement, 194 women, 278 Dalmia, Vasudha, 117, 143–4 dals, 89 Daman, 242 Damascus, 5 Dara Shukoh (1615–58), 20–1 Darbhanga, 149 Das, C.

With the advent of Islamic rulers in the early thirteenth century, Indian culture rigidified, political life gave way to despotism, and the gap between foreign ‘Muslim’ rulers and a native ‘Hindu’ populace of necessity made for a fragile Sultans, Mughals, and pre-colonial Indian society 3 structure. Moral arguments, particularly a focus on what became a caricature of Aurangzeb’s ‘intolerance’, were central in explaining ‘decline’. Stage three brought modern British colonial rule with its enlightened leadership, scientific progress, and professed tutelage to independence. This tripartite schema was explicit in much British writing, and it often underlay even anti-colonial Indian nationalist historiography. Even today it has been tenaciously persistent as unrecognized ‘common sense’ in historical writing; and, as we shall see in chapter 9, this periodization is today treated as fact in Hindu nationalist ideologies.

Both principle and practice were at stake as the British debated these questions. On one thing, however, the British were agreed. They could not avow a preference for ‘despotism’, for a commitment to the ‘rule of law’, in their view, defined them as a ‘civilized’ nation, and so alone could give legitimacy to their Raj. Yet colonial rule by its very nature could not help but create its own version of the ‘despotic’. Two fundamental convictions shaped Hastings’s jurisprudence. One was that, as the historian Bernard Cohn has written, there existed in India ‘a fixed body of laws, codes that had been set down or established by “law givers” and that over time these had become corrupted by accretions, interpretations, and commentaries’.


Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre by Kim Wagner

British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, Mahatma Gandhi, sparse data, trade route, Wall-E

Indians were still bound by caste and superstition, and Hindus and Muslims bound to get at each other’s throats were it not for the calming and civilising influence of the Raj. Deeply invested in a style of colonial rule referred to as ‘despotic paternalism’, O’Dwyer and his supporters believed it to be their duty to protect the peasants of Punjab, whom they regarded as the ‘real India’, from the self-serving and corrupting influences of educated nationalists and urban elites. Any attempt at loosening the reins of colonial rule was thus met with an almost instinctive wave of protest by British officials with nothing but scorn for those liberals, who might be well-meaning, as one administrator put it, but who have ultimately ‘helped to weaken our rule in India’.25 O’Dwyer accordingly described the reforms as ‘diabolical’ and asserted that the masses, whom he claimed to understand and to speak for, did not actually want political change, let alone ‘self-determination’.26 O’Dwyer’s views were well known, and even notorious, among the very class of educated Indians that he despised.

Presented without any real context in the movie, the Amritsar Massacre functions simply as a grim vignette to illustrate the power of Gandhi’s message of non-violence. The speaker at Jallianwala Bagh is giving voice to the doctrine of Satyagraha, or soul-force, when he is silenced, quite literally, by British bullets. The massacre is thus depicted as the inevitable result of the clash between Gandhi’s righteous struggle and the oppression of colonial rule – or, to use Niall Ferguson’s awkward analogy, the clash between soul-force and fist-force. Yet the violence unleashed on the unarmed men, women and children at Amritsar is entirely embodied by Edward Fox’s Dyer: a man seemingly incapable of emotions, who appears as nothing so much as an automaton.

In his renowned work on the ‘Wilsonian Moment’, for instance, Erez Manela includes a chapter titled ‘From Paris to Amritsar’, implying a more or less direct link between the 1919 Peace Conference and the events at Jallianwala Bagh – a connection that is never substantiated, and which is in fact unsustainable.12 In such accounts, the causes behind the massacre are identified exclusively in terms of short-term factors unique to the post-1918 world as a particular historical moment and shaped largely by events outside British India and therefore, ultimately, external to the dynamics of colonial rule.13 The nature of colonial violence of the twentieth century, however, was not simply a function of, nor coterminous with, imperial decline after 1918 as Britain and other European powers sought to hold on to their empires by all means possible. Rather than being the beginning of the end, I suggest that the violence of the Amritsar Massacre might better be understood as the final stage of a much longer process.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Hobson's warnings were echoed by the band of writers who made up Labour's ‘intelligence branch’ in imperial policy: Leonard Woolf, whose Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920) denounced colonial rule as a licence to rob; Sydney Olivier, whose The League of Nations and Primitive Peoples (1918) pressed the case for international trusteeship; and E. D. Morel, veteran of the Congo campaign, who published The Black Man's Burden in 1920. Their critical view of the pre-war world (Olivier believed that the humanitarian traditions of colonial rule had been corrupted by business after 1890)143 chimed with a larger body of ‘middle opinion’ disillusioned by political, diplomatic and economic failure in the aftermath of the war.

In 1955, at the Bandung ‘Asian-African’ conference (to which colonial leaders were invited), Nehru and Sukarno, the Indonesian prime minister, urged ‘non-alignment’ for Afro-Asian states, rejecting association with either the West or the Soviet bloc, and calling for the swift end of colonial rule.4 By the mid-1950s, the United Nations was becoming the forum where post-colonial states could make common cause, and mount a propaganda offensive against the remaining colonial powers. This trend was dramatically strengthened by the Suez crisis in 1956 after which Britain became for many ex-colonial states ‘Public Enemy Number One’.5 Their third assumption was also subject to rapid erosion as the decade proceeded. But, in 1951–2, it was still possible for senior ministers to take satisfaction in the moral reputation of British colonial rule and of British foreign policy generally.

The Empire Project The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, ‘has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire’ and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the ‘white dominions’; the commercial empire of the City of London; and ‘Greater India’ which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle.


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

JUSTIFYING COLONIALISM: THE ROLE OF THE STATE Hailey’s Africa report displayed the usual technocratic genius for recommending actions while avoiding the question of who should be given the power to take those actions. After the outbreak of war required a new justification for colonial rule to save the empire, Hailey was then ready to answer the question of who should have the power for action. Hailey took the first major step in articulating his new justification for colonial rule on October 29, 1941, at a lunch-time lecture to the members of the Royal Empire Society. Entitled “A New Philosophy of Colonial Rule,” its breakthrough insight concerned the role of the state in the colonies: “It is the primary function of the State to concentrate its attention on the improvement of the standards of living and the extension of the social services in the Dependencies. . . .

The failure to endorse Japan’s racial equality proposal at the Versailles peace talks after the previous war was now a huge embarrassment. Lord Hailey would attempt to remove this liability during World War II by reinventing yet again the idea of technocratic development as a justification for colonial rule. The empire’s legitimacy was going to be based on its technical ability to achieve rapid development, not on the racial superiority of the British. The empire could present itself as a benevolent autocrat for the colonial peoples. The British even banned racist statements by colonial officials to conform to the new narrative, although the victims of racism knew that such a ban did not immediately change racist attitudes.2 Ironically, Lord Hailey’s justification for colonialism and his cover-up of racism would later appeal to the anticolonial victims of racism, the new African political leaders who would emerge after the sooner-than-expected collapse of the British African empire in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Lord Hailey himself hired Lewis on September 4, 1941. Although Lewis was too young and too black to have any influence on colonial policy for the rest of the war, it was a notable milestone. 15 The next step in saving the empire was Lord Hailey’s formulation of technocratic development as a justification for colonial rule. The way Lord Hailey became the key colonial official on development ideas itself reflected a technocratic mind-set. LORD HAILEY’S AFRICAN SURVEY William Malcolm Hailey had been an unlikely member of the Colonial Service to become Britain’s leading official Africanist. He had spent his career not in Africa but in India.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Congress with little or no input on the proposed draft from congressional committees, the judiciary, the bar, business interests, law schools, or other stakeholders, I would be looking for a new career rather quickly. Based on many current practices, however, that career could easily be found abroad ‘helping’ transition countries with the same process.45 Titling Toward Confusion in Kenya Lord Lugard, the architect of British colonial rule in Africa, said land tenure follows “a steady evolution, side by side with the evolution of social progress.” This “natural evolution” leads to “individual ownership.” The Native Land Tenure Rules of 1956 privatized land in Kenya, advertising it as “a normal step in the evolution of a country,” under which “energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land.”

Sometimes these governments comprised little more than an independence agitator, an army, and a foreign aid budget. Although they had shallow roots, the new states brought benefits to their new leaders. The new rulers could use the inherited colonial army to levy high taxes on natural resources or any other valuable economic activity, and they had a tradition of autocratic colonial rule and economic planning. It was not surprising that most of these new states were unfriendly to both economic and political freedoms. Sponsoring Native Autocrats To make things worse, colonial administration had reinforced autocracy. The preferred method of colonial administration had been “indirect rule,” relying on native rulers or intermediaries.

Moreover, the specific problems created by colonialism seem to reflect more Europeans’ incompetence than their avarice. Certainly there was change over time from the era of annihilation of indigenous people and African slavery in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries to the more beneficent empires of the nineteeth and twentieth centuries, just as nation-building today is more beneficent than colonial rule. Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden” at the height of the imperial era in 1898. Before that, the British government ban on the slave trade in 1807 inaugurated a more humanitarian imperial era. The British agreed to take over Sierra Leone in 1808 from a chartered company, which had failed to make the country a haven for freed slaves (most of whom had died).


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Wouldn’t every citizen, every politician, and even a predatory dictator want to make his country as wealthy as possible? Let’s return to the Kingdom of Kongo we discussed earlier. Though this kingdom collapsed in the seventeenth century, it provided the name for the modern country that became independent from Belgian colonial rule in 1960. As an independent polity, Congo experienced almost unbroken economic decline and mounting poverty under the rule of Joseph Mobutu between 1965 and 1997. This decline continued after Mobutu was overthrown by Laurent Kabila. Mobutu created a highly extractive set of economic institutions.

Though the slave trade mostly ended after 1807, subsequent European colonialism not only threw into reverse nascent economic modernization in parts of southern and western Africa but also cut off any possibility of indigenous institutional reform. This meant that even outside of areas such as Congo, Madagascar, Namibia, and Tanzania, the areas where plunder, mass disruption, and even whole-scale murder were the rule, there was little chance for Africa to change its institutional path. Even worse, the structures of colonial rule left Africa with a more complex and pernicious institutional legacy in the 1960s than at the start of the colonial period. The development of the political and economic institutions in many African colonies meant that rather than creating a critical juncture for improvements in their institutions, independence created an opening for unscrupulous leaders to take over and intensify the extraction that European colonialists presided over.

As we will see (this page–this page), in the nineteenth century, King Khama, the grandfather of Botswana’s first prime minister at independence, Seretse Khama, initiated institutional changes to modernize the political and economic institutions of his tribe. Quite uniquely, these changes were not destroyed in the colonial period, partly as a consequence of Khama’s and other chiefs’ clever challenges to colonial authority. Their interplay with the critical juncture that independence from colonial rule created laid the foundations for Botswana’s economic and political success. It was another case of small historical differences mattering. There is a tendency to see historical events as the inevitable consequences of deep-rooted forces. While we place great emphasis on how the history of economic and political institutions creates vicious and virtuous circles, contingency, as we have emphasized in the context of the development of English institutions, can always be a factor.


pages: 403 words: 125,659

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The most advanced economy in the region – thanks in part to the network of roads, cities, railroads and ports left by the British – Kenya has held linchpin status ever since independence by mere dint of what it is not. It has never been Uganda, where Idi Amin and Milton Obote demonstrated how brutal post-colonial rule could turn; or Rwanda, mourning a genocide that left nearly a million dead; or Sudan, venue for one of the continent's longest civil wars. In place of Ethiopia's feeding stations and Somalia's feuding warlords, it offered safari parks and five-star coastal hotels. Kenya's dysfunctional neighbours have always made it look good in comparison.

When Kenya marked forty years of independence in 2003, newspaper cartoonists could not resist highlighting the cruel trick history had played on the country. They captured its itinerary in a series of chronological snapshots: in the first, an ordinary Kenyan in a neat suit and shined shoes stands sulking under white colonial rule. In the second, a free man under Kenyatta leaps for joy, but his suit is beginning to look distinctly tatty. By the Moi era, the emaciated mwananchi is crawling, not walking. His suit is in tatters, he has lost his shoes, and, eyes crazed, he is begging for alms. The statistics made the same point, in drier fashion: living standards in the independent, sovereign state of Kenya were actually lower than when the hated British ruled the roost.

The dividing line between work and play blurred as John methodically extended an already enormous social circle to include any players with the insights and experience that might help him in the Herculean task of cleaning out Kenya's Augean stables. Since childhood, John had possessed a talent for bonding with people from different spheres. Thrusting Kenyan yuppies and world-weary Asian lawyers, doddery white leftovers from the days of colonial rule and impassioned activists from Kenya's civil society, lowly taxi drivers and puffed-up permanent secretaries: they might not be able to talk to one another, but they could all, somehow, talk to John. He might not have the hormonal magnetism that allows a man to electrify a crowd, but when it came to the one-on-one encounter, few were more beguiling.


pages: 264 words: 74,688

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

In a remark with which, Americans well-up on “statue wars” will be familiar, she remarked, “Having it on the parlour wall, in my view, sent mixed messages about the city council’s values today.” The same month, Satyapal Singh, the Indian minister for higher education, denounced evolution as the legacy of British colonial rule in the shape of an education system reinforcing an imperialist mentality. Instead, he announced that he would offer a new Hindu theory on the origin of species. It is difficult to see imperial amnesia in the contention of recent years over the history of the British Empire. Indeed, empire is an aspect of the culture wars: sometimes ridiculous, sometimes bitter, and sometimes both, in Britain and elsewhere, of recent years.

The transfer of blame to the British Empire and/or to the United States was all too typical of a postcolonial failure to accept responsibility, a process also seen in debate within Britain and the United States. The creation of a new national history, the post-independence rethinking of the colonial period, and the need to “place” the latter in a hostile light have led to an emphasis on resistance to colonial rule, for example, by the Maroons of Jamaica in the eighteenth century, and also the “Indian Rebellion,” the renaming of the “Indian Mutiny.” However, this emphasis tended to involve a misleading treatment of much resistance in terms of later, nationalistic, anti-colonialism. An instructive instance is provided with the presentation of the Moroccan siege of English-held Tangier in 1680, in terms of postcolonial politics of resistance.10 That scarcely describes a situation in which Islamic anti-Christian feeling was more to the fore; Morocco was itself an empire with a history from the early 1590s of violent expansionism south across the Sahara into the Niger Valley, and its prime challenges came from Ottoman power based in neighboring Algiers and from Spain and Portugal; and not from England, later Britain, which, had obtained Tangier as a royal dowry.

Ironically, in terms of their rhetoric, many of the newly independent states, such as Egypt, were authoritarian and/or militaristic, a point that underlines the complexity of judging British policy in the Suez Crisis of 1956.18 Moreover, “the underlying centrality of slavery in the historical relationship between Egypt and the Sudan” was such that anti-colonial nationalism in Egypt was readily compatible with an Egyptian determination to regain power over Sudan,19 where, if earlier British colonial rule was, to a degree, violent and destabilizing,20 so also had been that of Egypt. Other states that can be seen as authoritarian and/or military include Nigeria and Pakistan. Each in effect was a type of empire, in that groups based in one part of the state, the Punjab, for example, ruled more broadly and suppressed opposition, as in Baluchistan in Pakistan and the Ibo-inhabited region in Southeastern Nigeria.


pages: 341 words: 111,525

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

airport security, blood diamond, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, failed state, Live Aid, Livingstone, I presume, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade

Never in history, neither before nor since, has a single person claimed ownership of a larger tract of land. The territory was mostly virgin rainforest and savannah, crisscrossed by the Congo River and its countless tributaries, inhabited by millions of Congolese, but in those first years of colonial rule it was not the natives who posed the greatest threat to Leopold's interests. Arab slavers in the east of the country - the ones whose stories of a mighty river in the centre of Africa first attracted Livingstone and Stanley in the 1860s and 1870s - were a much greater concern for Leopold. Many of these Arabs had already lived for decades in the east of the country, organising raiding parties to plunder slaves and ivory, which would then be transported by caravan back to the large Arab trading centres around Zanzibar.

'I was horn near Liege, but arrived here in 1951. I was in my twenties and my job was as a teacher of social science. My duties were to teach Congolese ladies who came from villages about life in towns such as this one. We had classes in water hygiene, cooking, baby care and that sort of thing. People remember the Belgian colonial rule as a time for cruelty, but towards the end progress was being made across all of society. I used to live with a nurse who worked on a health programme that was successful in ending leprosy in the area and much of the malaria. Can you imagine that? Today, leprosy and malaria are killing thousands of people all over the Congo.'

We were standing in an old shop in what one day had been a terrace close to the Belgian monument in Kasongo. Part of the roof was missing and the damp floor was cluttered with rather secondrate bric-a-brac - broken furniture, stained clothing, dirty cooking pots. Vermond clearly had a thing about hats because among his possessions I spotted a classic icon of Belgian colonial rule, a cream-coloured sun helmet, the sort of topi Tintin wore through out his Tintin Ali Congo adventures. Seeing it made me think of all the black-and-white photographs I had seen during my research of Congolese colonials carrying out the business of colonialism - stalking past railway stations or peering from road bridges or surveying copper mines - and always doing it while wearing one of these topis.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

They must be reduced to a minimum.’4 As the failings of the chartered companies mounted, the colonial powers were obliged to raise their grants-in-aid. Some five to ten years after the start of colonial rule, most territories were receiving grants at ten times the initial rate. Thereafter, as the colonies advanced towards economic self-sufficiency, grants declined. By about 1914 they had been almost entirely replaced by local revenues.5 The thirty-year transition from dependency to economic self-sufficiency marks a continent-wide submission to colonial rule. It was a process which demanded the active collaboration of the African population – and at often considerable cost to themselves.

The expansion of banana cultivation in the region led to ‘spectacular demographic increase’.25 By the eighteenth century the power of pastoral leaders was being eclipsed by the power of leaders controlling dense agricultural populations in the highlands of the Rift Valley escarpment to the west and along the shores of Lake Victoria to the east. A number of distinct polities emerged from this conjunction of pastoral and agricultural interests; some were elevated to the status of kingdoms under colonial rule (1890s to 1960s): Buganda, Bunyoro, Nkore, and Toro. The Great Lakes region was perhaps the largest, most richly endowed, most developed and most densely populated of indigenous agricultural systems in Africa. It was also one of the last to be ‘discovered’ by Europeans. John Hanning Speke was the first white man to enter the region.

The Germans established sisal estates, coconut and cashew plantations; people worked for them. The Germans were not bad, Hassan's father had said, they were sometimes cruel – they lashed people who did not work hard enough – but not bad. Hassan himself grew up in what he recalls as a period of steadily mounting prosperity under colonial rule. The Germans and the British colonial government which took over the territory after the First World War introduced machinery, made roads, built schools and hospitals. ‘All good things, no bad things,’ he says, ‘things got better day after day.’ Hassan remembers the 1930s in particular as a golden age among the palms, a time when the benefits and costs of the colonial experience balanced out in favour of the indigenous population and offered a promising future.


pages: 549 words: 170,495

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Just as culture may predispose and actively prepare one society for the overseas domination of another, it may also prepare that society to relinquish or modify the idea of overseas domination. These changes cannot occur without the willingness of men and women to resist the pressures of colonial rule, to take up arms, to project ideas of liberation, and to imagine (as Benedict Anderson has it) a new national community, to take the final plunge. Nor can they occur unless either economic or political exhaustion with empire sets in at home, unless the idea of empire and the cost of colonial rule are challenged publicly, unless the representations of imperialism begin to lose their justification and legitimacy, and, finally, unless the rebellious “natives” impress upon the metropolitan culture the independence and integrity of their own culture, free from colonial encroachment.

The colonial territories are realms of possibility, and they have always been associated with the realistic novel. Robinson Crusoe is virtually unthinkable without the colonizing mission that permits him to create a new world of his own in the distant reaches of the African, Pacific, and Atlantic wilderness. But most of the great nineteenth-century realistic novelists are less assertive about colonial rule and possessions than either Defoe or late writers like Conrad and Kipling, during whose time great electoral reform and mass participation in politics meant that imperial competition became a more intrusive domestic topic. In the closing year of the nineteenth century, with the scramble for Africa, the consolidation of the French imperial Union, the American annexation of the Philippines, and British rule in the Indian subcontinent at its height, empire was a universal concern.

I have tried to show that the morality in fact is not separable from its social basis: right up to the last sentence, Austen affirms and repeats the geographical process of expansion involving trade, production, and consumption that predates, underlies, and guarantees the morality. And expansion, as Gallagher reminds us, whether “through colonial rule was liked or disliked, [its] desirability through one mode or another was generally accepted. So in the event there were few domestic constraints upon expansion.”46 Most critics have tended to forget or overlook that process, which has seemed less important to critics than Austen herself seemed to think.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Much as we’ve seen elsewhere, the development of the modern physical sciences in India was fundamentally shaped by the growth of industry, nationalism, and war.61 In order to understand the history of science in late nineteenth-century India, we need to begin by looking at the changing nature of colonial rule. In 1858, the year Bose was born, the British Crown took formal control of the Indian colonies, which had previously been governed by the East India Company. This marked the beginning of the British Raj, which lasted until Indian independence in 1947. With formal colonial rule came a number of new scientific institutions. Just prior to the formation of the British Raj, the East India Company had established the first three universities in India, in the cities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay.

With letters of reference from the Cavendish Laboratory, he was immediately appointed as the first Indian Professor of Physics at Presidency College, part of the University of Calcutta. He was, however, paid only a third of the salary of his European counterparts at the same institution – another reminder of the injustices of colonial rule. Determined to fight against these prejudices, Bose returned to the Indian Association, but this time as a lecturer rather than a student. At the Indian Association, Bose was able to perfect his lecturing style, inspiring a new generation of Indian scientists. He also began serious research into the properties of electromagnetic waves, making use of the Indian Association’s laboratory which had recently been expanded.

Telegraph lines criss-crossed the country, connecting India to the wider British Empire, whilst various private companies began manufacturing and installing electric lights in Indian cities. In fact, Bose himself advised on the introduction of the first electric streetlights in Calcutta in 1891.63 Despite the growth of science and industry under colonial rule, opportunities for Indians to conduct original research were still relatively rare. Leadership positions within colonial scientific departments were reserved for British scientists. The same was true of the majority of teaching positions at Indian universities. When Bose became Professor of Physics in 1885, he became the first – and for a few years, the only – Indian teaching science at the University of Calcutta.


pages: 169 words: 54,002

A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa

colonial rule, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration

They had no concept of what it was or what it meant. My comrades had only ever known or heard of colonial rule at the hands of Japan and dictatorship at the hands of Kim Il-sung. And before that was the miserable feudal period of the Korean dynasties. They’d only ever known bondage. North Koreans didn’t have anything to compare their country with because they’d never experienced anything else. Even when Kim Il-sung did something particularly brutal or horrific, no one raised an eyebrow. “Remember the time of Japanese colonial rule!” “Never forget the cruelty of American imperialism!” Without any other information at their disposal, young North Koreans simply fell for the propaganda.

“I can’t believe the way those people deceived me! Masaji, if you ever get back to Japan, tell them what I think of them!” Oddly enough, I never heard him complain about or blame the political system of North Korea. I finally realized that he’d never experienced true freedom. He’d been born under Japanese colonial rule and then shipped off to a life of slave labor. So he’d never known anything else. That might explain why he seemed to grow milder and more accepting over time. My mother, however, became more frightened by the day. Soon after we moved into our rickety shack, a young police officer came by. According to this fellow, our family register was defective.

I picked up the letter and saw that it contained news of her mother’s death: Your mother was calling your name until she passed away. I recalled my grandmother’s last words to me. “You’re Japanese,” she’d said. I remember how sad her eyes were. She knew her history. She understood what awful things go on under colonial rule. I knew that my grandmother had tried desperately to change my mother’s mind about leaving Japan but to no avail. I still remember looking for her at Shinagawa Station—but she hadn’t come to see us off. After my grandmother’s death, my mother’s face quickly developed deep wrinkles. She suddenly became more weathered, worn, and frail.


pages: 670 words: 169,815

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

‘Effendi’ is a Turkish term, widely heard in Egypt and the Sudan in colonial times, which now, in modern Turkish, is used where an English-speaker might say ‘Mr’. In the colonial period, the effendi were the educated classes, the intellectuals, who often adopted a strongly nationalist stance against British colonial rule. Years later, when reflecting on mistakes made by the British in the Sudan, Sir James Robertson accepted that this class of person had been foolishly overlooked. The Sudan government had ‘tended to put too much emphasis on the Nazirs and the Sheiks and not enough on the small educated class’. The British ‘were much more friendly with the country members than with the “effendia”’.

The abolition of the Egyptian monarchy by the Free Officers’ coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in July 1952 was followed by the new Egyptian government’s abandonment of any lingering claims of sovereignty over Sudan.19 Arab nationalism had its effect in making northern Sudanese politicians more focused on achieving independence and less willing to accommodate the south, which, in terms of population, comprised only a quarter of the country. As the British Foreign Office drily observed, the ‘nationalistic self-confidence which is now the mood of all independent Middle Eastern states is not conducive to successful colonial rule’.20 The explosive situation reached its climax in August 1955 when troops of the Sudan Defence Force based in the south mutinied. The structure of the Force had made such an event likely, as it was split into battalions which had been selected along ethnic lines. There were ‘black battalions’ from the south and then there were the Camel Corps and the Eastern Arab Corps, which, as their names implied, were units composed exclusively of Arabic-speakers.21 The south protested, in a violent way, against the increasing dominance that northern Arabic-speakers began to wield in their territory.

Theodore Roosevelt remarked as long ago as 1910 that he doubted if, in any part of the world, there was ‘a more striking instance . . . of genuine progress achieved by the substitution of civilization for savagery’. This was a bold claim, but estimates of the population decline during the time of the Mahdi and his bloodthirsty successor, the Khalifa, from a figure of about 8 million to some 2 million, showed that Sudan had enjoyed some benefits from the stability provided by colonial rule. A note of self-congratulation, combined with an awareness of the ingratitude of the natives, was expressed most eloquently by Rudyard Kipling, the unofficial poet laureate of empire, in 1913: ‘In due time the Sudanese will forget how warily their fathers had to walk in the Mahdi’s time to secure even a bellyful.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

The centenary of his birth in 1953 was marked by the visit there of the Queen Mother and the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, amid a large gathering of dignitaries, and by the unveiling of a memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey.4 In Rhodes of Africa (1936), cinema-goers were regaled with a vision of Rhodes as gruff, manly and masterful, a true maker of empire. After 1960, a great reaction set in. The dismantling of empire, foreshadowed in the independence of India in 1947, was now well advanced. Colonial rule had lost what remained of its moral legitimacy as a form of enlightened trusteeship. The postwar idea of world order, embodied in the United Nations’ Charter, rejected all forms of colonialism in favour of the universal ideal of the sovereign nation-state. To progressive opinion in Britain, the imperial tradition now seemed an incubus.

It had to make up its mind on what forms of law they should have and whether or not to respect their ideas about property, punishment and the practice of religion. It was soon pressed to lay down the conditions on which incomers and immigrants could buy land from the locals, and if they should be subject to the same regime as the natives. There was no standardized formula. Although there were certain broad categories of colonial rule, almost every acquisition brought its own special history, and demanded customized features. Both time and place mattered. Sometimes no local ruler appeared to chase the intruders away or disrupt their mumbo-jumbo proclamations. Sometimes, like King Docemo, he could be pushed brusquely aside with a pension.

For all the myths that were peddled about African wealth, Europeans quickly discovered the limits imposed by a harsh physical environment, sparse populations and the hardships of travel: to go from Zanzibar to Uganda in the mid 1890s meant a walk of two months.86 The brutal corollary was that coercion was needed to accumulate wealth – at least on the scale that outsiders demanded. Coercion permitted the seizure of land and the conscription of labour, often both simultaneously. Colonial rule thus became, for a white master-class, the means of economic control: dividing the land between a large settler zone and reserves for the natives; and imposing the taxes that forced African males to seek work on the farms or on the diamond, coal and gold fields of South Central Africa with their insatiable demand for cheap migrant labour.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

These profound differences between the civil societies of colonial North and South America would have enduring consequences when the time came for them to govern themselves independently. AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS In 1775, despite all the profound economic and social differences that had developed between them, both North and South America were still composed of colonies ruled by distant kings. That, however, was about to change. On 2 July 1776 a large crowd gathered on the steps of the old trading exchange in Charleston to hear South Carolina’s government declare the colony’s independence from Britain. It was the first to do so. Some forty years later Spanish rule was ended in Latin America.

In the twenty-three modern Asian countries for which data are available, with one exception, the health transition came between the 1890s and the 1950s. In Africa it came between the 1920s and the 1950s, with just two exceptions out of forty-three countries. In nearly all Asian and African countries, then, life expectancy began to improve before the end of European colonial rule. Indeed, the rate of improvement in Africa has declined since independence, especially but not exclusively because of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. It is also noteworthy that Latin American countries did not fare any better, despite enjoying political independence from the early 1800s.8 The timing of the improvement in life expectancy is especially striking as much of it predated the introduction of antibiotics (not least streptomycin as a cure for tuberculosis), the insecticide DDT and vaccines other than the simple ones for smallpox and yellow fever invented in the imperial era (see below).

It ends with the tricolore flying proudly over the entire African continent, from Algiers to Dakar, from Brazzaville to Madagascar. It would not be hard to mock this classic expression of French imperial aspiration.110 Yet that aspiration was not without its results. In Senegal, as we have seen, colonial rule was associated with a sustained improvement in life expectancy of around ten years, from thirty to forty. Algeria and Tunisia also saw comparable improvements.111 Better medical care – in particular reduced infant mortality and premature infertility – was the reason why populations in French Africa began to grow so rapidly after 1945.112 In Indo-China it was the French who constructed 20,000 miles of road and 2,000 of railways, opened coal, tin and zinc mines and established rubber plantations.113 In 1922 around 20,000 Vietnamese were granted French citizenship – still a tiny minority in a population of 3 million, but not a trivial number.114 In French West Africa the franchise was extended to a million Africans in 1946 and a further 3 million five years later.115 Sleeping sickness, which had been the scourge of Cameroon under German rule, was largely eradicated under French rule.116 The Timing and Pace of Health Transitions in the French Empire Senegal Tunisia Algeria Vietnam France Beginning of transition c. 1945 1935 c. 1940 c. 1930 c. 1795 Years gained per annum 0.63 0.68 0.70 0.67 0.25 Life expectancy at beginning 30.2 28.8 31.2 22.5 28.1 Life expectancy in 1960 39.6 45.8 45.2 42.6 69.4 Life expectancy in 2000 52.3 72.1 71.0 69.4 78.6 Passed 65 in year – c. 1985 1987 1987 1948 By contrast, the Belgians ran the worst of all African empires in the Congo,117 while the Third Reich deserves to be considered the worst of all the European empires – the reductio ad absurdum and ad nauseam of the nineteenth-century notion of the civilizing mission, because its actual effect on the territories it briefly controlled was to barbarize them.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The regimientos and cabildos—institutions of local government that had earlier been elected—were by 1600 sold by the Crown as heritable property. State institutionalization thus went into reverse, from a modern, bureaucratic system to a patrimonial one. Ideas mattered a great deal as well in the evolution of institutions. In the first centuries of colonial rule, there was no Spanish Hobbes or Locke to tell the settlers that they possessed natural and universal rights as human beings. What they had instead were particularistic feudal privileges that they had inherited or bought. In contrast to the British settlers of North America, the Creole populations of Latin America were thus much more likely to demand protection of their privileges than of their rights.16 The ideas exported from Spain began to change again, as James Mahoney points out, during the liberal Bourbon phase of empire that began around 1600.

What East Asia had that Latin America needed more of and that Africa lacked almost entirely were strong, coherent states that could control violence and carry out good, economically rational public policies. THE ORIGINS OF STATE WEAKNESS The African deficit in state capacity must of course be traced back to the legacy of colonialism, as well as to the nature of African societies prior to the onset of European colonial rule. In this respect, Africa’s inheritance was totally different from that of Latin America. In the latter region, Spain and Portugal succeeded in wiping out the indigenous regimes and reproducing their own authoritarian, mercantilist political systems on the soil of the New World. Old World class hierarchies were amplified by the racial and ethnic differences that appeared as the Europeans extracted resources from their colonies.

States that make heavy use of overt coercion and brutality often do so because they cannot exercise proper authority. They have what Michael Mann labels “despotic power” but not “infrastructural power” to penetrate and shape society.7 This was true of both the colonial African state and the independent countries that emerged after the end of colonial rule.8 The reality of the colonial state was not a transplanted absolutist regime imposed by the Europeans but rather “indirect rule,” a policy that had been practiced since the Indian Rebellion of 1858 but was systematically articulated for the first time by Lord Frederick Lugard, the British governor of, among other places, Northern Nigeria (from 1900 to 1906) and Hong Kong (from 1907 to 1912).


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

At the time, the country’s main exports were tungsten, fish and other primary commodities. As for Samsung, * now one of the world’s leading exporters of mobile phones, semiconductors and computers, the company started out as an exporter of fish, vegetables and fruit in 1938, seven years before Korea’s independence from Japanese colonial rule. Until the 1970s, its main lines of business were sugar refining and textiles that it had set up in the mid-1950s.2 When it moved into the semiconductor industry by acquiring a 50% stake in Korea Semiconductor in 1974, no one took it seriously. After all, Samsung did not even manufacture colour TV sets until 1977.

It was our refrigerator (the kitchen being too small to accommodate it).My wife, Hee-Jeong, born in Kwangju in 1966, tells me that her neighbours would regularly ‘deposit’ their precious meat in the refrigerator of her mother, the wife of a prosperous doctor, as if she were the manager of an exclusive Swiss private bank. A small cement-brick house with a black-and-white TV and a refrigerator may not sound much, but it was a dream come true for my parents’ generation, who had lived through the most turbulent and deprived times: Japanese colonial rule (1910–45), the Second World War, the division of the country into North and South Korea (1948) and the Korean War. Whenever I and my sister, Yonhee, and brother, Hasok, complained about food, my mother would tell us how spoilt we were. She would remind us that, when they were our age, people of her generation would count themselves lucky if they had an egg.

The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 – the first episode of globalization – was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces. Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or ‘unequal treaties’ (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3–5%) on them.8 Despite their key role in promoting ‘free’ trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonialism and unequal treaties hardly get any mention in the hordes of pro-globalisation books.9 Even when they are explicitly discussed, their role is seen as positive on the whole.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

At the time, the country’s main exports were tungsten, fish and other primary commodities. As for Samsung,i now one of the world’s leading exporters of mobile phones, semiconductors and computers, the company started out as an exporter of fish, vegetables and fruit in 1938, seven years before Korea’s independence from Japanese colonial rule. Until the 1970s, its main lines of business were sugar refining and textiles that it had set up in the mid-1950s.2 When it moved into the semiconductor industry by acquiring a 50% stake in Korea Semiconductor in 1974, no one took it seriously. After all, Samsung did not even manufacture colour TV sets until 1977.

My wife, Hee-Jeong, born in Kwangju in 1966, tells me that her neighbours would regularly ‘deposit’ their precious meat in the refrigerator of her mother, the wife of a prosperous doctor, as if she was the manager of an exclusive Swiss private bank. A small cement-brick house with a black-and-white TV and a refrigerator may not sound much, but it was a dream come true for my parents’ generation, who had lived through the most turbulent and deprived times: Japanese colonial rule (1910–45), the Second World War, the division of the country into North and South Korea (1948) and the Korean War. Whenever I and my sister, Yonhee, and brother, Hasok, complained about food, my mother would tell us how spoilt we were. She would remind us that, when they were our age, people of her generation would count themselves lucky if they had an egg.

The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 – the first episode of globalization – was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces. Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or ‘unequal treaties’ (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3–5%) on them.8 Despite their key role in promoting ‘free’ trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonialism and unequal treaties hardly get any mention in the hordes of pro-globalisation books.9 Even when they are explicitly discussed, their role is seen as positive on the whole.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

In August 1999 the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission, meeting in Accra, issued a demand for reparations from ‘all those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and institutions, who participated and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism’. The sum suggested as adequate compensation – based on estimates of ‘the number of human lives lost to Africa during the slave-trade, as well as an assessment of the worth of the gold, diamonds and other minerals taken from the continent during colonial rule’ – was $777 trillion. Given that more than three million of the ten million or so Africans who crossed the Atlantic as slaves before 1850 were shipped in British vessels, the putative British reparations burden could be in the region of £150 trillion. Such a claim may seem fantastic. But the idea was given some encouragement at the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban in the summer of 2001.

In the latter camp belong the liberals, from Adam Smith onwards, who have maintained for almost as many years that the British Empire was, even from Britain’s point of view, ‘a waste of money’. The central nationalist/Marxist assumption is, of course, that imperialism was economically exploitative; every facet of colonial rule, including even the apparently sincere efforts of Europeans to study and understand indigenous cultures, was at root designed to maximize the ‘surplus value’ that could be extracted from the subject peoples. The central liberal assumption is more paradoxical. It is that precisely because imperialism distorted market forces – using everything from military force to preferential tariffs to rig business in the favour of the metropolis – it was not in the long-term interests of the metropolitan economy either.

Traditional accounts of ‘decolonization’ tend to give the credit for the blame) to the nationalist movements within the colonies, from Sinn Fein in Ireland to Congress in India. The end of Empire is portrayed as a victory for ‘freedom fighters’, who took up arms from Dublin to Delhi to rid their peoples of the yoke of colonial rule. This is misleading. Throughout the twentieth century, the principal threats – and the most plausible alternatives – to British rule were not national independence movements, but other empires. These alternative empires were significantly harsher in their treatment of subject peoples than Britain.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Leopold also assumed total control over the Congolese economy, decreeing that Africans could only sell their products to the state, while the state in turn controlled all prices and incomes. Ten million Congolese perished under Leopold’s brutal regime – roughly half the country’s population.48 Many of them died at the hands of direct Belgian aggression, but others died because colonial rule destroyed local economies and dislocated indigenous communities, causing widespread dispossession and starvation, along with an increase in fatal tropical diseases. As for the wealth from all the ivory and rubber, it was used in Belgium to fund beautiful stately architecture, public works, arches, parks and impressive railway stations – all the markers of development that adorn Brussels today, the bejewelled headquarters of the European Union.

Rich countries have a natural abundance of capital, so their wages will be higher and they will specialise in capital-intensive production of higher-order commodities. In orthodox economic theory, this is regarded as the natural order of things. But as soon as we bring history back into the picture, this theory starts to fall apart. Why do poor countries have a comparative abundance of labour in the first place? Because of hundreds of years of colonial rule, under which subsistence economies were destroyed and millions of people were displaced and forced into the labour market, driving unemployment up and wages down. The fact that slavery was used up through the 19th century further contributed to downward pressure on wages, as workers had to compete with free labour.

These developmentalist policies mimicked the very same measures that the United States and Europe used to such good effect during their own periods of economic consolidation.14 And they worked equally well in the global South, delivering high per capita income growth rates of 3.2 per cent during the 1960s and 1970s – double or triple what the West achieved during the Industrial Revolution, and more than six times the growth rate under colonial rule.15 It was a postcolonial miracle. And the new wealth was more equitably shared than before: in Latin America, for example, the gap between the richest fifth and poorest fifth of the population shrank by 22 per cent.16 Developmentalism also had an impressive impact on human welfare. At the end of colonialism, life expectancy in the global South was a mere forty years.


pages: 358 words: 106,951

Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics by Don Hanlon Johnson

BIPOC, clean water, colonial rule, complexity theory, conceptual framework, deep learning, emotional labour, epigenetics, imposter syndrome, liberation theology, mass incarceration, microaggression, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, W. E. B. Du Bois, working poor

Despite the fight for independence, Pilipinos were betrayed and once again overpowered. After the Philippine-American war, the Philippines became a U.S. Protectorate, a euphemism for colonial rule and once again victim to imperialist and colonial rule. Similar to the Spanish, the United States used insidious tactics to shape the country into their likeness. For the sake of American imperialism, they brought Thomasites to teach English and glorify American values to prevent indigenous insurrection. Even more devastating was the use of Freudian psychology to develop U.S. colonial rule. According to Ronald Tataki, Freudian psychology emphasized that only men/masculinity have the power of reason and rationality, and that patriarchy is the only model strong enough to subdue the instincts and impulses of the uncivilized Pilipino people.9 The United States used this rationale of saving the Pilipino to plunder the land, avail themselves of trade with Asia, strengthen their military presence, and continue the colonial work that Spain had started long ago, replacing Spanish values with American ones. 9 Leny Mendoza Strobel, Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (Santa Rosa, CA: Center for Babaylan Studies, 2015), 49–50.

According to Ronald Tataki, Freudian psychology emphasized that only men/masculinity have the power of reason and rationality, and that patriarchy is the only model strong enough to subdue the instincts and impulses of the uncivilized Pilipino people.9 The United States used this rationale of saving the Pilipino to plunder the land, avail themselves of trade with Asia, strengthen their military presence, and continue the colonial work that Spain had started long ago, replacing Spanish values with American ones. 9 Leny Mendoza Strobel, Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (Santa Rosa, CA: Center for Babaylan Studies, 2015), 49–50. After nearly five generations of colonial violence and intergenerational trauma, the indigenous brown body had successfully internalized their oppressors in the hopes of thriving under colonial rule. The cost was high and the body split in two, forming the double consciousness that Rizal and Du Bois poignantly describe. These embodiments would form into a potent self-hate and self-loathing as they come to realize they would never be seen as equals, that their lives did not matter. This toxic shaping would form into slow forms of suicide, a deep loss of self and authenticity, and the loss of connection and community.

., 186, 191, 229 dual attention cultivating mindful presence, 107 quality of expansiveness in, 109 work with autistic students and clients, 117 Duncan, Isadora, 206 dununba (largest dun), 244 dununfola (player of drums), 245 dununs (three drums), 244 dyspraxia in autistic individuals, 96–97 neuroplasticity supplanting, 107 shaming young autistics for lack of physical aptitude, 103 E Ealom, Tayla. see social wounds/personal transformation Earth direction of South as element of, 64 rhythm of flowing and Mother, 33–34 East, direction of the, 51–53 Eastern philosophy, mind-body issue in, 11 ebbo prescriptions, cowry shell divination, 48–49 Ebonics, 234 ecstasy, in sexual experiences/expression, 36–37 efun (used in ceremony for protection), 60 elders, North as direction of, 59 Eleggua, as living energy in Lakimi, 49 eleke (consecrated beaded necklace/flag), Lukimi practice, 48–49 Emancipation Proclamation, 222 embodiment autistic. see autistic embodiment gay men and therapeutic, 271–276 gay men seek to explain their, 257 reawakening for gay men, 255 relationship of protogay boy to, 261 EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), pattern theory, 266 Emergent Strategy (Brown), 80, 84 emotion, ethnic origin and, 152 empire, oppression of, 184 engagement, somatic sense of self, 40–41 ennvrkvpv (in the middle) sexual orientation, 28 Enriquez, Virgilio, 189, 195 environment autistic embodiment and, 115 and body in epigenetics, 257–259 embodied experience shaped by, 230 expanding/contracting and, 81–84 gay men profoundly shaped by, 255 molded into different shapes by our, 275 White people’s social, 153 whole body interaction with, 131–132 epigenetics genetic theory and, 257–259 how gay men come into being, 257 passing trauma through DNA markers, 235, 236 physical environment and, 269 Erotic Mind (Morin), 272 Europe, Reich addressing social devastation in, 13–14 European Enlightenment, 7–8, 10 expansiveness as quality of akido, 109 working with other autistics, 117 experience characteristics of, 207–208 disconnection of thought and, 206 environment shapes our embodied, 230 as a flow, 207 learning from history, 208–210 nature of autistic, 90–91 peace education grounded in, 208–210 trauma manifests in embodied, 236 unexamined framework of bodily, 206 Worldwork field dynamics and, 212–213 Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (Gendlin), 206–208 experiential psychology, 212–216 external experience (labas), kapwa and, 194 eye contact, autistics and, 95–96 Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), pattern theory, 266 F fable-like story (patakí), cowry shell divination, 47 fallow field concept, rhythm of stillness, 38–39 family origins, biracial child, 161–162 fascism, Reich’s analysis of, 14–16 Faye, Oumou, 245 field dynamics, Worldwork, 212–213 flowers, South as direction of, 64 flowing, rhythm of 5Rhythms and, 32–34 defined, 31 exploring somatic sense of self, 40–42 For Harriet, online community, 175 Foster, Kimberley, 175 Francis-Ecoffey, Stephanie. see black and white: biracial in America freedom letting go of chaos for, 38 requires body practices, 14 Freudian psychology U.S. colonial rule in Philippines and, 186–187 Wilhelm Reich shaped by, 14 Fukuma, Yoshiaki, 208–209 G Gandhi, Mohandas, 12–16 Gap closing, 145–147 collective, 135–139 definition of, 123 and I, 123–134 structuring, 139–143 gay coming out as, 33 what it means to be, 22–23 gay men, somatic psychotherapy and beginning of embodiment, 252–253 beginning to work with, 253–257 bibliography, 276–282 coming into being, 257–265 genetic theory and epigenetics, 257–259 how I got here, 251–252 overview of, 249–250 physical psychoeducation, 265–266 protogay boy, 260–261 protogay child, 261–265 revisiting epigenetics, 269–271 somatic theory, 266–269 therapeutic embodiment and, 271–276 Gendlin, Eugene, 61, 131–132, 206–208 genetic theory, and epigenetics, 257–259 The Great Turning, awaits us, 146 Greece, democracy in in fifth-century BCE, 6 grief colonialism and undigested, 188 exploring using rhythm of staccato, 35 healing by turning slowly towards wound, 146–147 from impacts of racism, 122, 139, 144–145 kapwa as anchor for deep, 194 living in white supremacist culture and, 170–172 role of Babaylan in guidance through, 190 as turning point in healing process, 3, 190 Griffin, Susan, 6–7, 202, 210 guilt creating personhood without, 183 of having caused pain to others, 79 undoing fat hatred in order to process, 81 Gutierrez, Francisca, 65 Gutiérrez.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

While China avoided direct colonization during the nineteenth century, it did not avoid chaos, military defeat, or European imperial encroachments on its sovereignty. India, with 20 percent of the world’s population, fared even worse. From the mid-1700s onward, India was absorbed step by step by the East India Company, and in 1858, it fell entirely into the clutches of the British Empire, which formally took over the job of colonial rule from the East India Company. Japan was the relative success story in Asia, not only preserving its sovereignty but successfully embarking on a path of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century, albeit at an income level far below that of Europe. By dint of its industrialization, Japan became Asia’s military powerhouse from the end of the nineteenth century until Japan’s defeat in World War II.

The gaudy corruption of company officials led the British government to assert partial control over company affairs and policies toward the end of the eighteenth century, so that British rule in India in the first half of the 1800s was under the mixed authority of the company and the Crown. In 1857, an Indian rebellion against British rule was decisively defeated, and the British government took over direct control of India, creating the British Raj that was to rule India until its independence from colonial rule in 1947. British economic policies decisively weakened the economy and society. As told vividly by historian Prasannan Parthasarathi, trade protectionism by Britain throughout the eighteenth century kept India’s famed textiles out of the British market, eventually driving millions of spinners and weavers to penury in the nineteenth century.

They had a lot of catching up to do. The European imperial powers had left most of their African and Asian colonies in a desperate condition of very high illiteracy and dreadfully low life expectancy. Table 7.4 shows the conditions of selected countries in 1950: three industrialized countries and three countries long under colonial rule (Kenya and India, UK; Indonesia, the Netherlands). As of 1950, illiteracy had been almost eliminated in the high-income countries and life expectancy was around sixty-eight years, but in the long-time colonies, illiteracy was around 80 percent and life expectancy was around forty years. Table 7.4 Illiteracy and Life Expectancy in 1950, Selected Countries Illiteracy (%) Life expectancy (years) High-Income Countries United Kingdom 1–2 69.4 United States 3–4 68.7 France 3–4 67.1 Former Colonies Kenya 75–80 42.3 Indonesia 80–85 43.5 India 80–85 36.6 Source: UNESCO, World Illiteracy at Mid-Century: A Statistical Study (Paris: UNESCO, 1957), https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000002930; World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision | United Nations Population Division, http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

So three youth leaders in the independence movement, impatient with his decision, kidnapped him and fellow independence leader Hatta—this was considered a brusque but broadly acceptable way of forcing someone’s hand at the time—until Sukarno committed to proclaiming the creation of independent Indonesia. Maybe he was right to be a bit worried. Not long after the speech, Sukarno’s independence movement was in trouble. Just as the French did in Indochina, the Dutch came back, attempting to reassert colonial rule. The Netherlands called the attempts at reconquest “police actions,” in terminology that managed to be both condescending and euphemistic, and they were brutal. As the Japanese had, the Dutch employed mass violence to suppress support for the new republic. The independence leaders, a mix of nationalists, leftists, and Islamic groups, hopped around the archipelago, making alliances with local kingdoms and mounting resistance.7 In the middle of all this, in 1947, Francisca went to Holland to study in the small university town of Leiden.

He would watch, amazed, as Sukarno spoke eloquently on “the world, the flesh, and the devil: about movie stars and Malthus, Jean Jaures and Jefferson, folklore, and philosophy,” then wolf down a huge meal, and dance for hours. Even more impressive to Jones, who had lived a relatively comfortable life, was that this remarkable man—about the same age as Jones—learned to eat this way, and became so steeped in knowledge, while spending years behind bars for opposing Dutch colonial rule.48 Along the way, he had learned to speak in German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, in addition to Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Dutch.49 When Sukarno opened his mouth in any of these languages, the whole country stopped to listen, and Jones noticed that this had gone to his head.

The two would meet soon, and get along well. But Kennedy’s election seemed to herald serious changes for US foreign policy, especially toward the Third World. Sukarno, like many Indonesians, viewed young Jack as a rare American ally in the fight against colonialism because he had read JFK’s denunciations of French colonial rule in Algeria.12 As a candidate, JFK had run on solidly anticommunist credentials, of course. It was the United States. But in his inauguration speech, he also made a pledge to the Third World. “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right,” Kennedy said.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

As Stuart Hall notes, “In the case of the colonial and post-colonial, what we are dealing with is not two successive regimes but the simultaneous presence of a regime and its after-effects. Colonialism persists, despite the cluster of illusory appearances to the contrary.”23 From the turn of the last century until 1975, Papua New Guinea was under Australian colonial rule as well as an Australian trusteeship agreement authorized by the United Nations. The long trajectory of Australian control over Papua New Guinea has been characterized by mass executions, legislated control through the Native Regulations and Ordinances, conscription of forced labor, and imposition of industrial mining such as the Rio Tinto Panguna mine.

Soon after Frederick Jackson Turner declared the archipelago an American frontier, the Philippines became a US colony, which it remained from 1898 until 1946. Approximately 1.4 million people were killed during the Philippine-American war, where waterboarding and scorched-earth tactics were first battle-tested by the US.61 Under colonial rule, workers from the Philippines were recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association to work the plantations and serve US imperial interests there. Even after the Philippines won independence, conditions like a fixed exchange rate between the peso and dollar were imposed to protect US companies.

Instead, I explore regional dynamics within an international ordering of racial capitalism, dispossessive forces in the formation of political economies, and the balance of power between the ruling and the working class. The key bureaucratic tenets of the kafala system originated during British colonial rule in the Gulf, especially strong in Bahrain. The British first introduced passports in Bahrain in 1929 for “foreign subjects” falling under British jurisdiction. According to Omar AlShehabi, the movement of pearl divers from other regions into Bahrain—comprising nearly half the island’s labor force—was regulated by the British through a sponsorship system to control movement and maintain surveillance.10 Ship captains were required to have valid permits and visas to work in Bahrain, and they were also responsible for all foreign divers on their ships.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The fading favor for English: A “symbol of colonialism” But as India neared independence, the English language found itself increasingly left out in the cold. For one, with the growing prospect of freedom, Indians had the opportunity to clearly consider the question of Indian identity after the end of colonial rule. Indian leaders were pragmatic about adopting a constitution with a British heartah and enthusiastic about adopting European ideas of nationalism and democracy. And of course, no one wanted to rip out the railway tracks and lay new ones just because they had been put in place by British administrators. 17 But when it came to the English language, they balked—it was one of the “colonial relics” that was unacceptable.

But the Empire had left its fingerprints all over India’s older cities—Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras had all been baptized into urban life by the British and cluttered with their architecture. Nehru called New Delhi “un-Indian” and was in search of a new Indian city that would be free of the burdens of colonial rule and legacy, a “new town symbolic of the freedom of India.”14 Nehru got an opportunity to test his dream of a new Indian city with Chandigarh, the new capital for Punjab. Le Corbusier, the temperamental French architect, designed a city after Nehru’s own heart—carefully planned between residential and commercial areas with each sector named, quite unromantically, with a number.

The British never suspected, when they established universities in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras the same year that they were going about stamping out the army rebellion so thoroughly, that they were setting themselves up for a far more intense, widespread protest against their rule. It is in these institutes that India’s political awakening began and it is here that India’s educated absorbed the ideas of freedom and democracy, inspiring them to eventually lead the struggle against colonial rule. The focus in these first universities was on creating a small pool of aristocratic, English-educated Indian workers for the civil services and strengthening the foundation of British rule. But institutions often have a way of thwarting the aims of their founders. Sir Henry Maine, vice chancellor of the University of Calcutta, remarked in 1866, “The founders of the University of Calcutta thought to create an aristocratic institution; and in spite of themselves, they created a popular one.”3 And these universities were immensely popular.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after U.S. colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I’d arrive at my destination, the Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, I’d hear students speaking what sounded to my Pennsylvanian ears to be virtually unaccented English. Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it’s impossible to miss. I read about the Philippines’ colonial history, and I got curious about other locales: Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawai‘i before it was a state. These places are part of the United States, right? I thought. Why haven’t I been thinking of them as part of its history?

The whole thing seemed to confirm the worst fears about U.S. imperialism. That a doctor would murder his patients out of racial hatred—to many, it seemed plausible. The Rhoads affair was a turning point in Puerto Rican politics. Before the letter, the Nationalists were an obscure group. After it, they were a force. For centuries Puerto Rico had endured colonial rule with little direct resistance. But now, with disease and poverty ravaging the island, and with what looked like proof of an official desire to exterminate Puerto Ricans, things were different. Albizu’s insistence that independence must be seized, immediately and forcibly, was not so easily dismissed

He spoke, one governor remembered, a “full, flexible, meaty English without indication of origin, except, perhaps, a trace of New Yorkese in expression”—Muñoz Marín joked that his English was better than his Spanish. Yet for all his cultural ties to the mainland, Luis Muñoz Marín was a sharp critic of colonial rule. As a young man he had concluded, just as Pedro Albizu Campos had, that Puerto Rico needed independence. It was the only way the island could escape poverty. One evening in the late 1920s, while dining at the Hotel Palace in San Juan, Muñoz Marín noticed Albizu sitting alone. Muñoz Marín invited Albizu to join him.


pages: 559 words: 178,279

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze by Bridget Kendall

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, white flight

‘They were leaving with only their suitcases, they lost everything’ The Congo Crisis (1960–1) THE FIRST TWO decades after the Second World War were not only marked by the emergence of the Cold War. This was also a period of intense decolonisation. Between 1945 and 1960, three dozen new states in Asia and Africa won limited or full independence from colonial rule, in parallel with and sometimes shaped by deepening superpower enmity. In fact, an aversion to colonial rule was one thing that the Soviet Union and the United States had in common: both were keen to see exhausted post-war European powers like Britain, France and Belgium relinquish their colonial possessions. Moscow backed decolonisation for ideological reasons (to liberate oppressed peoples from their colonial masters), but also for geopolitical ends (the hope that it would allow the Soviet Union to extend its influence and cultivate new allies).

The Congo had been under Belgian control since the late nineteenth century, subjected to a rigid colonial regime with a high degree of racial segregation. By the 1950s the évolués, as the growing ranks of Europeanised and educated urban middle class were called, were becoming impatient. A nationalist movement, made up of different and opposing factions, was gaining momentum. In 1959 protests by Congolese nationalists demanding an end to colonial rule descended into violence and put Belgium into a panic. In January 1960 the Belgian government convened a Congolese Round Table Conference in Brussels to discuss the country’s future. The Congolese nationalists present pushed for new elections and an early date for independence – 30 June 1960 – but the meeting left unresolved tricky issues, such as the balance of power between central government and key provinces.

But when the guest of honour, King Baudouin of Belgium, rose to speak, he shocked some of the Congolese politicians present when he praised the ‘genius’ of his ancestor King Leopold II for colonising the Congo and depicted the handover to independence as the successful end of a ‘civilising mission’, glossing over the millions killed and oppressed during the years of colonial rule. The new Congolese President, another nationalist leader called Joseph Kasa-Vubu, duly thanked him. The more radical Patrice Lumumba, the new Prime Minister, was not so diplomatic. He delivered an impromptu and scathing rebuke to the Belgian King, pointing out that the Congolese had fought for independence ‘to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed on us by force’.


pages: 225 words: 61,388

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, belling the cat, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Live Aid, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, moral hazard, Multics, Ponzi scheme, rent-seeking, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

They came from different tribes, from different parts of rural colonial Africa: my father, the son of a miner in apartheid South Africa; my mother, the daughter of a man who would later train to be a teacher. My mother did not speak my father’s language, and hence they mainly conversed in English. They met and married while still students. Zambia (formerly known as Northern Rhodesia) had been independent from British colonial rule for just six years, and the excitement at the prospect of what amazing things lay ahead was palpable. Although, upon graduation, my mother had eleven job offers (at the time companies were very eager to employ black graduates), my father wished to continue his studies. He was offered a scholarship at the University of California at Los Angeles in the USA and, very soon afterwards, my parents packed up my sister and me and decamped to America.

The prevailing view was that because these projects had longer-term pay-offs (for example, the funding of infrastructure projects such as roads and railways), they were unlikely to be funded by the private sector. One such example is the double-curvature, hydroelectric, concrete arch Kariba dam that straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe; it was built throughout the decade. The dam, whose construction began under British colonial rule in the mid-1950s, was finally completed at a cost of US$480 million in 1977. Today it still ranks as one of the largest dams in the world. By 1965, when around half of sub-Saharan Africa’s roughly fifty states were independent, aid had already reached at least US$950 million. Ghana, which had won its independence from Britain in 1957, had received as much as US$90 million in aid flows.

Political system: adopted a nominal democracy ten years ago, having spent twenty years as a one-party state led by the same political party, and the same president. This is the Republic of Dongo. While fictitious, the Republic of Dongo is not far off the reality of many African countries. Freed from European colonial rule in the 1960s, the country’s background and evolution are pretty characteristic of the average African country. A socialist economy in the 1970s, it underwent privatization in the mid-1980s, moved to a democratic regime after Glasnost and Perestroika,1 and is ranked 3 out of a possible 10 on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (where 0 is the least transparent).


pages: 219 words: 61,334

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

Rather, it is the application of these devices to reinforce and perpetuate a stereotypal view of the British that associates them with racism, superiority and atrocity. The Mel Gibson view of British history as represented in Braveheart and The Patriot identifies Britain with racial domination, terror and a sort of inexhaustible, brittle sang froid. Viewed sequentially, they portray English medieval brutality and eighteenth-century British colonial rule as part of an unbroken trajectory of intolerance and repression. The readiness of Western audiences, including the British, to accept this calculated distortion of history is interesting. It reeks of post-imperial guilt. The Gibson films play on post-imperial angst. They expose the brutality of Empire, without saying anything meaningful about the positive contribution of Empire to its colonies.

The fault lay in the close identification of colonial forces with the assertion that the Enlightenment tradition represents the summit of human civilization. Politically speaking, this allowed the colonial forces a wide berth, for it wrongly conflated British political and military interests with Reason per se. However, it is quite another thing to maintain that the Enlightenment concept of Reason inflexibly supported colonial rule. Essential to the Enlightenment tradition is what Ernest Gellner later called the ethic of cognition. That is the right and the defence of an adjoining social, political space in Civil Society, in which Reason could legitimately be used to criticize authority and power. To understand fully the Enlightenment tradition and its role in the government of the colonies, it is important to remember that it legitimated Reason as the source of ultimate authority.

In trying to understand the relationship between Reason and colonialism then, one must acknowledge the fundamental importance of contradiction. The sun may have long set on the Empire built by Banastre Tarleton and his ilk. Yet for Gibson in The Patriot, there is no recognition of contradictions within colonial attitudes to the American cause of independence. Nor is there the wider acknowledgement that British colonial rule introduced lasting democratic institutions, the rule of law, mass education, public health, effective systems of transport and sanitation, accountable policing and many other civil, technological and scientific benefits into regions where hitherto, despotism, superstition and tribal or religious warfare prevailed.


pages: 251 words: 69,245

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, colonial rule, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Gini coefficient, high net worth, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, open borders, Pareto efficiency, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, Simon Kuznets, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The ceiling on native Kenyans’ incomes and social position was removed: They could claim the highest-paid jobs and become bosses, high-level public servants, or rich traders. It is difficult to imagine that under colonial rule, Barack Obama Sr. would have had a chance to study in the United States. To be sure, the idea to go to the United States for study was given to him by two American women who found him very clever and diligent. And, yes, there were some Africans who acquired higher education even under colonialism. But the end of colonial rule removed both an effective and a psychological barrier to claiming higher positions in life. What could a university-educated African do with his fancy degree when the country was run by foreigners—get a job as a subaltern office worker?

That too illustrates the postcolonial era of optimism when the native children believed that their rightful place was back in their own country, which, thanks to the knowledge they acquired at the best schools, would be brought out of underdevelopment and into the modern world. It was certainly a much more optimistic time for young Kenyans than it is today. And this was not the case just because the oppression was lifted and the possibilities suddenly appeared almost endless, compared to how constricted they were under colonial rule. It was also because the income gap between Kenya and the developed world was much less than today. Paradoxically, as we know, independence has not solved Africa’s problems. On the contrary, during the period of independence, Africa has slipped much further behind the developed world. African countries either became even poorer than before independence or failed to advance at the same speed as the rich world.


pages: 220 words: 69,282

Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel by Matti Friedman

Bletchley Park, colonial rule

The energy of the place reminded me of Tel Aviv—the same sunlit bonhomie, impatience, and swagger, the same worship of life and flesh touched with fear of imminent doom, the same kind of people squeezed between the Islamic interior and the Mediterranean, sweating on a strip of sand between blocky buildings and the water. When I picture Beirut at the time of our story, I imagine that some of this was true back then. In the Lebanese capital, the government, newly independent of French colonial rule, functioned sporadically. The city’s inhabitants were a jumble of Arabic-speaking Christians with an affinity for France, Sunni Muslims with an affinity for Syria, poor Shiite migrants from the countryside, Armenians, Greeks, with overlap among the parts and many shades in between. There were Communists, Arab nationalists, capitalists, hedonists, and Islamists of every stripe.

An English visitor to the city in 1756 recorded that Jewish men wore beards and the women violet slippers, that they spoke Arabic better than Hebrew, that among Muslims the Jews “are held in still greater contempt than the Christians,” and that poor Jews were “of all people the most slovenly and dirty.” The arrival of French colonial rule after the First World War had improved the Jews’ lot, but Isaac’s father still remembered a time when any Muslim pedestrian could tell a Jew to move aside and walk in the sewage ditch in the center of the street. Isaac’s father was a janitor who cleaned one of the Jewish schools and set out the coal braziers that warmed the classrooms in the winter.

Her description is so good you can’t mention that incarnation of Beirut without quoting it, even if we understand that our story doesn’t exist in the fanciful world of the Western correspondent, and that we won’t meet a resplendent sheikh here, or anyone smouldering. Beirut was an Arab metropolis shaped by the French over years of colonial rule and still dominated by their Francophile clients, the Maronite Christians. The stern moralism of the rest of the region was harder to find in this little coastal enclave, the breezes less Arabian than Mediterranean, the atmosphere laissez-faire. It was a place set gracefully between the sea and the hills of Mount Lebanon, white-capped in the winter months, a hybrid of Thessaloníki, Damascus, and Bern.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

How it is seen now depends on whom you ask. In the Palestinian territories, for example, the Union Jack is negatively associated with the British role in dividing Mandate Palestine between Jews and Arabs. However, in India, it’s not so clear cut. There is certainly a degree of contention, considering the history of British colonial rule, replete with oppression, economic exploitation and resultant famines – and there are some who are keen to emphasize the negative impact of colonialism in India, particularly those in authority. But that is not the only sentiment, and my experience is of a residual warmth towards the British flag and what it stands for.

In the 2016 New Zealand referendum, 56 per cent of voters chose to keep the existing version and rejected a rather natty dark-blue flag featuring a striking silver-white fern branch. It seems that public opinion is on the side of the Union Jack; to many it represents their ties, past and present, with the UK. Perhaps that’s due to the lasting effects of British colonial rule, with the majority of the population, around 69 percent, being of European descent, mostly British and Irish. The indigenous Maori form around 15 per cent of the population. It seems likely that given time and changing ethnic demographics, one day their flag may be replaced, but for the next decade or so the Union flag’s position on it appears safe.

What about the awe-inspiring, time-honored rivers that course through the length and breadth of our country’s landscape; the rich, labyrinthine tapestry of our history; our uniquely sumptuous culinary treats; our valiant pre-colonial empires . . . ? Why is none of these captured representationally on our national flag? . . . [W]e have been “independent” from British colonial rule for 52 years now. Isn’t it about time we rethought the colors and design of our national flag? For one, it is a holdover from colonialism; it wasn’t a product of a post-independence effort . . . We have no business having a green-white-green national flag.’ Ouch. But these things are emotive and very subjective, and Mr Kperogi is just one voice on the matter.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Mahbub ul Haq, “An Evaluation of Pakistan’s First Five Year Plan,” The Strategy of Economic Planning: Case Study of Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 136. 8. Haq, Strategy of Economic Planning, 35. 9. Economy of Pakistan, 397. The late historian of economic growth Angus Maddison is among those who argued that British colonial rule helped in the deindustrialization of India. The wiping out of the Mughal court and its replacement with a new European bureaucracy reduced the home market for luxury handicrafts by 75 percent. The value of domestic manufacturing and exports was around 6.5 percent of national income. Losing that “was a shattering blow to manufacturers of fine muslins, jewellery, luxury clothing and footwear, decorative swords and weapons,” Maddison wrote.

One of its first grants went to a study on economic development in India, Indonesia and Italy, three countries where communist parties were popular, or in power. A team of MIT economists began meeting with representatives of Indonesia’s government. The government was understandably wary of offers of large-scale investment, having just won its freedom from Dutch colonial rule. Jakarta was more interested in technical advice, especially around an idea to develop cooperatives, a model of business ownership where employees are the shareholders, and where large amounts of capital investment are not always a necessity. This did not go down too well with the MIT economic advisers and they did their best to talk the government out of this idea.

But Rostow would accomplish far more: he would be an active participant in enabling America’s government, the CIA, MIT and Harvard, and funders such as the Ford Foundation, to connect academic economists and their theories to the mission to support military dictatorships in countries that were emerging from centuries of European colonial rule. Rostow probably had more in common with Marx than he would care to admit. Both wanted a better life for citizens of the poorest countries. Both believed that this could be achieved in stages. And both advocated—or at least understood—that their aims could not be achieved without some degree of violence.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

The details of the story lines differ across other developing countries, but the themes are similar. Most of today’s developing countries were under some kind of colonial rule until a few decades ago, and had been for a century or more. Those not under colonial controls were under local rule that often was similarly brutal, with a small ruling group extracting resources from the broader population, such as in imperial China. Colonial rule ended in Latin America and the Caribbean a century earlier, but Spanish and Portuguese settlers established local elite rule that seized resources and privileges for themselves and failed to create more widespread development opportunities.

The Meiji Restoration was a political revolution that ended the Tokugawa shogunate and consolidated control of Japan under the emperor Meiji, resulting in enormous political, social, and economic changes in Japan in the decades that followed. THREE THE WEALTH OF A NEW GENERATION To get rich is glorious. —Deng Xiaoping WHEN MOZAMBIQUE’S CIVIL WAR ENDED in 1992, the country was in ruins.1 ARMED rebellion against Portuguese colonial rule started in the 1960s, but conflict intensified significantly after the 1974 coup in Lisbon led to Portugal’s withdrawal. When the Portuguese pulled out, “they did so with spite, sabotaging vehicles and pouring concrete down wells, elevator shafts, and toilets, leaving the country in disarray,” according to David Smith of the Guardian.2 The new government in Maputo established one-party rule, aligned itself with the Soviet Union, and provided support to the liberation movements in South Africa and Rhodesia, while the governments of South Africa and Rhodesia countered by financing an armed rebellion to fight the Mozambican government.

With the large and growing Indonesian Communist Party, the chaos of the mid-1960s, and the example of Vietnam, Suharto’s major objectives were to establish control and stop the spread of Communism. He did so brutally, with the support of the United States, throughout the archipelago and including Timor-Leste, which Indonesia invaded and annexed in 1975 in response to a perceived Communist threat. Given the history of four centuries of colonial rule, coupled with the conflicts engulfing Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, it is not surprising that Suharto based his rule on the tried-and-true recipe of strong military power, absolute political control, exploitation of natural resources to benefit a small elite, and no substantive checks on his power.


pages: 347 words: 115,173

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields by Tim Butcher

barriers to entry, blood diamond, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Scramble for Africa, trade route, upwardly mobile

The recaptives soon swamped this original group, with the Royal Navy delivering a total of 6,000 slaves retaken on the high seas by 1815. The influx continued at a similar pace over the next thirty years, meaning that recaptives became by far the dominant settler community in Freetown. But the irony was that, in spite of the growing number of black settlers, colonial rule meant a small cohort of white officials, appointed by the British government in London, still ran the affairs of a much larger black population, both settlers and indigenous Africans. It meant the dream of the philanthropists was only ever half fulfilled. Yes, black settlers had been saved from slavery, but they never enjoyed full freedom.

If his village had strong historical links, his own bloodline read like the genome of Sierra Leone’s freed-slave history. His father’s family were ‘recaptives’ from Nigeria and his mother’s birth certificate described her as a ‘Maroon, Liberated African’. Born in 1925, he had been brought up during Freetown’s golden age when, still under British colonial rule, it was establishing itself as a city many compared to Athens. ‘I was born in a nursing home down on Sackville Street at a time when it was normal for all people in Freetown, black and white, to have access to maternity care. Of course it was not all easy back then. My mother had ten children but only four of us survived to adulthood,’ Prof.

Jones, who had spent his career teaching English literature, had never seen an original edition so did not know of his father’s encounter with one of the most illustrious English authors of the twentieth century. His father had served as a customs inspector at Freetown harbour, the most senior rank then attainable by a native employee under British colonial rules, and had spent time with Graham Greene clearing the disembarkation of the expedition’s equipment. In the original text Graham Greene writes glowingly about Mr Jones, the customs inspector, describing him as one of the few ‘perfectly natural Africans whom I met in Sierra Leone’. It was a feeling I echoed one generation later.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Inflation has become the bogeyman that has been used to justify policies that have mainly benefited the holders of financial assets, at the cost of long-term stability, economic growth and human happiness. Thing 7 Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich What they tell you After their independence from colonial rule, developing countries tried to develop their economies through state intervention, sometimes even explicitly adopting socialism. They tried to develop industries such as steel and automobiles, which were beyond their capabilities, artificially by using measures such as trade protectionism, a ban on foreign direct investment, industrial subsidies, and even state ownership of banks and industrial enterprises.

Naturally, the World Bank advised the other potential donors not to support the project, and every one of them officially pulled out of the negotiations in April 1969. Undeterred, the Korean government managed to persuade the Japanese government to channel a large chunk of the reparation payments it was paying for its colonial rule (1910–45) into the steel-mill project and to provide the machines and the technical advice necessary for the mill. The company started production in 1973 and established its presence remarkably quickly. By the mid 1980s, it was considered one of the most cost-efficient producers of low-grade steel in the world.

China, being the birthplace of Confucianism, had the confidence to take a more pragmatic approach in interpreting the classical doctrines and allowed people from merchant and artisanal classes to sit for the civil service examination. Korea – being more Confucian than Confucius – adamantly stuck to this doctrine and refused to hire talented people simply because they were born to the ‘wrong’ parents. It was only after our liberation from Japanese colonial rule (1910–45) that the traditional caste system was fully abolished and Korea became a country where birth does not set a ceiling to individual achievement (although the prejudice against artisans – engineers in modern terms – and merchants – business managers in modern terms – lingered on for another few decades until economic development made these attractive professions).


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

Information technology, starting with the ubiquitous cell phone, and now extending to wireless Internet, is reaching the most remote areas of the world. National aspirations to join the global economy are nearly universal. Sovereignty is the rule rather than the exception in vast regions of the world that until two generations back were under colonial rule. There is, in short, no reason why nearly all of the world will not be part of the convergence club in the first part of the twenty-first century. This would imply the acceleration of total world growth in the coming years, and such a trend is evident in the past half century. It is instructive to apply the convergence framework to the future development of per capita income in different parts of the world.

For example, Korea and Taiwan are often compared pointedly with Ghana, with the assertion that all three economies had roughly the same starting point in 1960, so the subsequent divergence in performance was homegrown and due to better economic governance and management in Asia. In fact, the economic takeoff of Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s was built on foundations laid by Japanese investments during the colonial era and by infrastructure financed by U.S. aid in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most important, and without downplaying the darker sides of colonial rule, Japanese policies and investments laid the foundation for high-productivity agriculture in both Korea and Taiwan, and thereby laid the foundations for food security and industrialization. A leading economic analyst of Asia’s successful industrialization, Robert Wade, has usefully summarized some of the key investments that Japan made in rural Taiwan: A good communications infrastructure was laid down, designed not with the narrow purpose of extracting some primary raw material but with the aim of increasing production of smallholder rice and sugar, both wanted in Japan.

Under these policies, “expansion in irrigation and drainage, dissemination of improved or better seeds, and spread in the use of fertilizers and manures were all energetically attempted, sometimes even with the aid of the police force; the statistics indicate continuously rising trends” [quoting Ishikawa, 1967:102]. Farmers were grouped into farmer cooperatives, irrigation associations, and landlord-tenant associations so as both to accelerate the spread of technical knowledge and to keep them under control. After the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Taiwan invested heavily in rural infrastructure and irrigation, backed by U.S. aid. Again, as Wade summarizes: Agricultural production grew at 4.4 percent a year between 1954 and 1967, faster than just about anywhere else in Asia. The surge of agricultural growth checked discontent with the Nationalist regime in the countryside, helping to stabilize the industrial investment climate.


pages: 293 words: 89,712

After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine by Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, drone strike, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, land reform, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, one-state solution, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, young professional

Above everything else, it requires a sophisticated, principled and popular Palestinian resistance movement with a clear vision for justice and a democratic, inclusive society. It is also premised on two other pillars: a democratised and free Arab region, which now looks far less imaginary; and an international solidarity movement supporting Palestinian rights and struggling to end all forms of Zionist Apartheid and colonial rule, particularly through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), as called for by the great majority of Palestinian civil society in the historic BDS call of 2005.5 In parallel, a crucial process of de-dichotomising the identities involved in the colonial conflict should be launched to build the conceptual foundations for ethical coexistence in the decolonised future state.

By 1960, with the adoption of the “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples”, GA resoultion 1514, the principle of self-determination had been elevated to the position of an unconditional right for peoples under “alien, colonial or oppressive domination”, and called for a “speedy and unconditional end to colonialism in all its manifestations”. In the following decades, the scope and applicability of the right to self-determination expanded to include indigenous peoples suffering from consequences of past colonial rule, unrepresented peoples, and national minorities oppressed by national majorities within the boundaries of a state. UNGA resolution 3236, of 22 November 1974, elevates the applicability of the right to self-determination to the people of Palestine to an “inalienable” right. The resolution: 1.

Cultural particularity and diverse identities should be nourished, not just tolerated, by society and protected by law. Palestine was for centuries a fertile meeting ground for diverse civilisations and cultures, fostering communication, dialogue and acculturation among them. This heritage, almost forgotten under the cultural hegemony of Zionist colonial rule, must be revived, nourished and celebrated, regardless of any power asymmetry in the new state. We also must keep in mind that half of the Jewish–Israeli population, the Mizrahi/Arab Jews, have their cultural roots in Arab and other Middle Eastern cultures. The Vehicle: Resistance & Effective Solidarity Regardless of the above vital components of the vision, perhaps the most nagging question that one-state advocates face is whether our vision is feasible, whether it can be realised and, if so, how.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

Charles Trevelyan, the British assistant secretary to the Treasury, who controlled funds for famine relief, was quite clear on the matter: “the real evil” was “not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil . . . of the [Irish] people.”34 Trevelyan received a knighthood for his services to the realm while Ireland starved, and wrote that as a way of curbing unchecked Irish population growth, “the famine is a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.”35 Other British colonies were subject to the same forces. Indian customs of feeding the poor were replaced, at gunpoint, by free market relations so that India could export grain.36 As we saw in chapter 2’s discussion of money, military force is never far from financial power, and sometimes the latter can be wielded to pay for the former. Under colonial rule, India was tasked with funding, through taxation, Britain’s worldwide imperialism: “Ordinary Indians . . . paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian army as the sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896–98).”37 Colonial exploitation intensified yet further when Germany and the United States—and quickly Japan and the rest of Europe—joined Britain on the gold standard after 1871.

The first book on obesity, diet, and nation was George Cheyne’s 1733 The English Malady.44 Through the idea of nationalism, states’ power to police their citizens extended to everything from productive and reproductive labor through actions in defense of currency and food purity to mental health policy. As the example of Haiti shows, however, it wasn’t just European bourgeoisies that adopted and circulated the ideas and technologies of nationalism. Sometimes the idea of a common destiny was turned against colonizers. Fights for liberation from colonial rule in the Global South invented their own national destinies. The Indian Rebellion of 1857—what the British called the Sepoy Mutiny—was a clash of nationalisms. In a culmination of long-festering resentments over taxation, exploitation, and injustice, the Indian military refused to cooperate with the British.

Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 3: 515–43. Stoler, Ann L. 1989. “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures.” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4: 634–60. ———. 2010. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stone, Irving. 1999. The Global Export of Capital from Great Britain, 1865–1914: A Statistical Survey. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Stoneman, Adam. 2015. “The New Conspicuous Consumption.” Jacobin, June 8. Stotsky, Janet G., Sakina Shibuya, Lisa Kolovich, and Suhaib Kebhaj. 2016.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people. A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition. In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for largescale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.

Where, by contrast, civil society was well organized and the state relatively weak, cadastral mapping was late, often voluntary, and fragmentary. Thus Napoleonic France was mapped much earlier than England, where the legal profession managed for a long time to stymie this threat to its local, incomeearning function. It followed from the same logic that conquered colonies ruled by fiat would often be cadastrally mapped before the metropolitan nation that ordered it. Ireland may have been the first. After Cromwell's conquest, as Ian Hacking notes, "Ireland was completely surveyed for land, buildings, people, and cattle under the directorship of William Petty, in order to facilitate the rape of that nation by the English in 1679."911 Where the colony was a thinly populated settler-colony, as in North America or Australia, the obstacles to a thorough, uniform cadastral grid were minimal.

And a range of historical soils have seemed particularly favorable for the flourishing of high-modernist ideology. Those soils include crises of state power, such as wars and economic depressions, and circumstances in which a state's capacity for relatively unimpeded planning is greatly enhanced, such as the revolutionary conquest of power and colonial rule. The industrial warfare of the twentieth century has required unprecedented steps toward the total mobilization of the society and the economy.32 Even quite liberal societies like the United States and Britain became, in the context of war mobilization, directly administered societies. The worldwide depression of the 1930s similarly propelled liberal states into extensive experiments in social and economic planning in an effort to relieve economic distress and to retain popular legitimacy.


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The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Talent and ability are widely misallocated, wasted. Not only liberty but economic efficiency was sacrificed at the altar of India’s cage of norms. No wonder the country has suffered from endemic poverty and underdevelopment. (And we might add that none of this was made better by 150 years of East India Company and British colonial rule and before that the hegemony of the Mughal Empire, both of which built on and reinforced the caste system.) But if India is so hierarchical and so riven with divisions, why has it also sustained democratic elections since independence and is it often held up to be the world’s largest democracy?

One Colombian judicial prosecutor even referred to a military unit, the Batallón Pedro Nel Ospina, as a “group of assassins dedicated to creating victims which they then pretended were killed in combat.” If the guerrillas and paramilitaries don’t get you, the army might. Another consequence of the Colombian Paper Leviathan was noted almost two hundred years ago by Simón Bolívar, Latin America’s “liberator,” who led its revolution against Spanish colonial rule, when he stated: These Gentlemen think that Colombia is full of simple men they’ve seen gathered around fireplaces in Bogotá, Tunja, and Pamplona. They’ve never laid eyes on the Caribs of the Orinoco, the plainsmen of the Apure, the fishermen of Maracaibo, the boatmen of the Magdalena, the bandits of Patia, the ungovernable Pastusos, the Guajibos of Casanare and all the other savage hordes of Africans and Americans that roam like deer throughout the wilderness of Colombia.

We saw in Chapter 8 that the Indian state is disorganized and feeble too, and this is maintained by the fragmented nature of society, just like the Paper Leviathan. But there are notable differences too. In India, this situation was forged by the history of caste relations and the cage of norms this created, not by the history of colonial rule. This also implies that it was the society’s peculiar organization that kept the state weak. This makes India closer to a state impaired and constricted by society, more of a weak state than a despotic one. As such, in terms of our figure, India is on the other side of the line demarcating the division between the Absent and Despotic Leviathans.


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The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Bletchley Park, centre right, colonial rule, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, trade route, urban sprawl, éminence grise

After being dropped by parachute into central Bosnia, Maclean and his small team of Allied agents were led to the old fortress town of Jajce, briefly held by the communist resistance as its headquarters, and there he met their leader. He was named Josip Broz, but he would become known around the world by his partisan nom de guerre, Tito. What I found fascinating was how much Tito had in common with Princip. Born within two years of each other – Tito was the older – they were both southern Slavs brought up under colonial rule, both committing their lives to winning freedom for their people. Whereas Princip was born in 1894 in the Serb community of Bosnia, only recently absorbed within Austria–Hungary, Tito came from Croat and Slovene stock, born further north in Croatian land that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for centuries.

That is not to say it was a single, disciplined party with a coherent structure, leadership or set of internal rules. It would be more accurate to describe it as an amorphous grouping of diverse young people from across Bosnia’s ethnic and social spectrum, coalescing around one shared aim: the removal of Habsburg colonial rule. Ideas about how this would be achieved and what type of regime would come in its place did not enjoy the same unanimity. These questions remained unsettled, subject to fierce debate and bitter disagreement. But what stands out to me – as someone who saw Bosnia pull itself to pieces in the 1990s over ethnicity – is that the group was not called Young Serbs or Young Croats or Young Muslims.

By the spring of 1909 the Berlin treaty had been amended, the annexation was complete and the house of cards still stood. Princip had only just started his second year of the Merchants’ School when the crisis began in 1908. But what he witnessed on the streets of the capital city was the impact of the annexation: deeper entrenchment of Austro-Hungarian colonial rule, emergency powers granted to imperial governors, new waves of non-Slav immigration from elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire, growing resentment among fellow Slavs who grumbled that advancement was being monopolised by foreigners. The 1910 census illustrated the population shift clearly, recording a city population of 52,000, with the Muslim and Orthodox communities relatively static.


pages: 415 words: 103,801

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

The currency transactions protected his assets and increased his profits and sent a rich stream of dividends to his London relatives to fund their shooting parties and art collections. Dismissed in London as a playboy, Victor in India became a man of influence. He was appointed to the colonial National Legislative Assembly as a representative of the textile industry. He immersed himself in debates over currency reform and factory conditions. He believed in colonial rule and was convinced that his own family’s paternalism had benefited India’s workers. Labor conditions and wages in the Sassoon factories were the best in India. He supported a law that limited the workweek to sixty hours and raised the minimum age of child workers to twelve, over the objections of many of his fellow millionaires.

And through a Kadoorie-funded agricultural program, much of the pork and chicken here bears the Kadoorie mark.” Powered by Lawrence’s electricity, spared any further political turmoil, Hong Kong boomed. It joined the “Asian tigers” of economic growth, embracing a mixture of free-market economics and colonial rule that improved education, expanded housing, and kept unemployment low. By the 1970s Hong Kong’s per capita income was ten times higher than China’s. It had the fifth-busiest port in the world; if it were a country, it would rank twenty-fifth globally among trading economies. Television, radio, and a vibrant press fed a creative and increasingly globalized population, a burgeoning tourist industry, and pacesetters in global fashion and film.

The Kadoories were more attuned to China’s politics and its needs, from Laura Kadoorie’s early support of charity to Horace’s creation of the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association. Lawrence and Horace refused to abandon China entirely, and their commitment paid off for them as a family and for Shanghai and Hong Kong. Yet when China rose and demanded Hong Kong’s return, Lawrence clung to the idea of continuing some form of colonial rule over the city. And when China’s resurgence was clear, Lawrence and his son did not publicly condemn the Tiananmen massacre. They opposed efforts to bring more democracy to Hong Kong. They chose commercial profit over political freedom and decency—a dilemma that many foreign companies from Google to Facebook to Apple must increasingly face.


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

The UK government had to guarantee bank deposits and the Bank of England extended massive loans to Northern Rock and others.19 The links between capitalist companies and the nation-state help explain the different status of countries within the world economy. This also gives an economic definition of the term ‘imperialism’. My argument is that imperialism is not the same thing as colonial rule, and should not be understood only in terms of some countries dominating others through military or political pressure. A country does not have to rule politically over another for it to be imperialist, and imperialism did not die out with the end (almost) of colonialism.20 Today, imperialism is characterised by economic privileges in the world economy, reinforced by monopolistic control of industry, commerce and finance, and backed up by powerful states, directly or indirectly.

Together, these two Singapore investment funds have assets worth probably in excess of $500bn, and they each contribute to government revenues. Ireland offers a sorrier tale, beginning its move into financial services in less auspicious circumstances. Having been partitioned in 1921, after several hundred years of British colonial rule, Ireland stagnated economically until it found a means of escape through the economic subsidies that flowed from its 1973 membership of the European Economic Community. Compared to Hong Kong and Singapore, it had no developed financial or commercial services expertise or status, but in the late 1980s the Irish government took a gamble by offering the country up as a low-tax venue for corporations interested in Europe, especially financial businesses.

Pham, Ending ‘East of Suez’: The British Decision to Withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore 1964–1968, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 19Central bank and regulatory authorities nowadays distinguish ‘systemically important financial institutions’ from others. 20Given the movements towards independence in many countries from the late 1940s onwards, it is common for people to think that colonial rule no longer exists. Among other examples, this ignores Britain’s continued rule over Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the Malvinas and elsewhere. 21For example, see Harvey, The New Imperialism, especially Chapter 4, ‘Accumulation by Dispossession’. 22Lenin, ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, a Popular Outline’, Selected Works in Three Volumes, p. 700. 23Gartner Research, ‘Gartner Says Smartphone Sales Surpassed One Billion Units in 2014’, March 2015, at gartner.com. 24UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2013, Global Value Chains: Investment and Trade for Development, United Nations Conference on Trade & Development, June 2013. 25Milberg and Winkler, ‘Trade, Crisis, and Recovery’, p. 29. 26Marx had already noted in Capital that the establishment of monopolies in certain spheres had provoked ‘state interference’ (Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 27, p. 438). 27Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, New York: Free Press, 1990, pp. 107–10. 28Estes Kefauver, In a Few Hands: Monopoly Power in America, London: Pelican, 1966. 29Chico Harlan, ‘In South Korea, the Republic of Samsung’, Washington Post, 10 December 2012. 30Joseph E.


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War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR by John Dower

anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, Scientific racism, seminal paper, South China Sea, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway

The Burmese prime minister spoke repeatedly of the solidarity of “a thousand million Asiatics,” a vision also evoked by other Asian leaders.4 Burma and the Philippines, long colonies of Britain and the United States respectively, were granted nominal independence by Japan in 1943. Occupied Indonesia was later also given independence, although the quick end of the war made the transfer of authority untidy. The Tokyo conference of November 1943 was designed to be an inspiring symbol of Pan-Asian idealism and the demise of white colonial rule in Asia; and although it was ultimately a hollow exercise, it fueled both Asian racial dreams and Western racial fears. Officials in the West took the rhetoric of Asian solidarity painfully to heart. During the first year of the war, for example, Admiral Ernest King worried about the repercussions of Japanese victories “among the non-white world” while Roosevelt’s chief of staff Admiral William Leahy wrote in his diary about the fear that Japan might “succeed in combining most of the Asiatic peoples against the whites.”

Just as attacks on the Japanese enemy carried over into animosity toward Asian peoples in general, so also did the Yellow Peril sentiment pass on into even larger fears concerning the rise of “colored” peoples everywhere. For the English, the colored problem evoked a multitude of unsettling images linking the war to the clamor for independence from colonial rule in India, Burma, Malaya, and, though still muted there, Africa. For white Americans, “color” was a blunt reminder that the upheaval in Asia coincided with rising bitterness, impatience, anger, and militance among blacks at home. The alarm which accelerating black demands for equality caused in U.S. military and civilian circles during the war cannot be underestimated.

The potentially explosive nature of the situation became most apparent, however, when blacks began appropriating the Allied rhetoric of “fighting for democracy” as their own and drawing practical lessons from the war.43 The conflict in Asia itself provided several sometimes contradictory models for black leaders, including the example of Japanese militance, the inspiration of Chinese resistance against the Japanese, and the tactics of nonviolent resistance exemplified by Gandhi in his struggle against British colonial rule in India. But the “good war” against the oppressive Axis powers was inspiration enough in itself for many American blacks, and campaigns for civil rights were organized during the war under such slogans as “Double Victory,” “Victory at Home as Well as Abroad,” and “Defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito by Enforcing the Constitution and Abolishing Jim Crow.”


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

In 1858, the East India Company’s control of the Indian subcontinent ended with the establishment of British Crown colonial rule. This rule was not established easily, however; there was great expense (to the tune of ₤36 million) and bloodshed during the two-year period immediately preceding this formal establishment of Crown rule by the British, a period known as the “First War of Indian Independence.”136 With these geopolitical changes, a marked change in commodities operations became apparent under British colonial rule of India. Now that a formal, stable geopolitical environment had arisen as a result of Crown rule, economic activity was facilitated greatly.137 India served as both a market for British goods and services and an important defense asset in terms of the size of the standing British Indian Army.

See also commercial banks; merchant banks Barbarians at the Gate, 276 Bardi bank, 43–44 Barings Bank, 170–72 behavioral finance, 251–54 bell curve, 239 Benartzi, Shlomo, 252 benchmarking, 328–30 Benedict XIV (pope), 37 Bent, Bruce, 143 Bentham, Jeremy, 36 Index 417 Bergen Tunnel construction project, 178 Berlin Wall, fall of, 96 Bernanke, Ben, 9, 197, 208, 226 beta, 243–45; alpha and, 248–49, 254, 308–9 Bible, 34, 239 Bierman, Harold, 204 bills of exchange, 83–84 Birds, The (Aristophanes), 24 Bismarck, Otto von, 108–9 Black, Fischer, 230, 235–36 BlackRock, 299 Black Thursday (October 24, 1929), 164 Blunt, John, 67–68 Bocchoris, 23 Boesky, Ivan, 147, 181, 184–86 Bogle, Jack, 284–85 bond index funds, 285 bonds: convertible, 178; fabrication of Italian, 163; government, 6, 135, 176; high-yield, 276; holding, 93; investment in, 257, 259, 297, 301; management of, 102 Boness, James, 236 bookkeeping, double-entry, 41 borrower, reputation of, 22–23 Borsa Italiana, 95 Boston, 100 Boston Consulting Group, 194 Boston Post, 157 bourses, 84 Breitowitz, Yitzhok, 150 Bristol-Myers Squibb, 188 Britain: beggar-thy-neighbor policies in, 202; colonial rule of India, 49–50, 61; supplies contract, after American Revolution, 175 British Bankers’ Association, 182 British East India Company, 66, 326 Brookings Institution, 91 Brown, Henry, 143 Brown, Robert, 230 Brownian motion, 230, 234 Brumberg, Richard, 121–22 Brush, Charles, 81 Bubble Act of 1720, 68, 87 bubbles: causes of, 5; housing bubble of 2004–2006, 213–14; South Sea Bubble, 68–69; technology (dot-com bubble of 1999-2000), 187, 213, 223–24, 246, 263, 276, 287 bubonic plague, 75 bucket shops, 90 Buddhist temples, 29–30 budget deficit projections, 218 Buffett, Warren: American Express and, 169; earnings of, 305; on efficient market hypothesis, 250–51; financial leverage and, 6; on real ownership, 4; resource allocation and, 7; as value manager, 140 bullet payments, 321 bull market: in 1920s, 91; of 1990s, 269, 285; after World War II, 92, 143 burghers, 42 Bush, George W., 218, 225 BusinessWeek, 143, 188 Buttonwood Agreement, 88, 97 Byzantines, 52 Cabot, Paul, 141 Cady, Roberts decision, 192 Caesar, 28 Calahan, Edward, 90 California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), 129 418 Investment: A History call option: performance fee as, 310–11; sale of, 151 CalPERS.

., 160–61 Grant and Ward, 160–61 Great Depression of 1930s, 197–212; causality of, 205–7; Crash of 1929 and, 203–5, 208, 222; deflation and, 198, 231; Federal Reserve and, 205–7; impacts of, 91, 95, 163, 321; interest rates and, 106–7; monetary and fiscal response to, 208–10; 1920s growth and, 199–200; open-ended mutual fund and, 141–42; origins of, 197; policy responses to, 196; Regulation Q and, 114; regulatory response to, 210–12; retirement and, 106–8; Strong and, 200–203 Great Recession of 2007–2009, 212–25; buildup to, 213–15; the crash, 215–16; Federal Reserve and, 217–18, 220–21, 225; fiscal response to, 218–19; intercrisis period, 212–13; key dates in, 227; recovery from, 224–25; regulatory response to, 219–22; response to, 196, 216–22; Treasury and, 217–18, 225 Greece: commercial banks in, 25–26; endowments and foundations in, 56–57, 57; estate management in, 18–19; financial leverage in, 5; guardianship in, 58; interest-free consumption loans in, 25; lending in, 22, 24–27, 60; maritime loans in, 26–27; real estate loans in, 27; resource allocation in, 6; usury in, 33 Greenspan, Alan, 213 Griswold, Merrill, 275 Gross, Bill, 258 Group Association, 106 Guardian International Bank, 154 guardianship, 58 guilds, 42, 48–49 Guinness sharetrading fraud, 181–82 gun mada (tax), 16 Gurney, John, 74 Gurney’s Bank, 74 Gutenberg, Johannes, 71 Hace Şerefüddin el-Hace Yahya, 52 Hamilton, Alexander, 175–77 Hanna, Robert, 81 Hargreaves, James, 71 Harley, Robert, 67 Harrison, George, 202, 206 Harvard University, 257, 271, 311 Hayek, Friedrich, 205 hedge funds, 260–74, 268; definition of, 261; fees, 261, 262, 270–71, 273, 301–2, 304–6, 308–9, 313, 314; funds of, 270–71; growth and development of, 262–64; highestpaid managers, 304–6, 307; illiquidity of, 271–72; origin of, 261–62; passive aggressive, 301, 302; risks and returns of, 272–74; 424 Investment: A History hedge funds (continued ) strong performers’ characteristics, 269; universe today, 264–69 Heshuyen, Frans Jacob, 140 Hesiod, 25 Hewlett-Packard, 279 HFR database, 271, 306 Hickman, Bert, 207 Hidetada, Tokugawa, 47 home equity, 115 homeownership, 2, 321–23 Hoover, Herbert, 202, 208–9 Hope and Company, 140 Hopkins, Harry, 209 horoi (stones), 27, 60 Horowitz, Jerome, 150 House Appropriations Committee, 194 housing bubble of 2004–2006, 213–14 Hughes, Charles Evans, 108 Hume, David, 79 Hussein, Saddam, 266 IDS. See Investors Diversified Services illiquidity premium, 272, 328 Immigration Act of 1924, 199 impact investing, 324–25 increase or expansion (riba), 37–38 independent custodian, 153 independent foundations, 127 index funds, 10, 284–86 indexing, market efficiency and, 301–3 India: British colonial rule of, 49–50, 61; castes in, 48–49; foreign investment in, 49–50; trade in, 48–49; usury in, 38–39 Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), 113–14, 144, 295 individuals, retirement accounts and, 120–23 Industrial Revolution, 70–82; banking and, 73–75; breadth of, 79–80; capital in, 71–72; discussions about, 61; impacts of, 8, 40, 98; laborers during, 63, 77–79; wealth generation during, 75–77.


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Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

Namibia redefined the role of the UN and pioneered new methods, notably in disarmament and reintegration of fighters. In Namibia, the UN mission “differed from all previous UN peacekeeping operations in that its primary means and purpose were political (in overseeing a democratic transition after decades of civil war and colonial rule), rather than military (where monitoring a cease-fire is the primary task).” The UN for the first time took over civilian police functions, established an information program to keep the population informed, and set up a “Contact Group” of western countries committed to helping with the process.

“If what you say is substantially true . . . then the Congo is truly hell on earth. The only way to bring civility to such a place would be to install a brutally punitive, but fair, military occupation.” “Has anyone . . . tried to determine if Africa and Africans have been better or worse off since colonial rule ended?” “Every single person who is under the UN umbrella is collaborating to this crime with their silence.” These four comments appear in just the first ten posts in response to the Kristof column. Finally, although the issue is complex, I detect an element of racism in the popular discourse portraying Congo as a place of uncontrolled brutality.

It is “darkest Africa,” with black men as rapists and people so uncivilized that they commit atrocities all the time. One would hardly be surprised to read that a rebel militia had captured a white foreign humanitarian and boiled her in a big pot of water for dinner. The suggestions to put Congo back under colonial rule—made with no apparent awareness of their irony—are understandable given this level of misunderstanding and stereotyping about the Congo. 11 WARS OF THE WORLD The Fires Still Smoldering The gory headlines are right about one thing—war remains a serious problem in our world. However much humanity has accomplished in the past, much work remains to do in the future.


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The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Even less can be said here about South Asia except that high inequality both in the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century and under British control 200 years later provides further confirmation of the disequalizing effects of large-scale predatory imperial or colonial rule.24 For much of the past 600 years, inequality trends in the New World can only be sketched out in a highly impressionistic way. It is likely that the formation of the Aztec and Inca empires in the fifteenth centuries raised economic disparities to new levels as tributary flows extended over longer distances and powerful elites accumulated increasingly hereditary assets. Countervailing forces operated during the following two centuries: even as the Spanish expansion and predatory colonial rule by a small conquest elite would have sustained or arguably even increased existing levels of wealth concentration, the catastrophic demographic attrition caused by the arrival of novel Old World infections I describe in chapter 11 made labor scarce and even drove up real wages, at least for a while.

Countervailing forces operated during the following two centuries: even as the Spanish expansion and predatory colonial rule by a small conquest elite would have sustained or arguably even increased existing levels of wealth concentration, the catastrophic demographic attrition caused by the arrival of novel Old World infections I describe in chapter 11 made labor scarce and even drove up real wages, at least for a while. Even so, after these epidemics had abated, the population recovered, land/labor ratios fell, urbanization increased, and colonial rule was fully consolidated; by the eighteenth century, Latin American inequality was probably as high as it had ever been. Revolutions and independence in the early nineteenth century may have had an equalizing effect until the commodities boom of the second half of that century pushed inequality to ever higher levels, a process of income concentration that with only intermittent pauses continued well into the late twentieth century (Fig. 3.4).25 THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY This brings us to the onset of modern economic growth in the nineteenth century.

Land reforms that targeted former colonial or other captured elite holdings similarly occurred in a whole series of other countries.17 Genuinely peaceful reform often appears to have required some form of foreign control that checked the power of local elites. It worked in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s—and even there it was an outgrowth of equalizing reforms in the United States that had been driven by the Great Depression and World War II and coincided with top-down land reform in Japan under American occupation. Colonial rule was also instrumental in Irish land reform. In the late 1870s, the so-called “Land War,” agitation for fair rents and tenant protection from eviction, involved organized resistance in the form of strikes and boycotts but only very little actual violence. The British Parliament addressed these grievances in a series of acts that regulated rents and provided for loans at fixed interest for tenants who wanted to purchase land from willing landlords.


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The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Having campaigned unsuccessfully for Vietnam’s independence at the Versailles conferences after World War I, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party and went on to work for the Communist International, the Comintern, in Moscow and then in China and southeast Asia from 1923 to 1941. Only then did he return to Vietnam, where he sensed that France’s defeat in World War II provided an opportunity to break his country free from colonial rule. Ho and the organization he headed, the Viet Minh, short for the League for the Independence of Vietnam, fought the Vichy French and the Japanese, never trusting Tokyo’s promises of postwar independence for Vietnam and following instructions from Moscow to put pressure on the Japanese Imperial Army.

They wanted their peoples to be recognized as a new driving force in world history, not as second-class citizens in their own countries. The disasters of the two world wars and the global depression focused these movements politically and magnified their support. Until the 1920s almost all of them were minority phenomena, with leaders who had a hard time convincing their countrymen to take the risk of challenging colonial rule. But thereafter they increased in size and significance, not least because the colonial powers tried to stamp them out by force. India’s Jawaharlal Nehru had been imprisoned by the British, as had Gandhi, his political mentor. Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh, and Ben Bella all spent time in prison and exile.

Instead many leaders found that their countries did not have the expertise needed to advance fast, especially in building new industries, and that the few resources they could export were still hostage to conditions set by multinational companies and international trade regimes. Almost from the beginning, many countries found that development efforts were hampered by increasing levels of official corruption. By the mid-1960s many Africans, especially, found that they were worse off in their daily lives than they had been under colonial rule. They were beginning to look for more stability, order, and incremental progress than the postcolonial regimes were able to offer. Algeria is a good case in point. The man who emerged as the key leader of the FLN, Ahmed Ben Bella, had become radicalized when he served in the French army and later in France as a political prisoner.


The Rough Guide to Morocco by Rough Guides

colonial exploitation, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, place-making, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal, walkable city

INTRODUCTION TO MOROCCO For Westerners, Morocco holds an immediate and enduring fascination. Though just an hour’s ride on the ferry from Spain, it seems at once very far from Europe, with a culture – Islamic and deeply traditional – that is almost wholly unfamiliar. Throughout the country, despite the years of French and Spanish colonial rule and the presence of modern and cosmopolitan cities like Rabat and Casablanca, a more distant past constantly makes its presence felt. Fez, perhaps the most beautiful of all Arab cities, maintains a life still rooted in medieval times, when a Moroccan kingdom stretched from Senegal to northern Spain, while in the mountains of the Atlas and the Rif, it’s still possible to draw up tribal maps of the Berber population.

Continued expansion, once again facilitated by an influx of refugees, this time from the Spanish reconquest of Andalusia, helped to establish the city’s reputation as “the Baghdad of the West”. After the fall of the Merenids, Fez became more isolated under the Saadians and Alaouites, and French colonial rule allowed the city little more than a provincial existence. Despite the crucial role the Fassis played in the struggle for independence (a time brought to life in Paul Bowles’ novel The Spider’s House), Mohammed V retained the French capital of Rabat, condemning the city to further decline.

These were, with Bab Doukkala, the principal approaches to the city until the twentieth century and along them you find many of the old fondouks used for lodging by merchants visiting the souks. EL GLAOUI: THE PASHA OF MARRAKESH T’hami el Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh during the French Protectorate, was the last great southern tribal leader, a despot and shrewd supporter of colonial rule – and personal friend of Winston Churchill. Cruel and magnificent in equal measure, he was a spectacular party-giver in an age where rivals were not lacking. At the extraordinary difas or banquets held at his palace, the Dar el Glaoui, for his Western friends, “nothing”, as Gavin Maxwell wrote, “was impossible.”


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The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

In 1989 most people believed that last version. The others were either dead or in retreat. Today, only Marxism remains dormant. Belief in an authoritarian version of national destiny is staging a powerful comeback. Western liberalism is under siege. More to the point, non-Western visions of history, which were overshadowed by colonial rule but never forgotten, are staking their pressing claim to relevance. In very different ways, China and India have traditionally taken a circular view of history. They still do. Material conditions may improve. But humanity’s moral condition is constant. There is no spiritual or political finale towards which history is guiding us.

Washington is the biggest obstacle. It is critical to try to see the dispute from China’s point of view. Since Washington proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the US has treated outside interference in the Western hemisphere as a threat to its national interests. That includes Cuba, which the US helped liberate from Spanish colonial rule in 1898. The Caribbean island never fell under US sovereignty. Yet John F. Kennedy was prepared to risk nuclear war with the Soviets over the transfer of Soviet missiles to Cuba. In contrast, Taiwan was not only an historic part of China, but is recognised as such by the US and most of the rest of the world.


Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

Since 1945, the United States had been involved in state-building in Korea, a task initially assigned to the U.S. Army. Many of the programs undertaken went far beyond simple reconstruction and stabilization tasks. Education, agriculture, industry, and other programs aimed to enhance or improve capacities that had existed under Japanese colonial rule. These efforts even included attempts to “modernize” the Korean language to include new scientific and technical terms. • 22 • From Consensus to Crisis • Such efforts were continued after the U.S. Army departed, following the creation of the Republic of Korea in 1948. They were handed off to the Economic Cooperation Administration, the body initially created to administer the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, which was given a global writ to foster development in the late 1940s.

Much of this work was directly related to modernization brought about by a new world order.21 From the perspective of the Carnegie Project, these Americans were all operating in an altered world, one that was defined politically by nationalism and economically by industrialization. In the countries only recently freed from colonial rule, there were rising expectations for a better life and the desire of leaders to cultivate modern economies and industry. It was logical that the United States should have a role in this process, as “the potentialities of large-scale industrialization have been demonstrated most vividly by the United States.”

They had a governmental structure based on European patterns, built on bureaucracies, civil and military, with the higher positions in them filled mostly or entirely by European whites, the lower levels filled by “natives” of various sorts. A kind of caste system prevailed, in which social behavior and authority were predicated on skin color and racial origin, in both governmental and nongovernmental affairs. The famous sparseness of the colonial ruling elite was based on more than the control of firearms, indirect rule, and the calculated accommodation of subjects to power. This structure of colonial societies meant that the apparatus of government was both the most conspicuous and prestigious expression of their hierarchical social structures, and in a time of rising egalitarian values, their Achilles’ heels.


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Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

The gradual formation of liberal, secular democracy over the Enlightenment and the Modern periods was characterized by struggles against oppressive forces and the search for freedom. The battle against the hegemony of the Catholic Church was primarily an ethical and political conflict. The French Revolution opposed both church and monarchy. The American Revolution opposed British colonial rule and nonrepresentative government. Throughout these earlier periods, institutions like, first, monarchical rule and slavery, then patriarchy and class systems, and finally enforced heterosexuality, colonialism, and racial segregation were challenged by liberalism—and overcome. Progress occurred fastest of all in the 1960s and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized.

The postcolonial Theorists studied the discourses of colonialism, which sought to protect the interests of the powerful and privileged, not least the so-called right to dominate other cultures that hegemonic “civilized” Western (and Christian) discourses construed as “uncivilized” and “barbaric.” POSTCOLONIALISM AS AN APPLIED POSTMODERN PROJECT As concerns about colonialism grew through the middle part of the twentieth century, the work of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon rapidly gained influence. Fanon, who was born on Martinique under French colonial rule, is often considered foundational to postcolonial Theory. His 1952 book, Black Skins, White Masks,3 offers a powerful critique of both racism and colonialism. His 1959 work, A Dying Colonialism,4 chronicles the changes in culture and politics during the Algerian War of independence from France.

Nevertheless, later thinkers, including Edward Said, the father of postcolonial Theory, took inspiration from Fanon’s depiction of the psychological impacts of having one’s culture, language, and religion subordinated to another. Fanon argued that the colonialist mind-set has to be disrupted and, if possible, reversed within people who have been subjected to colonial rule and the colonialist worldview that justified it. This focus on attitudes, biases, and discourses fits well with postmodernism. The scholars who look at postcolonialism in a postmodern way—postcolonial Theorists—also see their work as a project geared towards overcoming certain mind-sets associated with and putatively legitimizing colonialism (rather than focusing on its practical and material effects).


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Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 by Hannah Arendt

American ideology, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, dark matter, desegregation, means of production, military-industrial complex, post-truth, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Rosa Parks, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

III The Satellite System The last words to come out of free Hungary were spoken over Kossuth Radio, and ended with the following sentence: “Today it is Hungary and tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, it will be another country; for the imperialism of Moscow knows no bounds, and is only trying to play for time.” A few days earlier, the communist station Free Radio Rajk had declared that “it was not only Stalin who used Communism as a pretext to expand Russian imperialism” and that it had been among the goals of the Hungarian Revolution “to present a clear picture of Russia’s brutal colonial rule.” We said at the start that the development and expansion of postwar Russia must be seen in the flaming light of the Hungarian Revolution. This light—who would deny it?—is not steady, it flares and flickers; yet we would have nothing to see without this unsteady light. If we want to learn politics from what happens in the world—and there is no other way to learn—our eyes will have to become accustomed to this twilight.

In a move typical of these relations, at a very early stage of the Bolshevization of the satellite states, Moscow demanded the obligatory study of Russian in all schools. It was just as typical that the demand for its abolition figured prominently in all the programs and manifestos in Hungary and Poland. No dichotomy of principle, therefore, between home rule and colonial rule will impose restraint on totalitarian imperialism; if it, too, has to fear certain boomerang effects from its imperialist adventures, they have other causes. Thus it cannot be denied that the role of the Red Army in crushing the Hungarian uprising justified Zhukov’s hopes of replacing the party dictatorship in Russia with a military dictatorship: events in Hungary had provided compelling evidence that for this kind of foreign rule one could rely neither on party nor police.

The goal is again the equalization of conditions, something that not only did not interest overseas imperialism, but which it actively strove to avoid. However, these and other distinctions between Western national and Russian totalitarian imperialism do not go to the heart of the matter. For the immediate predecessor of totalitarian imperialism is not the British, Dutch, or French version of overseas colonial rule, but the German, Austrian, and Russian version of a continental imperialism that never actually succeeded and therefore is given scant regard by historians of imperialism. In the form of the so-called pan-movements, however—pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism—it was a very potent political force in Central and Eastern Europe before and during the First World War.


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Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

Far from being a creator of this lineage, his thinking was a direct descendant of some of the foundational ideas about race, nationhood and citizenship that were assembled in the later years of the nineteenth century.3 Equally, it was formed out of direct experience of the military and administrative aspects of colonial governance. Churchill's Empire Historians continue to debate how important the imperial experience was for Churchill and what exactly were the most important and consistent principles he held on the various issues relating to colonial rule on which he spoke and acted during his career. His political contemporary Leo Amery famously characterised his interest in empire as synthetic and secondary to his much deeper interest in England, a charge repeated by Clement Attlee.4 In fact, perceptions of Churchill's relationship with empire altered at different stages of his career.

‘If there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set’, he observed, ‘it is the world of the English-speaking peoples, in which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component.’34 His argument was a precursor to a more concerted examination of the – seemingly unlikely – proposition that India might become an important partner within a putative Anglosphere association, a position also advanced by the Tory MP Daniel Hannan.35 In January 2011 the foreign affairs magazine New Criterion published a special issue on the Anglosphere with authors from a variety of countries, including an Indian commentator, Madhav Das Alapat.36 The geographical expansion of the Anglosphere idea also drew sustenance from a separate intellectual current – an emerging interest in re-evaluating the nature and impact of the empire, a focus which was associated particularly with the controversial account of liberal imperialism supplied by Anglo-American commentator Niall Ferguson.37 And it was advanced too in the addition by the historian Andrew Roberts to Churchill's iconic volumes on the history of the English-speaking peoples, which appeared in 2007.38 Nor was this debate confined to Britain. Within Anglosphere circles more broadly, the desire to re-evaluate colonial rule and to trace its positive legacies, such as the establishment of the rule of law, the development of democratic institutions and the spread of ideas of liberty, became a commonplace in these years. According to the Canadian pundit Mark Steyn, ‘The key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are … British-derived – from Australia to South Africa to India – and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you're better off for having been exposed to British rule than not.’39 Intellectuals of the Anglosphere: Robert Conquest and James C.


pages: 648 words: 165,654

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright

Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, colonial rule, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, power law, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment

But it, too, had begun to implode politically. Its presidential candidate, Noman Gomaa, received less than three percent of the vote when he ran against Mubarak in 2005. And Wafd won only six seats in parliament. Wafd means “delegation.” The party emerged in 1919 among liberal activists who challenged both British colonial rule and Egypt’s monarchy. It was widely popular until it was forced to disband, along with other parties, after the 1952 revolution. The New Wafd was revived in the late 1970s and, again, became the main legal opposition party. Its power brokers were merchants, middle-class professionals, landowners, and the bourgeoisie marginalized after the revolution.

“We originally became Marxists because the first generation of liberals failed to solve the national problems that faced our countries after independence,” he said. “The majority of Syrians and Egyptians and Iraqis were poor farmers. In fact, they were more than poor, they were nearly slaves. But the old liberals of the Arab world, the people who led the struggle for independence against colonial rule, generally came from a class of urban notables—people who were rich and had big landholdings. They were not interested in agricultural reform.” “They collapsed completely in Syria in the 1960s. That’s why the Baathists had an easy victory over them,” he added. The Baathists, led by Syria’s Alawite minority, identified with the farmers.

Indeed, the groundbreaker was arguably a man. Qasim Amin was an Egyptian judge, cofounder of Cairo University, and an activist in Egypt’s nationalist movement. He is also considered the father of Arab feminism. He wrote The Liberation of Women in 1899 to argue that the education and liberation of women were pivotal in ending British colonial rule. In The New Woman, published in 1900, he then boldly condemned Arab societies for their attitudes and treatment of females. The book resonates with a single word—slavery. The woman who is forbidden to educate herself save in the duties of the servant or is limited in her educational pursuits is indeed a slave, because her natural instincts and God-given talents are subordinated….


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

It is tempting in the face of all this to conclude that the political rhetoric concerning the pursuit of liberty and freedom is a sham, a mask for hypocrites like Bush to pursue more venal aims of profit, dispossession and domination. But this would deny the force of that other history which, from peasant revolts to revolutionary movements (American, French, Russian, Chinese etc.), to the struggle to abolish slavery and the fight to liberate whole populations from their chains of colonial rule, has in the name of freedom wrought a seismic reworking of the contours of how our world society works. All of this has been going on while social forces have been extending the field of freedom and liberty through struggles against apartheid, for civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights and the rights of many other minorities (LGBT, indigenous or disabled populations etc.).

But the ecological effects are localised, leaving behind an uneven geographical landscape of abandoned mining towns, exhausted soils, toxic waste dumps and devalued asset values. The ecological benefits are located somewhere else. These extractive and exploitative practices become doubly rapacious and violent under systems of imperial and colonial rule. Soil mining, soil erosion and unregulated resource extractions have left a huge mark upon the world’s landscapes, in some instances leading to irreversible destructions of those use values needed for human survival. A more benign capitalist logic can be constructed in certain places and times that combines principles of sound environmental management with sustained profitability.

., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?


pages: 427 words: 114,531

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

The endorsement of Zionism distracted officials from that broader agenda. Here was a further contradiction. On the one hand, by fuelling inter-communal tension, Jewish immigration rendered the Balfour Declaration unattainable in practice. This is what the men on the spot witnessed. On the other hand, Zionist enterprise helped greatly to subsidise colonial rule. That is what London thought was needed. Enough members of the British government continued to believe that there was a strategic case for Palestine to remain in British hands. But there was no consensus here. The case against keeping Palestine remained strong, too. The army general staff were confident, as in the past, that British forces stationed in Egypt were sufficient to defend the Suez Canal and would only be financially drained by the need to defend Palestine as well.

It may be read as a last heartfelt appeal for the British to give precedence to the principles of the League of Nations Covenant over the terms of their Palestine mandate. The letter conveys his exasperation. ‘The British government has always ignored Arab rights, Arab national existence, and Arab demands; instead it administers Palestine under direct colonial rule and facilitates Jewish immigration and the usurpation of Arab lands.’78 At the same time, the AHC submitted three demands: an end to Jewish immigration; an end to Jewish land purchases; and Arab national self-government. In response, and recognising that immigration was a central issue, on 18 May 1936 the British administration announced that Jewish immigration would be restricted to 4,500 for the coming six months.

After ten more years, it was ironic that the forces of armed Zionism, not those of Arab resistance, put pressure on Britain to abandon its administration of Palestine after the Second World War. Arthur Koestler’s often quoted aphorism – that ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’ – points to an exceptional, hybrid, form of British colonial rule. This proved exceptionally unsustainable and also distinctive in its outcome. Whereas in Africa British settlers eventually had to accept indigenous majority rule (in Kenya after Mau Mau, and in Rhodesia after years of liberation war), in Palestine it was Zionists acting in the name of the settlers – Koestler’s ‘second nation’ – who in the end persuaded the British to leave and inherited the land they had colonised.


pages: 228 words: 69,642

Among the Islands by Tim Flannery

British Empire, colonial rule, David Attenborough, European colonialism, Kula ring

When their time was up they were supposed to be transported back to the Solomons. But all too frequently they were not dropped at their home village, thus placing them in grave danger of being killed by people who were their traditional enemies. The twentieth century was just seven years away when, in 1893, British colonial rule was established in the Solomons. Indeed it was with considerable reluctance that the British government declared the Solomon Islands a protectorate, their principal motive being the suppression of blackbirding. Despite the good intentions, the European impact on the islands was particularly fatal.

Admiralty Islands 96 Alcester Island 15, 46–7, 50–5 bats 54 collecting 52, 53 cultural influences 51, 52, 53 flying foxes 53, 54, 55 geology 50–1 quadoi 46, 52, 53–4 Alotau 55 American Museum of Natural History 19, 58, 60–1 Andersen, Knud (taxonomist) 126, 128, 139 Anthops ornatus 178 Araucaria schmidii 228 Archbold Expedition 58–9, 70, 83 Aspidomorphus 67 Aujare, Ian 183, 236 Australasian long-eared bats 215–16 Australia Museum 235 biological exploration of Solomons 115 Flannery at 16–17, 38–9, 74 Hangay at 76, 77–8, 133–4 museum cadets 37 Poncelet collecting for 182 Troughton at 37–40 Wang at 134 Bainimarama, Frank 203 Balof Cave, New Ireland 89, 102, 105, 112 archaeological history 102–4 faunal record 103, 104 pollen record 103–4 bandicoots 36–7, 38, 40, 72, 100 bare-backed fruit bats 107, 109 Basiana (Kwaio ramo) 161–2, 164 bats 1, 2 Alcester Island 54 classification 126 Fiji 203, 205 Guadalcanal 129, 137–9 Makira Island 149, 155–6 New Caledonia 215–16 New Georgia and Vangunu 185–6 New Ireland 106–10 Sideia Island 80 Woodlark Island 31 bêche-de-mer 195 Beechey, Des 20, 21, 25, 42 Bell, William (district officer, Malaita) 161, 162, 167 birds Fiji 205–6 Goodenough Island 66, 67, 73 Guadalcanal 172–3 Makira Island 148 New Caledonia 217, 218 Bismarck Archipelago 84, 87–9, 111 human history 87–9 Bismarck bare-backed fruit bat 109 Bismarck giant rat 84 Bismarsk blossom bat 109 black gazelle-faced wallaby 59, 68, 69–72 blackbirding 119–20, 183 blossom bats 109, 138, 155, 156 Fiji 203 Solomon Islands 155–6 blue-breasted pittas 67 Bougainville 89, 118, 180–4 flower-faced bat 178 giant rats 181, 182 monkey-faced bats 139–40 political climate 180–1 Poncelet’s collecting 183 zoological expeditions 183 Bower, Lieutenant (HMS Sandfly) 149 brahminy kite 66 Bridie, Susan 17 brown tree snakes 43 Buka Island 180, 181, 182 Bulominski, Franz 101 Calaby, John 37–8 Calvert, James 206 cane toads 83, 106, 211 cannibalism 120, 121, 197–8 in Fijian culture 193, 195–7, 206 China Strait 14–15, 23, 25, 82 Choiseul Island 183–4 Colubridae 43 convergent evolution 131, 213 Cook, James 8, 51, 193–4 Coral Sea 21–2 Corris, Peter 152 crocodiles 191–2 curl-crested manucode 67 cuscuses Alcester Island 47, 52, 53–4 Manus Island 96 New Guinea 45 New Ireland 103, 104–5 piebald 2 spotted 95, 105–6 Woodlark Island 18, 19, 29, 45–6 Damon, Fred 26 Dampier, William 87 de Bougainville, Louis Antoine 14 de Maire, Jacob 87 de Rays, Marquis 87–9 d’Entrecasteaux, Antoine Raymond Joseph de Bruni 14 D’Entrecasteaux Group 14, 55, 57–8, 76, 83–4 Des Voeux Peak, Fiji 205–6, 210–11 diadem horseshoe bat 137, 138 Discodeles guppyi 145 Dorcopsis atrata 59 dusky pademelon 104 Dutch seafarers 87, 193 Echymipera 36 Echymipera davidi 38, 40, 72 Emballonura serii 109 emperor rat 129–32, 136–7, 143, 147, 229 endangered species preservation 132–3, 141–2 Endicott, William 195–7 Ennis, Tish 20–1, 30, 53, 55, 63, 68, 73, 76, 80, 236 at Manus Island 90, 93 at New Britain 84, 100 at New Ireland 101 Ennis’s flying fox 110 Etheridge Jr, Robert 37 European exploration 13–14, 87–8, 116–17 evolutionary process, on islands 5–8 expedition funding 17, 18, 132–3 expedition planning 2–4, 9, 75 Fergusson Island 83, 84 Fiji 191 bats 203, 205, 211, 212 birds 192, 205 cannibalism 193, 195–7, 206, 207 colonial history 193, 199 extinct fauna 191–2 human settlement 192 independence and military coups 202–3 indigenous culture 192–3 kava drinking tradition 200–3, 231 zoogeography 193 Fijian blossom bats 203 Fijian flying foxes 211, 212 Fijian monkey-faced bat 211–12 biology and reproduction 212, 213 evolutionary relationship 213 fish and fishing 22, 222 Fisher, Diana 185–7, 236 Flannery’s monkey-faced bat 140 flightless birds 7, 192 floating islands 92 flower-faced bat 178–9 flying foxes 110–11 Alcester Island 53, 54, 55 Makira Island 149, 157 Malaita Island 167 Manus Island 91, 94 New Caledonia 220, 228 New Ireland 110 Taveuni 211 Folofo’u (Malaita) 166–7, 168 Forbes’s tree mouse 72–3, 83–4 French exploration and mapping 14 Fruhstorfer, Eric 60, 61 German, Pavel 83–4, 194, 203–5, 211, 236 collecting on Taveuni 212–13 Geve, Fr Augustin 169 giant crocodile skink 145 giant flightless pigeon, Fiji 192 giant geckos 216–17 giant rats 84, 100 Bougainville 182 Buka 182 Choiseul 183–4 Guadalcanal 129, 130–1, 136, 137, 141, 142–3 Malaita 168 New Georgia and Vungunu 187 Poncelet’s 182 Ugi Island and Makira 157–8 gigantism 6, 145 goannas 49–50, 55–6 Goodenough Island 55, 57–74, 83, 120 birds 66, 67, 73 boulder campsite in forest 65–7, 72, 73 climb up mountain peak 63–4 drought conditions 62–3 funeral practices 74 kunai slopes 64 mammals 58, 59–60, 69–72, 84 prior expeditions to 58–9, 70 snakes 67 wallabies 59, 68, 69–711 war legacy 62 zoogeography 58 great black bat 129 Great Council of Chiefs (Fiji) 202–3 Greater Bukida 181, 183 Griffin, Des 235 Grimes, Captain 27 Guadalcanal 118, 120, 121, 158 bats 129, 137–9, 144–5, 175–6, 178 birds 172–3 civil war 135 climb up Mount Makaramomburu 171–9 Cyclone Namu impact on 171, 176 feral cats 174 frogs 145 giant rats 129, 130–1, 136–7, 141–3, 145, 147, 229 Gumburota Caves 144–5 mountain climb and forests 143, 145–6, 147 Pacific rats 174 political unrest 169 rat evolution 131–2 savagery on 123 weather coast expedition 147, 169, 170–9 Woodford’s experiences and collecting 122–4 Guadalcanal monkey-faced bat 138–9, 140 Guadalcanaria inexpectata 172–3 Guasopa village (Woodlark Island) 27–30, 34, 47 Gumburota Caves, Guadalcanal 144, 145 habitat destruction, impact of 184, 188 Hangay, George (taxidermist) 76–8, 134, 138 non-museum taxidermy 78–9 Sideia Island research 79–83 as world-championship wrestler 79 Heinsohn, Tomm 101 Helgen, Kris 139, 140, 213 Hill, John Edwards 127, 129 Holics, Michael 20 honeyeaters 172 Honiara, Solomon Islands 134, 135, 136, 144, 179, 230 hornbills 73 horned tortoise 191 horseshoe bats 137, 138, 144–5, 149, 156 huia bird 156 hunting rituals 69, 70–1 huntsman spiders 227 Ingleby, Sandra (Sandy) 194, 199, 236 International Union for the Conservation of Nature 71, 140, 213, 230 Irani, Aziz 20 Isabel Island 183 island biodiversity 1–2 importance of preservation 229 loss of 230 island formation 4–5, 6 island peaks 3–4 island species 6–8, 229 islands, and the evolutionary process 5–8 Islands of Love 16, 17, 35 Jean-Claude gecko 217 Jumelutt, Matt (Captain of Sunbird) 20, 22–3, 42 and the goanna 49–50, 55–6 outboard fuel-mixture screw 44–5 as The Captain 27–8 kagu 217, 218 Kaona, Sam 180–1 Kava, Ronnie 169 kava drinking, Fiji 200–3, 231 Kavieng, New Ireland 100, 101 Keesing, Roger 152, 164–5 Keke, Harold, and henchmen 169, 171 king rat 129, 130–1, 132, 142–3 Kiriwini Island 15, 30 bandicoot 37, 38 Mengden’s experience 40–2 Seri’s collecting 36, 40 snakes 40–1 Kisokau, Karol 91, 92, 94 knob-headed giant gecko 216 Kolombangara Island 185 Kula Ring 13, 27, 47 Kula shell valuables 32–3 kuru (brain disease) 198 Kwaio people, Malaita 159, 160–1 massacre of 163–4 ramo 160–1, 162–3 women and culture 165–6, 167 land-bridge islands 4–5 Lapérouse Expedition 14 Lapita culture 104 largy spiny rat 104 Leache’s giant gecko 216 Leary, Tanya 170, 178, 183, 236 L’Esperance (ship) 14 Lillies (district assistant, Malaita) 161, 162 little pig rat 129, 131, 132, 141, 142 Louisade Archipelago 14 McCoy, Mike 143, 145, 147, 152, 159, 165, 170 Makira flying fox 149 Makira horseshoe bat 149 Makira Island 147, 148–58 bats and flying foxes 149, 155–7 birds 148 collecting 155–6 rats 149, 150, 157 Malaita Island 118–19, 124, 147, 159–68 British colonial administration 161–2 climb up Sifola 165 flying foxes 167 giant rats 168 Malinowsi, Bronislaw 16 mangrove monitor 56 Manueli, Peter 236 Manus friarbird 97 Manus Island 90–9 birds 9, 96–7 flying foxes 91, 94 geographical isolation 92 human history 91–2 mammals 92, 96 native rats 94–5, 97–8 spotted cuscus 96 war history 91, 93 marsupials 8 masolai (Melanesian spirits) 32–4 Mbara Island 122 Medinilla waterhousei 205 Meek, Albert 18–19, 45, 58 Melanesian seafarers 87, 118–19 Melanesians 199 Melanycteris fardoulisi 155 Melomys matambuai 96, 97 Melomys rufescens 95–6 Mendaña, Alvaro de 116–18, 120 Mengden, Greg 20, 30, 34 snake collection and sampling, Woodlark 42–4 snake experience, Kirawina 40–2 Microchiroptera 128 Mipi (Matt’s wife and crew of Sunbird) 20, 28, 49–50, 55 Mirimiri 213 missionaries, Taveuni 206–8 mist-nets 31, 68, 97, 144, 172–3, 211, 219 molecular sampling 43, 44 monkey-faced bats 2, 129, 138–40 behaviour 186, 187 classification 140, 213 New Caledonia 214, 224 new species 174–6, 185–7 Taveuni 211–13 Mont Dzumac, New Caledonia 221–2 Mont Koghi, New Caledonia 215, 218 Mont Panié, New Caledonia 224–8 Moresby, Captain 14 Morton, Alexander (HMS Cormorant) 149–50 mosquitoes 106 Mount Goodenough 57, 66 Mount Makarakomburu 134, 143, 147, 169, 170–1 bats 175–7, 185 climb up 172–9 collecting 172–4 honeyeaters 172–3 rats 175 Mount Popamanesu 134, 143 museum collections 2–3, 17, 60, 127–8 museum specimens 3 collection methods 233–4 Mussau Island 105 naked-tail rats 142–3 native cultures, vulnerability to change 8 Natural History Museum, London 124, 129–30 Naufe’e, Malaita 166–7, 168 New Britain 84, 111 New Britain flying fox 110, 111 New Caledonia 191, 194, 214–23 bats and flying foxes 215–16, 220, 224, 228 birds 217 buying formaldehyde in 220–1 collecting 215–16, 218–19, 221–2, 224–8 extinct fauna 191–2 flora 222, 225–6, 228 as French colony 194 giant geckos 216–17 human settlement 192 indigenous culture 192–3 Kanaks and conflict 219–20 zoogeography 193, 214 New Caledonia flying fox 220, 228 New Caledonian nautilus 223 New Georgia Island 183, 185, 187, 188 New Guinea 4, 16 cuscuses 45 expedition reaches 23–5 as German protectorate 89 mountains 57 southeastern islands 13, 14–15 transferred to Australian colonial control 89 New Ireland 1988 expedition to 91, 100–12 Balof Cave excavation 89, 102–4 bats 106–11 cane toads 106 colonial German administration 101, 102 geography 100–1 human geography 103, 105–6 mammal fauna 103, 104, 106 Marquis de Rays exploits 87, 88 rats 104, 106, 112 spotted cuscus 104, 105–6 Normanby dasyure 83 Normanby Island 76, 83–4 Norris, Chris 29 Noumea 215 Nyctophilus nebulosus 216 Oldfield Thomas, Michael (curator of mammals, British Museum) 124–5, 127, 139 classifies Woodford’s rats 129, 130–1 naming of species 124, 125 outrigger canoes 47, 51 Oxford University research team 29, 46 Pacific Island collections 17 Papua New Guinea customs clearance 24–5 independence 89 parasitism 227–8 Parnaby, Harry 183, 185, 216, 236 Pentecost Island 201 philanthropy 60–1 phosphorescence 21, 227 piebald cuscus 2 Polomou research station, Manus Island 94, 97 Polynesians 13, 104, 199 Poncelet, Fr 182 Poncelet’s giant rat 182 possums 167 predators 7, 47 Pteralopex 129, 213 Pteralopex flanneryi 140 Pteralopex pulchra 176 Pteralopex taki 185 Pteropus capistratus 110 Pteropus cognatus 157 Pteropus ennisae 110 quadoi see cuscuses Rabuka, Sitiveni 202 rat-traps 98–9 rats 2, 31 Guadalcanal 129, 130–1 Makira Island 149 Manus Island 94–5, 97–8 New Ireland 104, 106, 112 Rattus sanila 112 Revercé, Jean-Pierre 222–3 Riufaa of Kwangafi 164 Roe, David 136 Samarai Island 14–15, 24–5 Santa Cruz 117, 120 Santa Isabel 117, 120 Saunders, Robert 20 Schouten, Willam 87 Sclater’s honeyeater 148 Scott expeditions 133, 177, 205, 216, 231, 235–6 Scott, Winifred Violet 132–3, 177, 185, 200 seasickness 21, 42 Sepik River 92 Seri, Lester 20, 30, 53, 55, 63, 64, 76, 236 Alcester quadoi 54 at Manus Island 90, 93, 95, 97 at New Ireland 101, 107 at Normanby Island 83 collecting on Kiriwini 36, 40 goanna from Woodlark Island 49–50, 55–6 Seri’s sheathtail bat 109, 110 sheathail bats 54, 109, 110 Shortland Islands 145 Sideia Island 76, 77, 80 cane toads 83 Hangay’s collecting and experiences 79–83 leper colony 81, 82 mammals 77, 80 zoogeography 77 silktail 205 slugs 226–7 snakes Goodenough Island 67 Kiriwina Island 40–2 molecular sampling 43, 44 New Ireland 106 Woodlark Island 30–1, 34, 42–3 Solomon Islands 115, 230 bats 137–8, 144–5, 155–6 biodiversity 119 blackbirding 119–20 British colonial rule 120 British law 151–2 cannibalism 120–1, 124, 183 Greater Bukida landmass 181, 183 habitat destruction 184, 188 history of Spanish contact 116–18 ice age impact on animal distribution 184–5 Melanesian seafarers arrival in 118–19 monkey-faced bats 129 threats to biodiversity 115–16, 184 zoogeography 119 see also Guadalcanal; Makira Island; Malaita Island Solomon Islands Ministry of Conservation 170 Solomons blossom bat 138 Solomons flying fox 157 Solomons giant horseshoe-bat 144–5 Solomys 168 Solomys salamonis 149 Somosomo, Taveuni 206 cannibalism 206–7 funerary practice 208–10 missionaries’ experiences 206–10 Spanish explorers 116–17 spotted cuscus 96, 105–6 Spriggs, Matthew 181 Sunbird (catamaran) 18, 55 Supreme Rat Trap Company, Sydney 98–9 Szaley, Alexandra 194, 214–15, 218, 223, 225, 236 Talevat, Sanila 105, 109, 111, 155 TAMS (the Australian Museum Society) 17, 18, 54 Tasker, Elizabeth 236 Tasman, Abel 193 Taveuni Island 205–13 taxidermy 77–8 taxonomy, science of 234 Thurston, John Bates 123, 199 Toxicocalamus 40 traditional island cultures 8, 47–8 tree mice 72–3, 83–4 Trobriand Islands 15, 16, 18 Troughton, Ellis Le Geyt 38–9 at Australia Museum 37–40, 178 receives giant rodents from Bougainville 182 visit to Santa Cruz 120 Tuithaku, King, death of 208–10 Tulagi Island 123, 165 type specimens 234 Udre Udre, Ratu 198 Ugi Island 149, 150 giant rat 149, 157–8 Uki Ni Masi 150, 157 Unicomys ponceleti 182 Uromys 131 Uromys rex 142 Valearanisi, Guadalcanal 170, 171 Van Deusen, Hobart 59, 60, 70 Vangunu Island 185, 187, 188 Vanikoro 14 Vanua Levu 193, 206 venom collection 44 venomous snakes 43 Viti Levu 193, 199, 203 survey of highest peaks 199 Vokeo Island 92 volcanoes 4 wallabies black gazelle-faced 59, 68, 69–70, 71 New Ireland 104 Wang, Alex (taxidermist) 134 whale-tooth pine 199–200 White, Peter 89, 101, 102, 104, 105, 112 Williams, Thomas (missionary) 208–10 Woodford, Sir Charles Morris bat collecting 178 collection of giant rats 124, 129–31, 137, 141 as deputy commissioner of Solomon Islands 123–4 on Guadalcanal 121, 122–4, 171 Woodlark Island 15, 18, 26–35, 48 bats 31 caves 31, 32–3 collecting 30–2 councillors and culture 30, 31–3 cuscus 18, 19, 29, 45–6 geology 26 goannas 49–50 history 27 mammals 18, 19, 30 Oxford University researchers 29, 46 prior expeditions to 18–20 snakes 30–1, 34, 42–4 WWII infrastructure 27, 29 World War I, and New Guinea 89 World War II cave refuges 102, 144 legacy on Pacific islands 15, 27, 62, 91, 93, 230 Xeronema moorei 225 About the Author TIM FLANNERY is a writer, a scientist and an explorer.


Amazing Train Journeys by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, country house hotel, Donner party, high-speed rail, megacity, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, trade route, urban sprawl

Then the Eastern & Oriental Express slides across the causeway into Singapore’s gleaming modern rail terminal, and the dream is sadly over. But you’ll always have the memories. % Hotel of writers The Eastern & Oriental Express train shares its name with the Eastern & Oriental Hotel on the Malaysian island of Penang. Established in 1885 during British colonial rule, its elaborate Moorish architecture has played host to many famous authors, including Rudyard Kipling, Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham and Hermann Hesse. % Join travellers, including saffron- robed monks and commuters, at Bangkok’s main station. % Visit the Bridge over the River Kwai and reflect on its sombre wartime history

Travelling over a thousand miles from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City in the south, there is no more atmospheric way to haul into Vietnam’s twin metropolises. And there’s no better way of exploring all the glories in between. ❶ RIDING THE RAILS The story of the North–South Railway is the story of modern Vietnam in microcosm. The railway has its origins in the days of French colonial rule in Indochina – the government promising to build a new ‘backbone’ that would connect northern and southern portions of their territory. It quickly became caught up in Vietnam’s tumultuous 20th- century history. The railway was hijacked by invading Japanese forces in World War II, and soon after formed the front line during the First Indochina War when Viet Minh guerrillas seeking independence from France attacked armoured trains that rolled along the line.


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

In short, though Americans by birth, we derive our rights from Europe, and we have to assert these rights against the rights of the natives, and at the same time we must defend ourselves against the invaders.4 In hindsight, it is difficult to understand why the collective subject of the Spanish American revolution would not be composed of the “legitimate proprietors” of the countries in question, but instead of those who proclaimed themselves the heirs of certain rights whose legitimacy they were the first to denounce. Bolívar shied away from posing that question for two reasons. The first is the obvious fact that he himself belonged to that “species midway.” And, second, all who knew something about Spanish America would have agreed that the three centuries of colonial rule had not been in vain, and, as had been proven three decades earlier by the successful suppression of the vast indigenous rebellion that shook the ancient Incan empire to its core, the other kind of revolution was already an impossible feat. As a direct descendant of Creole aristocracy, Bolívar could no doubt refrain from lamenting that such an alternative was unavailable, but his heritage did not keep him from envisioning, through the successful marginalization of the “legitimate proprietors” of the land, the legacy of a historical experience that was tainted from the very start.

Sokoloff, “Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World,” Villa Borsig Workshop Series 2000, on The Institutional Foundations of a Market Economy, pp. 78, 79 [summary version available online at http://www.inwent.org/ef-texte/instn/sokoloff.htm]. Terry Karl echoes the prevailing view: “In Latin America from the very beginning, mineral and agricultural riches were a mixed blessing; in the context of a specific form of colonial rule they produced concentrated rents that centralized economic and political power and established the region’s patterns of inequality.” Terry L. Karl, The Vicious Circle of Inequality in Latin America, Working Paper 2002/177 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales, Instituto Juan March, 2002), pp. 7, 8. 58.

The main factors which determined Spanish colonial activities were whether the indigenous peoples possessed “permanent intensive agriculture, stable town and village sites, strong tribute mechanisms, and dense populations.”33 Other institutions were designed to reinforce this system. For instance, the legal system systematically discriminated against the indigenous population, and the testimony of natives in court was highly circumscribed. Although Indians certainly did use the legal system to challenge aspects of colonial rule, they could not alter the main parameters of the system. In addition to all of this, the Spanish Crown created a complex web of mercantilistic policies and monopolies in order to raise revenues for the state. Spanish colonies that had small populations of native peoples, such as Costa Rica and Argentina, seem to have followed different paths of institutional development.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

It seems plausible to imagine the ascendance of shining, modern, prosperous cities all over the world. Take, for example, the success story of Singapore. A port city situated on a large island at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore began as a British trading colony in 1819 and remained under colonial rule for one hundred and forty-one years before gaining independence in 1960. Since then, despite its small size (less than 270 square miles), few natural resources, and no domestic fossil fuel supply, Singapore’s growth and economic success have been phenomenal. Between 1960 and 2005 Singapore’s population grew rapidly, averaging 2.2% annually or doubling every thirty-six years.

In the year of its passage Greenlanders voted into their provincial council463 some radical youth, including an unknown twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher, Lars-Emil Johansen (whom I would meet years later as the former prime minister of Greenland), and the young firebrand Moses Olsen. These two began stridently objecting to Denmark’s sovereignty of Greenland, and for the first time in memory, Greenlanders began thinking seriously about disentangling themselves from Copenhagen’s colonial rule. One year later, Greenlanders heartily rejected Denmark’s referendum to join the European Community (predecessor to today’s EU) with 70% of the vote. Alongside their growing nationalism, natural resources were again a root cause, but this time going the other way: Danish membership in the EC would impose fishing restrictions and a sealskin ban on Greenland, both dear to her small aboriginal economies.

The chief connection between the two countries today is economic, as Greenland depends on heavy subsidies from Denmark for solvency. In 2008 Greenland voters overwhelmingly passed another referendum moving Greenland toward full independence from Denmark. 465 As noted in the preceding note, full independence for Greenland, which some speculate could be declared in 2021, the 300th anniversary of Danish colonial rule, will require weaning from generous Danish subsidies averaging $11,000 annually for every Greenlander. The most likely mechanism for this weaning is revenue from oil and gas development, which is being actively encouraged by the Greenland government. So far, thirteen exploration licenses have been issued to companies like ExxonMobil, and another round of licensing will take place in 2010.


pages: 1,433 words: 315,911

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, War on Poverty

In 1910, the year before Ho Chi Minh fled Cochinchina, a government survey found that just three French officials in the whole colony understood Vietnamese well enough to make policy decisions on their own. The French depended instead on a network of French-speaking Vietnamese willing to carry out their wishes—and all too often eager to enrich themselves in the process. Other Vietnamese benefited by colonial rule. They became bankers, merchants, or landlords in Cochinchina, where the availability of cheap, newly opened lands created a fresh entrepreneurial frontier for those with enough capital to get started. These privileged people created a Westernized urban world of their own; they spoke French, drank wine, and followed Paris fashions.

“The French usually disembarked in Indochina determined to be on the best possible terms with the Annamese,” one critical colonist remembered. “It was only gradually, moving from one small misunderstanding to another, that they arrived at isolation and a separation from the Annamese world.” But for the peasants who made up 90 percent of Vietnam’s population, colonial rule provided few benefits. Subject to French monopolies on salt and alcohol, sometimes dragooned to labor without pay on public works, burdened by ever-climbing taxes and saddled by debt, many stood by helplessly as lands they once had owned slipped into the hands of big landowners. By the beginning of the twentieth century, just 5 percent of the population owned 95 percent of the arable land in Cochinchina.

Imperial Japan, soon to ally itself with Germany and eager to move against British and Dutch colonies throughout Asia, then forced the collaborationist Vichy French to permit them to station troops in Tonkin in exchange for the right to continue day-to-day administration of the colony. Within a year, Japanese soldiers would occupy all of Vietnam. To some Vietnamese, the collapse of the French and the coming of the Japanese had seemed to signal a welcome end to white colonial rule. But Ho Chi Minh saw things differently. To him, the Japanese were alien invaders, no more welcome than the French. France might be an “imperialist wolf,” he said, but Japan was a “fascist hyena,” interested only in exploiting his country, commandeering rubber for its war machine, and seizing Vietnamese crops to fill its own rice bowls.


pages: 192

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

Another piece of evidence that 'good institutions' are not enough to generate growth is the fact that the major Asian developing economies remained virtually stagnant during the first half of the twentieth century, despite the fact that many modern institutions were introduced under (formal or informal) colonial rule. According to the estimate by Maddison 1989, the average per capita GDP growth rate for the nine largest Asian developing countries (Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) during 1900-50 was 0 per cent p.a.. During this period, Taiwan and the Philippines grew at 0.4 per cent p.a., Korea and Thailand at 0.1 per cent p.a.. China grew at -0.3 per cent p.a., the South Asian countries and Indonesia at -0.1 per cent. These countries were, however, able to generate much faster growth after the end of colonial rule. The average per capita GDP growth rate for the 1950-87 period for these countries was 3.1 per cent p.a..


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

Beth Daley, The Conversation, October 1, 2017, https://theconversation.com/​what-gandhi-can-teach-todays-protesters-83404. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “inflicted such humiliation and defiance”: E. Andrews, “When Gandhi’s Salt March Rattled British Colonial Rule,” The Daily Star, March 14, 2021, https://www.thedailystar.net/​in-focus/​news/​when-gandhis-salt-march-rattled-british-colonial-rule-2060665. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he in turn called them “sissies”: Daniel Lewis, “Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84,” The New York Times, May 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/​2020/​05/​27/​us/​larry-kramer-dead.html.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

These boom years brought undoubted benefits, helping over one hundred million escape from poverty. Just as importantly, they began to reintegrate India with the rest of the world. The Indian subcontinent had been the planet’s largest economy for most of the last two millennia.9 Three centuries of colonial rule ruined that legacy, as the East India Company suppressed and plundered southern Asia. In the late seventeenth century, when Britain controlled just a handful of coastal cities, India’s Mughal Empire presided over close to a quarter of global gross domestic product. That figure stood at four percent when the last British troops left, not long after Independence in 1947, the final battalion marching out through the grand basalt arch of Mumbai’s Gateway of India, just down the road from the apartment in which my wife and I would later live.10 Yet even under the yoke of imperialism local merchants still sent plentiful cargoes to Liverpool and Manchester, while Indian capital coursed through the exchanges of the City of London.

“I looked at each business and I said to myself, you know, how can we compete with the Nestlés and the Unilevers of this world? Either we have to come up with a huge bunch of resources or we’re going to die.” The 1991 crisis had roots going back more than half a century and the battle against colonial rule. In 1947, just when Mallya’s father bought UB Group, a fierce debate raged among India’s national founders. On one side stood Gandhi, with his vision of a future agrarian utopia, dotted with prosperous villages and free of commercial exploitation. On the other was Nehru, who became prime minister of a newly independent India at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947.

Yet if India can complete it, with an estimated population of 1.7 billion by the middle of this century, it will bring more people into conditions of moderate prosperity than any country in history.9 India would also be the first major world economy to do this as a democracy, rather than turning democratic as it grew prosperous, as happened in America and Britain, or, like China, not being a democracy at all. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge,” Jawaharlal Nehru said on the evening of August 15, 1947, as his country readied to cast aside the injustices of British colonial rule.10 “India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent.” By 2047, as its people celebrate their centenary, India has a chance to fulfill that destiny: to become history’s second democratic superpower and a beacon for free peoples around the world. Modi’s admirers like to see him in just these historic terms, as the man destined to take a nation beset by graft and poverty and wrestle it doggedly towards greatness.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

National Service, by which some two million young men were conscripted into Britain’s armed services between 1946 and 1962, was used to force many young British men to fight colonial wars.10 The experiences of these men shaped the attitudes of their generation. As one RAF flight controller explained, ‘We had Empire Day at school and we all thought empire was a marvellous thing. When Britain chose to give her empire away we were all rather saddened. The colonial people had all the blessings of British colonial rule and look how casually they dismissed them.’11 When the British public did vote to stay in the European Economic Community in 1975, there was a vague feeling that since the old empire was ‘going, going, gone’, another alliance was better than nothing. Flippantly, people were told that maybe the price of Danish butter might come down.

To understand Brexit, we have to revisit the geography textbooks in use in schools up until the 1960s, which told school children, including some recent migrants from former colonial countries, that under the guidance of Europeans, Africa is steadily being opened up … Doctors and scientists are working to improve the health of the Africans, missionaries and teachers are educating the people … The Europeans have brought civilisation to the peoples of Africa …whose standards of living have been raised by their contact with white people.40 This is a very different story from that told by the descendants of the 10,000 or so Kenyans killed during the 1950s uprising against colonial rule. So how can the current generation of school and university students – and all the rest of us born after overt colonialism – understand the empire, how Britain now fits into the world, and the importance of the EU? Statutory guidance for the study of history still demands that students should know the history of our islands as a chronological narrative, and also ‘how Britain has influenced the wider world’.

Much of this importation caused malnutrition in the colonies in which the food was originally grown. Colonial policies for food did little for the nutrition of the colonised and often left populations more vulnerable to food scarcity. This led to hypocritical claims that hunger and poverty were endemic in colonies, thus creating an apparent justification for colonial rule. Even as recently as the 1970s, in Kenya many farmers stopped growing the beans that had been a staple for local markets and instead began growing French green beans exported by air for a mainly out-of-season European market. As Thomas Sankara, the former President of Burkina Faso, put it, ‘Do you not know where imperialism is to be found?


pages: 286 words: 82,970

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

At the close of World War II, much of the world, including most of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, was ruled by the countries of Europe. Decolonization was founded on the idea that peoples had the right to establish independent nation-states; this was the concept of self-determination. Independence was sought by virtually all the populations living under colonial rule. Interestingly, it was also supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States: the former saw it as an opportunity to win converts, while the latter feared that absent independence these societies would turn to the Soviets for support against the Western colonialists. With time, the populations of the mostly European colonial powers themselves grew weary of the costs of maintaining rule in faraway places that wanted to be on their own.

The principle was so broadly embraced that it often included sympathy and even outright support for the use of violence in its pursuit. Self-determination was thus a fundamental tenet of the post–World War II order. But less clear and certainly less broadly embraced was the notion of a right of self-determination for peoples living within established nation-states. Unlike those seeking to get out from under colonial rule, self-determination broadly applied would not be a one-time affair. To the contrary, it could be potentially unlimited in its application. What is more, if it applied to groups living within countries, it threatened the idea and the ideal of state sovereignty, in that sovereignty could be attacked and undermined not just from the outside but from within.


pages: 267 words: 81,108

Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya by Nicholas Best

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Etonian, lateral thinking, out of africa, Scramble for Africa

As an example of how the Kikuyu dominated African thinking, eight out of nine central committee members of the Kenya African Union – a non-tribal party set up at the end of the war to represent the political interests of all Kenya Africans – were Kikuyu by 1951. President of KAU from 1947 was Jomo Kenyatta. He used the party as a respectable front for the still-proscribed Kikuyu Central Association. Kenyatta’s aims were the same as they had always been: to obtain freedom from colonial rule, and to get hold of the white highlands. The difference now was that people were beginning to listen to him. Among his earliest recruits were the old soldiers, tough dissatisfied men who felt that the world owed them a living and did not shrink from talk of bloodshed to achieve their aims. Many of these Kikuyu were comrades of the same age group, having been circumcised together in the initiation rites of 1940.

He appealed, but the appeal was dismissed. In Nairobi prison, on 18 February 1957, Dedan Kimathi was hanged. He has subsequently become a hero to the Kikuyu people, a martyr to the cause of independence and the most famous of all the freedom fighters who lost their lives in the struggle against colonial rule. Every emerging country needs a warrior figure to give it self-respect. In a country lamentably short of heroes, Kimathi is Kenya’s choice. Prominent streets are named after him in every town. He is the subject of numerous eulogistic books, poems and – to be honest – awful plays, all of them written in English, the language of the oppressor.


pages: 337 words: 87,236

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Far from being granted independence, he said, the Congolese people had fought for it, and that fight ‘was filled with tears, fire and blood. We are deeply proud of our struggle, because it was just and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us. That was our lot for the eighty years of colonial rule and our wounds are too fresh and much too painful to be forgotten.’12 Lumumba’s speech was interrupted eight times by loud applause from the Africans present. Most of the Europeans sat in stony silence. Baudouin stormed out. Six months later, in January 1961, Lumumba was taken captive, beaten, and murdered by Belgian and Congolese officers.

, BBC News, 5 November 2011. 30‘Mayawati should reimburse public money spent on building statues, observes Supreme Court’, Scroll.in, 8 Feb 2019, https://scroll.in/latest/912521/mayawati-should-reimburse-public-money-spent-on-building-statues-observes-supreme-court. 31Krishnadas Rajagopal, ‘Why no questions raised on 182-m high Sardar Patel statue, Mayawati asks in SC’, The Hindu, 2 April 2019. 6: ‘The Horror! The Horror!’: King Leopold II 1Daniel Boffey, ‘New find reveals grim truth of colonial Belgium’s “human zoos”’, Guardian, 4 October 2020. 2Quoted in Isam Shihada, ‘Historicizing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Critique of King Leopold II’s Colonial Rule’ in English Language and Literature Studies, vol. 5, no. 1; 2015. 3Valérie Rosoux, ‘The Two Faces of Belgium in the Congo: Perpetrator and Rescuer’, European Review of International Studies, vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 2014), pp. 20–1. 4George Washington Williams, ‘An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo By Colonel, The Honorable Geo.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Latin culture radically favors the masking of power in the language of esteem and purpose, but truth in Latin politics is about reading between the lines, even inverting what one is told. With notable exceptions, exaggeration is integral to communication for Latin politicians, more important than reality as it actually occurs. The result is a culture that implicitly asks, “Why tell the truth when you can lie instead?” The legacy of subverting colonial rule is a prime justification for habits that now only subvert themselves. The social contract of laws and institutions in Asian countries—whether guided by Confucian or Islamic values—is all but absent in Latin America. Trust and commitment to leaders—these things do not exist: Few governments ever complete a first term.

“A Tale of Two Slavic States,” The Economist, June 3, 2006, 53. 11. E. Wayne Merry, “Therapy’s End: Thinking Beyond NATO,” The National Interest, Winter 2003–04. 12. This climate of malaise and frustration led the Third International Commission on the Balkans in 2005 to declare the region “as close to failure as to success,” adding, “If Europe’s neo-colonial rule becomes further entrenched, it will encourage economic discontent; it will become a political embarrassment for the European project; and, above all, European electorates would see it as an immense and unnecessary financial and moral burden.” International Commission on the Balkans, The Balkans in Europe’s Future (Sofia, Bulgaria: Centre for Liberal Strategies, 2005), 7, 11. 13.

*33Because the Maghreb countries lie between Europe and third-world Africa, it is swelling migration not only from the Arab world that Europeans fear, but also from West and sub-Saharan Africa as well. Timbuktu, once a great center of Islamic learning and the starting point for Saharan caravans, today represents much of Africa’s inability to achieve even the level of material progress and social organization that existed a century ago under colonial rule. Hordes of young West African men traverse and hide in Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia before storming the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla to gain entry into Europe. Mauritanians have desperately sailed in overwhelming numbers to the Canary Islands, which are viewed as a weak link in “fortress Europe,” arriving dehydrated, sick, and without identity papers.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Paradoxically, African countries are often also cursed by sudden windfalls of rich mineral wealth, such as oil or diamonds, which serve only to corrupt democratic politicians, strengthen the power of dictators, distract entrepreneurs, spoil the terms of trade of exporters and encourage reckless state borrowing. Take, therefore, one such typical African country. It is landlocked, drought-prone and has a very high population growth rate. Its people belong to eight different tribes speaking different tongues. When freed from colonial rule in 1966 it had eight miles of paved road (for an area the size of Texas), twenty-two black university graduates, and only 100 secondary school graduates. It was later cursed by a huge diamond mine, crippled by AIDS, devastated by cattle disease, and ruled by one party with little effective opposition.

The Tswana were also inclusive, happy to bring other tribes into their system, which stood them in good stead when a collective army was needed to repel the Boers at the battle of Dimawe in 1852. This was a good start, but Botswana then had a stroke of good fortune in its colonial experience. It was incorporated into the British empire in such a half-hearted and inattentive fashion that it barely experienced colonial rule. The British took it mainly to stop the Germans or Boers getting it. ‘Doing as little in the way of administration or settlement as possible’ was explicitly stated as government policy in 1885. Botswana was left alone, experiencing almost as little direct European imperialism as those later success stories of Asia – places like Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China.

Botswana was left alone, experiencing almost as little direct European imperialism as those later success stories of Asia – places like Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China. In 1895, three Tswana chiefs went to Britain and successfully pleaded with Queen Victoria to be kept out of the clutches of Cecil Rhodes; in the 1930s, two chiefs went to court to prevent another attempt at more intrusive colonial rule and though they failed, the war then kept bossy commissioners at bay. Benign neglect continued. After independence, Botswana’s first president, Seretse Khama, one of the chiefs, behaved like most African leaders in setting out to build a strong state and disenfranchise the chiefs, as well as to win all future elections (so far so good for his party under two successors).


pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Muhammed Tabiu, a Kano lawyer and deputy program manager for a Nigeria-wide access-to-justice project called J4A, sees the movement within the historical context of the region’s desire for shari’a law. “We’ve had shari’a law here historically. But under colonial rule and even afterward, those courts were seen as the courts of the people in power. In 2000 the people wanted ‘our’ shari’a courts. The whole agitation for shari’a was a search for a solution to corruption. You can’t get a fair deal. You have to bribe. The law itself is alien. You can’t get justice. People felt that boko—Western education that traced back to the mechanics of colonial rule—was the way we got to this state of affairs.” Indeed, Western Africanists and residents of countries from Nigeria to South Africa alike deplore what they see as a pattern: that post-independence elites seem to have left much of the structure of colonial-era administration intact, just taking over as beneficiaries of the oppressive and extractive system in positions left vacant by the departed colonizers.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Hobbes was, however, no fan of democracy, arguing that a sovereign was less likely to be corrupt than those with vaunting political ambitions keen to gain the support of the people. Of modern-day political systems, he might have expressed a preference for, say, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, which enjoyed huge increases in living standards over a handful of decades thanks to a strong legal system (a legacy of British colonial rule), a benevolent leader who also happened to be a Cambridge-educated lawyer, and a high level of political stability (helped by restrictions on civil liberties of which Hobbes might well have approved). Hobbes certainly would not have favoured the separation of powers between legislature and executive incorporated within the US Constitution, an outcome that owed a great deal to the writings of John Locke (1632–1704), who, unlike Hobbes, thought a monarch should not be allowed to rule supreme when men (and, presumably, women) were by nature free and equal.

Over the next two decades, large numbers also arrived from the Indian subcontinent, a mixture of Hindus from Gujarat, Sikhs from the East Punjab and Muslims from both Pakistan and modern-day Bangladesh (not that the indigenous British population was very interested in the distinctions between these various groups). And in 1972, thanks to Idi Amin’s brutal racism, over 27,000 East African Asians, whose forebears had arrived in East Africa under nineteenth-century British colonial rule, found sanctuary in the UK. In Amin’s own words, ‘Our deliberate policy is to transfer the economic control of Uganda into the hands of Ugandans, for the first time in our country’s history.’ Still, Amin was not the only politician suspicious of the ‘foreigner’ in his midst. Enoch Powell, in his notorious April 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, argued: For reasons they could not comprehend [the existing UK population] found themselves made strangers in their own country … The Race Relations Bill … is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They gathered careful data on the modern wealth, colonial history, and weather patterns of eighty small islands, and they concluded that the islands that were easy to reach because of the prevailing winds back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are wealthier today. An extra century of colonial rule increased per-capita incomes by 40 percent and reduced infant deaths by 2.6 per hundred births. Needless to say, the wealth brought by colonial rule did not usually benefit the original inhabitants of the colonies. While Australia leapt from being perhaps the poorest place in the world to one of the richest in just a couple of centuries, that impressive record is a little tarnished by the fact that most of the original inhabitants died of smallpox.


Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages by Derek Bickerton

colonial rule, dark matter, European colonialism, experimental subject, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, rent control, Suez crisis 1956

The oddest thing was that one was Afro-Guyanese and the other was Indo-Guyanese. Workers from India were brought to Guyana to cut sugar cane after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, when the Afro­ Guyanese, almost to a man, walked off the plantations and set up as subsistence homesteaders. All through the subsequent years of colonial rule, the British played the two races off against one an­ other. But in the rising tide of anticolonialism that followed World War II, they joined together to demand independence, and for a few years it looked like Guyana might become a haven of inter­ ethnic harmony. But the Brits rallied, worked the divide-and-rule routine they'd mastered over centuries, exploited personal jeal­ ousies between Cheddi Jagan, the Indo leader, and Forbes Burn­ ham, the Afro leader, and in no time brought the country to the brink of an undeclared civil war in which, with British boots back on Guyanese streets, they could pose as the peacemakers.

., 205 Firth, Raymond, 182 folk etymology, 105 Fort Creoles, 146, 147 "for-to" constructions, 224 ' Foundations of Language, 46 France, 7,151,153, 188, 189, 193-94; colonialism, 164, 189-90, 194 Franco, Francisco, 8, 162 Frederick II of Sicily, 241 free variation, 203 French, 10, 12,34-35, 189, 193, 203; Creole, 14,33, 148, 170; Pidgin, 209 French Louisiana, 153 Futunan, 124 Gambia, 12,47 Garifuna, 26 genetic-related hypothesis, 84-88 Genie, 240 Georgia, 153 Germany, 79,94-95; 196,228 Ghana, 3-6, 18,54,62,200 Gibbons, Yutaka, 120-21 Givon, Tom, 114, 115-16, 126, 133, 134 Gnierre, Antonio, 135, 136 Gold Coast, 172 Goodenough, Ward, 128,133-34 Goodman, Morris, 47 Goree, 200 Gould, Stephen jay, 144 grammar, 5,6, 7, 14, 28,40,53,85,113, 126,170,181-82,197,218,225,234; childhood acquisition of, 124-26, 141-43; Guyanese Creole, 19,33-43, 107-10; Hawaiian Creole, 106-10, 113, 227; systemic, 6; transforma­ tional, 6; see also specific grammar and languages Great Britain, 4, 5, 6, 66-71, 73-75, 153; colonialism, 9, 20, 26, 164, 172-76,194 Greece. 241 Guam, 228 Guyana, 9-10,15,17-48,57,63,65, 66,81,181,194; colonial rule, 19, 20; ethnic cleansing, 20-21, 31; society, 18-21,30-32; supernatural, 31 Guyanese Creole, 19-48,57,63-65,66, 93,105,142,148, 156-58, 163,177, 181-82,227; article system, 37, 39; English compared to Guyanese, 33­ 44, 156-58; grammar, 19, 33-43, 107-10; Hawaiian Creole compared to, 105-10; TMA system, 41-43, 47, 48,67,68,82-84, 182; variation, 33-44,47; vocabulary, 33-36 Haiti, 57,164,182,190 Haitian Creole, 14,34,40,57,139,148, 155-56,190 263 Hall, Robert, Jr., 12 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 158 Hammer, Barbara, 131 Hancock, Ian, 68-69, 76, 108 haole, 79,80,81,82,219 hapa-haole, 81, 209 Hawaii, 14,65,71-72,75-76,77-114, 115-16,132,140,188.207;annexed by the U.S., 79-80, 219; children, 101-104,106-10,219-20,223-29; court records, 2l4-15, English in early years of, 213-23; haoles, 79-80, 81,82,219; history oflanguage in, 80-81, 209-11; justice system, 214; leprosy, 211; literacy, 210, 227; monarchy, 79, 80; pidgin, 209-25; pidgin to Creole in, 97-114, 125, 141; sociery, 78-80, 82, 101-107, 209-12,226-29; statehood, 82,105; sugar, 79,100,209,214,218,221, 222,227; supernatural, 31, 90-91; tourism, 78 Hawaiian Creole, 81-114,123, l41, 162, 166,182,190,219-29; article system, 83,212; children and, 101-104, 106­ 10,114,219-20,223-29; diffusion and, 220-22; grammar, 106-10, 113, 227; Guyanese Creole compared to, 105-10; pidgin interface, 97-1l4, 125, 141; Saramaccan compared to, 170; TMA system, 82-84, 107 Hawaii Sugar Producers Association, 100 Hebrew, 242 Helmreich, Bob, 128 Holm, John, 85 home sign, 232, 234 homesteading, 153, 160, 172 Honolulu, 80, 83, 105, 215, 219, 222 lIocano,91 imbecile jargons, 14-15 264 \ r I. !


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

I suppose you could call my last decade a “coming out”—coming out against the killings and brazen abuses of power, coming out against technology’s dark side, coming out and owning my political views and my sexuality. I was born on October 2, 1963, in a wooden house in Pasay City, Manila, in the Philippines, a sprawling archipelago of disparate languages and cultures united by the Catholic Church. A feudal society, it was dominated by oligarchs who had been given their lands during centuries of Spanish colonial rule. After the Spanish-American War ended in 1898, Spain gave the Philippines to the United States under the Treaty of Paris. A year later, Filipinos say the Philippine-American War began, long a footnote in US history books, which referred to it as “the insurrection.”1 It was a time of “manifest destiny” in the United States.

Rudyard Kipling published his famous imperialist poem “The White Man’s Burden” to encourage the Americans to govern the Philippines in 1899. They did until 1935, when the Philippines became a self-governing commonwealth. Its Constitution, which had to be approved by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a virtual rewrite of the US Constitution. The joke about colonial rule is that the Philippines spent three hundred years in a convent and fifty years in Hollywood. In 1964, my father, twenty-year-old Manuel Phil Aycardo, died in a car accident when I was a year old and my mother, Hermelina, was pregnant with my sister, Mary Jane. My mom took us away from my father’s family, and my sister and I lived in a half-built home with my mother and my great-grandmother, who reeked of alcohol but took care of us.


pages: 86 words: 26,489

This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore

Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, desegregation, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, immigration reform, liberal world order, mass immigration, Steve Bannon

Neither will we go with you on a wild and reckless adventure which we know will lead us only to a total ruin.” This form of nationalism was largely ignored by American historians. So were other forms. Even as nationalism was on the rise in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in nations that declared their independence after decades of colonial rule, scholars in Europe and the United States generally turned a blind eye. “The neglect of nationalism within the academy after 1945 is easily explained,” as one scholar later observed. “Nationalism was blamed for the onset of war in 1939.” Nationalism and After was the title of the English historian E.


pages: 1,014 words: 237,531

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Thus Hoffman 2015, esp. 7–15 for a summary (quote: 7). Sharman 2019 disagrees. Outgrowth: Mann 2006: 380–83 (quote: 383). 81. Global share: Hoffman 2015: 2n4; see also Etemad 2007: 119–87 for quantitative analysis of the evolution of territory and population under colonial rule. For 1938 (42 percent of territory and 32 percent of population under colonial rule), see Etemad 2007: 123, table 7.1. 1760–1830: Etemad 2007: 125, table 7.2. 82. See, e.g., Darwin 2008; S. Dale 2010; Stanziani 2012. 83. Hoffman 2015: 69–81 (China) (see also I. Morris 2014: 176), 81–85 (Japan), 85–89 (India), 89–94 (Ottomans and Russia). 84.

Smaller regions in other parts of the world add little of substance to this picture. Polities in the Pre-Columbian New World operated on a much smaller demographic scale. In Mesoamerica, uncertainties surround the political reach of Teotihuacan and the nature of the Toltec polity. In the end, the eventual ascent of the Aztec empire and subsequent universal Spanish colonial rule across Central America snuffed out any semblance of polycentrism for hundreds of years. In the Andean region, the extent of Tiwanaku and Wari rule in the second half of the first millennium remains unclear. A period of fragmentation in the early second millennium preceded the rise of the Inka empire that captured what must have been a very large share of the total population of western South America until it too was absorbed into the global Spanish colonial empire.

On the continent, the Angkorian Khmer empire occupied a dominant position from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, followed by several coexisting major powers (Ayutthaya, Khmer and Lan Xang), short-lived Taungoo Burmese expansion in the late sixteenth century, more intense fragmentation in the eighteenth century, and dominance by the Rattanakosin kingdom of Siam around 1800. In Malaya and Indonesia, the Srivijaya empire exercised hegemony from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries, succeeded on the islands by the Singhasari empire of the thirteenth century and the Majapahit empire of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Dutch colonial rule eventually took over in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet anything resembling hegemonic empire was always conspicuously absent from this region. Even during the most noteworthy peaks, demographic imperial dominance remained rather limited: perhaps one-third of the region’s population under Angkor and Rattanakosin, and less for other imperial ventures.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

This global utopian vein in Marx is nonetheless ambiguous, perhaps even more so than in the other two cases, as we can see clearly from the series of articles he wrote for the New York Daily T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y 119 Tribune in 1853 on British rule in India. Marx’s primary goal in these articles was to explain the debate going on at the time in the British Parliament over the status ofthe East India Company and situate the debate in the history ofBritish colonial rule. Marx is of course quick to note the brutality ofthe introduction ofBritish ‘‘civilization’’ into India and the havoc and suffering wrought by the rapacious greed ofBritish capital and the British government. He immediately warns, however, in terms that bring us right back to the revolutionary face of the Renaissance, against simply reacting to the barbarity ofthe British by supporting blindly the status quo ofIndian society.

Important segments ofthe discipline ofhistory were also deeply embedded in the scholarly and popular production ofalterity, and thus also in the legitimation ofcolonial rule. For example, upon arriving in India and finding no historiography they could use, British administrators had to write their own ‘‘Indian history’’ to sustain and further the interests of colonial rule. The British had to historicize the Indian past in order to have access to it and put it to work. This British creation ofan Indian history, however, like the formation of the colonial state, could be achieved only by imposing European colonial logics and models on Indian reality.24 India’s past was thus annexed so as to become merely a portion of British history—or rather, British scholars and administrators created an Indian history and exported it to India.

Once we recognize postmodernist discourses as an attack on the dialectical form of modern sovereignty, then we can see more clearly how they contest systems ofdomination such as racism and sexism by deconstructing the boundaries that maintain the S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E 141 hierarchies between white and black, masculine and feminine, and so forth. This is how postmodernists can conceive their theoretical practice as heir to an entire spectrum ofmodern and contemporary liberation struggles. The history ofchallenges to European political- economic hegemony and its colonial rule, the successes ofnational liberation movements, women’s movements, and antiracist strug- gles, are all interpreted as the heritage ofpostmodernist politics because they, too, aim at disrupting the order and the dualisms of modern sovereignty. Ifthe modern is the field ofpower ofthe white, the male, and the European, then in perfectly symmetrical fashion the postmodern will be the field of liberation of the non- white, the non-male, and the non-European.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

No details about Razzle exist in the declassified archives; it was discussed only orally by the few in the know. One Treasury official, however, jotted down just four tantalizing words in pencil next to a fleeting mention: ‘Yemen. Imam Dying. Friends’.40 ‘Friends’ likely refers to SIS involvement and Britain would certainly have wanted rid of the troublesome Imam Ahmad. He had long opposed colonial rule in Aden and, in addition to authorizing trade deals with the Soviets, by 1956 had signed a defensive pact with Nasser’s Egypt. Perhaps there were plans to rig the system and ensure a more amenable successor. But whatever the mysterious Razzle entailed, Ahmad did not die until 1962, despite suffering regular bouts of ill health.

It spawned an unhappy period of drift for Britain’s covert action planners. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 8 Decolonization and Drift The Battle for Influence after Empire From my point of view there is no doctrinal objection to the use of clandestine and covert activities. Alan Lennox-Boyd, 1955 1 B ritain’s colonial rule was built on information management and it is no exaggeration to describe the British Empire as an ‘empire of intelligence.’2 Swathes of information, gathered as part of the process of colonial governance, were vital to allow a few administrators to govern vast territories such as India. Intelligence in the colonies had developed differently from intelligence in Whitehall: it remained more informal, less glamorous, part of the quotidian administration.

The third, Operation Alismah, somehow involved the nationalist political and religious leader Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi. However, in what appears to be another case of Britain hiding behind someone else—likely Israel—to maximize deniability, the plan merely involved SIS giving a guarantee of up to £250,000 while hoping not actually to spend anything.37 Al-Mahdi had long been a thorn in the side of colonial rule but was seen as the lesser evil after a Nasserite People’s Democratic Party established itself in 1956. Details of the covert action are sparse, but the Umma Party, of which al-Mahdi was a leading figure, won the most seats in the 1958 elections. In November, a military coup overthrew the civilian government OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi T h e Bat t le for I n f lu e nce a f t e r E m pi r e147 altogether.


Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Airbnb, anti-communist, Atahualpa, bike sharing, call centre, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, digital nomad, Easter island, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, invention of writing, Kickstarter, land reform, urban planning, urban renewal

The Andes are home to communities that have preserved traditions for centuries, while life in the huge metropolises of Brazil and Argentina is so energetic it will leave you breathless. The countries of South America share a common history – thousands of years of Indigenous cultures broken by European intrusion over 500 years ago; colonial rule followed by bitter wars of independence; then an unsteady progress at the fringe of world events – yet each country retains its own character. On the north coast are Colombia, Venezuela, and the Guianas, divided between rugged mountains, Caribbean coastline, and Amazon rainforest. Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador form the Andean heartland.

Getty Images INTO THE 21ST CENTURY The republics of South America have trodden a rocky road to stability, failing to prosper despite – or because of – natural wealth. Opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock Much of Latin America has just turned the page on bicentennial independence celebrations, but it took until 1827 for Portuguese and Spanish colonial rule to end. Years of war took their toll on local economies. Black people and mestizos, lured into the fight with promises of freedom, soon saw these hopes dashed as, for the most part, the same wealthy families and military leaders refused to relinquish power. Except for Brazil, ruled by Dom Pedro – crown prince and later king of Portugal – most countries descended into virtual anarchy as disputes over the spoils arose among the victors.

Columbia is a country where myth and modernity mingle to produce a vast diversity of cultures. This is where the legend of El Dorado and the lure of untold riches caught the imagination of the Spanish conquistadors. Miners still pursue this dream, now in search of emeralds as well as gold. Although the society is contemporary and outward-looking on the surface, the legacy of Spanish colonial rule remains here for all to see, as are the remnants of some of the great pre-Columbian civilizations. Geographically, Colombia is the fourth-largest country in South America, and is unique in having lengthy Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Three cordilleras (mountain ranges) stretch north from the southern border with Ecuador to meet the lowland plains of the Caribbean.


The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

These tanks were an important component of rain-fed agriculture systems and provided a reservoir that helped mitigate the effects of flooding and sustain agriculture and drinking-water needs throughout the dry season by capturing rainwater. The Vayalagams were groups of community leaders who managed the distribution of water resources to maximize resources and sustainability, and to ensure that the whole community participated in, and benefited from, the appropriate maintenance of the tanks. Under British colonial rule, and later under the independent Indian government, Agricultural Innovation Systems 109 irrigation systems became centralized, and communities were no longer encouraged to use the tanks, so both the physical structures and the organizations that managed them fell into disrepair. As the tank-fed systems fell apart and agricultural systems changed, rural communities began to suffer from the lack of sufficient water to grow crops.

See also education: clusters and, 106, 114; economicagricultural linkages and, 20, 146, 152; entrepreneurship and, 208–9; future and, 253; gender and, 148; infrastructure and, 118; innovation and, xvii, 114, 146–47, 234 Index hunger: data on Africa’s levels of, 14; economicagricultural linkages and, 12, 14–15, 132; Einstein on, xv; food processing as means of addressing, 217; free trade as a means of addressing, 247; Green Revolution and, 68; policy challenges presented by, xv–xvi, 27; Strategy for Africa 2024 (STISA-2024) and, 224 Hyundai Rotem, 140 iCow (mobile technology platform), 203–4 ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the SemiArid Tropics), 161, 164 IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority for Development), 133 IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture), 88–90, 199 Illumina, 81 Imperial Bakeries, 201 Improved Management of Agriculture Water in Eastern and Southern Africa (organization), 133 incomes: biotechnology and, 68, 79; economic-agricultural linkages and, xx, 1, 12, 14–15, 17, 23; education and, 147, 151, 224; entrepreneurship and, 132, 189–90, 192, 207, 214, 216–17; growth in Africa’s overall, 22, 26; infrastructure and, 118, 120, 129 independent power projects (IPPs), 125–27 India: brinjal production in, 71–72; cotton production in, 65, 69–70; diaspora population from, 311 240; drought-resistant crops in, 74; e-Choupal system in, 133–34; entrepreneurship in, 191–94, 210; geographic information systems (GIS) programs and, 52; Green Revolution in, 13, 192; immigration policy in, 244; infrastructure in, 129, 131, 134–35, 143–44; innovation and, 233, 240; irrigation in, 130–31; National Innovation Council in, 210, 230; National Knowledge Commission in, 240; rice production in, 75; state seed corporations in, 192–94; sugarcane cultivation in, 130; technology and, 134–35, 242; transgenic crops in, 65, 69–72, 74–75; Vayalagam system of, 108–9 Indian Seed Act (1966), 192 Indonesia, 74 infrastructure: climate change and, 257; clusters and, 95, 105, 107, 114; definition of, xxii, 117; economic-agricultural linkages and, 17, 19–20, 79, 118; education and, 118–19, 145, 147, 158, 167, 177, 179, 182; energy and, 6, 42, 118, 123–28, 134, 141, 143–45; entrepreneurship and, 11, 190, 197, 207–8, 217; future and, 253, 255, 257–63; innovation and, xx–xxii, 111–12, 117–20, 129–45, 220–22, 224, 228–31, 234, 237, 241, 246–47, 251; investments and, xvii, 10, 19–20, 27, 30, 32–33, 41–42, 111–12, 118–20, 123, 128–29, 132–45, 261; rural deficiencies regarding, 29–30; “social infrastructure” and, 49; social service delivery and, 121; technology and, 134–41; value chains and, 26 312 Index Ingredion, 7 innovation and innovation systems: African diasporas and, 239–42; biotechnology and, xviii, 23, 41, 63–70, 190, 239, 242–43, 251; clusters and, xxi, 94–116; for cocoa, 4–5, 92–94; definition of, xxi; economic-agricultural linkages and, xxi, 37, 45, 49, 83–84; education and, xxii, 10, 20, 87, 91, 94–95, 151, 160–61, 163, 165–69, 173–80, 182, 224, 229, 231, 234, 236–38, 241, 258; entrepreneurship and, xxii–xxiii, 4, 10–11, 37, 99, 101–2, 185–86, 198–202, 204, 206, 223–24, 243, 259–62; “farm firms” and, 86; food security and, 132, 221, 224, 251; fostering culture of, xvi–xix, xxi, xxiii; future and, 265–66; governance of, xvii, xix, 84, 90, 96, 101, 219, 221, 224, 231, 237, 243; infrastructure and, xx–xxii, 111–12, 117–20, 129–45, 220–22, 224, 228–31, 234, 237, 241, 246–47, 251; intellectual property rights and, 246; investment and, 4, 7–8, 23, 26, 30, 85, 93–94, 119, 221, 228, 232, 235–40; knowledge and, xviii, xx–xxi, 20, 28, 43, 84–86, 90–91, 94, 96, 102, 144, 219, 225–26, 234–35, 238, 240–41, 243–44, 246, 255–58, 260–63, 265; latecomer advantages and, 40–45, 48–49; leadership and, xvi, xix, 8–10, 38, 218, 220, 222, 226–27, 232–33, 237, 240–41, 245, 251; mechanization of agriculture and, 25; prizes for, 231–32, 238–39; regulation and, 248–50; research and, 26–27, 41, 44–46, 55, 83–90, 92–93, 102–4, 110–13, 219, 224–25, 227, 229, 232, 234–37, 239–40, 243, 252; sustainability and, 83; technology and, xvii–xxi, 6, 19, 26, 33, 37, 39–40, 43–47, 52, 55–57, 74–75, 84, 86, 89–90, 98–99, 101, 219–20, 222–33, 228, 235–36, 238–39, 242–46, 248–51, 254–59, 264 insecticides, 53, 55, 65, 67–72, 74, 77, 108 insect-resistant (IR) agricultural crops, 65–67, 69–70, 72, 75 Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD), 133 International Centre for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT), 58, 75 International Civil Aviation Organization, 122 International Crops Research Institute for the Semi- Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), 161, 164 International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), 88–90, 199 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 9 International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), 58, 75 International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, 59 International Water Management Institute, 133 Internet: business and, 50; education and, 179, 261; entrepreneurship and, 186; innovation and, 59, 96, 179; open access movement and, 59; penetration by and access to, 50–51, 134, 186, 203, 261; research and, 50, 179 investments: clusters and, 107; community development funds and, 32; developed world’s declining levels of, 80; Index economic-agricultural linkages and, 8, 15, 18–19, 30; education and, 162, 179; in energy, 43; entrepreneurship and, 191, 194; foreign direct (FDI), 30–31, 187; future and, 261; government initiatives to attract, 28–31, 34; infrastructure and, xvii, 10, 19–20, 27, 30, 32–33, 41–42, 111–12, 118–20, 123, 128–29, 132–45, 261; innovation and, 4, 7–8, 23, 26, 30, 85, 93–94, 119, 221, 228, 232, 235–40; land tenure rules and, 31; in research, 44–45, 85; returns on, 93; technology and, 54, 85, 111, 113 IPPs (independent power projects), 125–27 Ireland, 9, 89 irrigation: Africa’s levels in international context, 15, 19–21, 131; Africa’s potential and, xvi, 20; colonial rule in India and, 109; economic-agricultural linkages and, 10, 14, 16, 100; entrepreneurship and, 191; infrastructure and, 10, 27, 30, 42, 119, 128–35, 141–43, 145; innovations in, 68, 102, 128–32, 163, 167; investments in, 131, 261; yields improved by, 45 Israel, 181, 208 Italy, 102 ITC (Indian company), 134–35 Japan, 66, 244 John Innes Centre (UK), 73 Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), 57–58 Jonathan, Goodluck, 2, 6–7, 10, 199 Junior Farmer’s Field School (South Africa), 159 313 Kamano Seeds, 194 Kampala (Uganda), 121 Kenya: aquaculture in, 24; banana crops in, 71; breadfruit trees in, 213; CAADP and, 28; cassava crops in, 79; climate change and, 36; coffee production in, 174; COMESA research laboratory in, 210; droughtresistant crops in, 65–66, 74; education in, 175, 194, 238; Electricity Regulatory Board in, 127; entrepreneurship in, 194, 196–97; export-led agricultural innovation in, 120; fertilizer use in, 16; fruit exports from, 197; gender inequality in, 149; independent power projects (IPPs) in, 126–27; infrastructure of, 120–21; innovation and, 120; land tenure system in, 31; maize crops in, 75; Ministry of Industrialization in, 57; mobile phones in, 49, 203; national academy of science and technology in, 230; One Acre Fund in, 205–6; Power Africa initiative in, 127; risk insurance in, 37; school gardens in, 157; smallholders in, 184–85, 194; tax-supported research institutes in, 236; technology and, 49, 136, 203, 238; Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) program and, 75; weather stations in, 136 Kenya Multimedia University, 238 Kigali (Rwanda), 121 Kikwete, Jakaya, 2 King’s College Hospital (London), 241 Kisumu (Kenya), 121 314 Index knowledge: clusters and, 96, 100, 105–8, 114–16; economicagricultural linkages and, 37, 39, 42; education and, 147, 156, 165, 169, 171, 173–74, 176, 179, 258; entrepreneurship and, xvii, 183, 185–86, 201, 203, 215, 260–61; future and, 262–63, 265; Green Revolution and, xx, 39; human capacity and, 40; indigenous forms of, 39, 107–9; infrastructure and, 117, 128, 138, 257; innovation and, xviii, xx–xxi, 20, 28, 43, 84–86, 90–91, 94, 96, 102, 144, 219, 225–26, 234–35, 238, 240–41, 243–44, 246, 255–58, 260–63, 265; prospecting and, 185–86; rate of growth of, 40, 44; sustainability and, xxii, 43, 83, 117; technology and, 40–41, 43–44, 46–47, 50, 54, 59, 257, 262 Korea, South, 45, 67, 136–41, 244 Korean High-Speed Rail Construction Authority (KHRC), 139–40 Korean Train Express (KTX), 136–40 Korea Railroad Research Institute (KRRI), 141 Kotler, Steven, 40 Lake Victoria region, 136 La Molina (national agricultural university of Peru), 180–82 land policy and land records, 31–32 Latin America.


Powers and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deskilling, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, language acquisition, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, theory of mind, Tobin tax, Turing test

One of the leading historians of Africa, Basil Davidson, observes that modernising reforms in West Africa’s Fanti Confederation and Asante kingdom were similar to those implemented by Japan at the same time, and indeed were seen in that light by African commentators and historians, one of whom wrote bitterly a few years later that ‘The same laudable object was before them both, [but] the African’s attempt was ruthlessly crushed and his plans frustrated’ by British force. Davidson’s own view is that the potential ‘was in substance no different from the potential realised by the Japanese after 1867’. But West Africa joins Egypt and India, not Japan and the United States, which were able to pursue an independent path, free from colonial rule and the strictures of economic rationality.9 By the 1920s, England could not compete with more efficient Japanese industry. It therefore called the game off, returning to the practices that allowed it to develop in the first place. The empire was effectively closed to Japanese trade; Dutch and Americans followed suit.

For most of the world, ‘complementary development’ was the most that could be allowed; there are interesting exceptions in the region of Japanese influence, where the two major former Japanese colonies, largely under the stimulus of Vietnam War ‘military Keynesianism’, were able to renew the rapid economic development that had taken place under the harsh colonial rule of Japan, which, unlike the West, developed its colonies. From the outset, the US was on a collision course with Third World nationalism, one of the major themes of postwar history, generally concealed in a Cold War framework. The Western hemisphere and the world’s major energy resources of the Middle East were assigned to the global ruler itself.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

But what did the rising powers of Asia think? 14 THE OPTIMISTIC EAST KISHORE MAHBUBANI AND THE ASIAN CENTURY On the night of June 30, 1997, the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong was packed. The crowd had gathered to watch television coverage of the ceremonies marking the end of British colonial rule over Hong Kong and its return to China. The people at the bar were journalists, they were Westerners, and they were drunk—so the mood was raucous and irreverent. The official ceremonies, with their anthems, flags and somber-looking officials, were greeted with jeers and laughter. Suddenly, from behind the bar, there was a shout: “Shut up, all of you!”

The forced ceding of the territory to Britain after the Opium Wars was one of the more humiliating moments of China’s “century of humiliation.” Margaret Thatcher, who handled the negotiations with the Chinese during the 1980s, found it hard to believe that it was really necessary to hand over Hong Kong, which she regarded as a temple of free-market capitalism and a tribute to the wisdom of British colonial rule. Again and again, British officials had to explain to Thatcher that, in a phrase that she herself made famous in another context, “there is no alternative.” International law, power politics, and time were all on China’s side. The Chinese side played their hand with skill, patience, and determination.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

In 1773 another riot, against the importation of cheap tea, became the ‘Boston Tea Party’, an impromptu protest with a long afterlife. Britain was now at war throughout New England. With many misgivings, all the colonies rallied in support of Massachusetts. The next year, 1774, the first American Congress met in Philadelphia. American nationalism was building from a mood of sullen opposition to colonial rule towards a convulsion of revolutionary fury. If there was to be a storm, there first had to be a lightning strike. This necessary explosion was ignited by a little book, attributed to an unnamed ‘Englishman’, and published by Robert Bell from a print shop on Third Street, Philadelphia, on 9 January 1776.

Privately, Harris was serious about his representation of slave culture, and paid tribute to the rich tradition of speech and narrative he was trying to preserve: ‘If the language of Uncle Remus fails to give vivid hints of the really poetic imagination of the Negro’, Harris wrote, then he would have failed to capture its essence. 6 The half-century between the American Civil War and the First World War saw two contrasting, but equally humiliating, sets of experience for black people in the English-speaking world. In Africa, Britain became engaged on an imperial competition, the ‘scramble for Africa’, with rival European powers that saw the whole continent subjugated to colonial rule. In America, meanwhile, the slaves, finally liberated in December 1865, found themselves catapulted from servitude to legal equality and then reduced to a state almost as degrading as slavery. Four million African-Americans were freed at the end of the Civil War, and an old English legal phrase, ‘civil rights’, entered the American lexicon for the first time.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

In 1946, India was on the verge of achieving independence from Britain. But within the Indian National Congress, celebrations were tempered by an awareness of the monumental task of nation building that lay ahead. The country’s public health needs were particularly urgent: nearly 400 million Indians lived in extreme poverty, and two centuries of export-oriented colonial rule had left the country with little health or industrial infrastructure. The poor country was starting from scratch. A year before the official declaration of independence, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru sent a team of scientists on a tour of European and North American pharmaceutical plants. They returned with a plan for the domestic manufacturing of essential drugs and medicines, beginning with antibiotics, antimalarials, and sulfa drugs.

Not just any products, but “wonder drugs” like penicillin and streptomycin that seemed to fall from the robes of Jesus Christ himself, spoonful cures for tuberculosis and infections that once meant certain death. The biggest and most ambitious of the U.S. firms developed expansion plans to conquer a world newly populated by nations emerging from colonial rule. It didn’t matter that U.S. patents had no legal standing in these countries. They would buy American drugs because they had to. And most had just enough wealth—concentrated in a middle or “creamy” class—to make it worth the trouble. Then, in the late 1940s, the American Century took a troubling turn.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Imperialism had not only imposed inapposite ideologies and institutions upon societies that had developed, over centuries, their own political units and social structures; it had also deprived many of them of the resources to pursue Western-style economic development. Despite, or because of, this disadvantage, the explicitly defined aim of Asia and Africa’s first nationalist icons (Atatürk, Nehru, Mao, Sukarno, Nasser and Nkrumah) was ‘catch-up’ with the West. Immense problems – partly the consequence of colonial rule – confronted these many catch-up modernizations soon after independence. The antagonisms and alliances of the Cold War aggravated them further. Left-wing regimes across Asia, Africa and Latin America were embargoed or overthrown by the representatives of the free world; explicitly communist movements, as in Indonesia and Egypt, were brutally suppressed by their local allies.

A few months later this same young man by the name of Mohammed Atta was told that he been chosen to lead a mission to destroy America’s most famous skyscrapers. * * * ‘Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,’ Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the confused inheritance of Mexico from colonial rule, and the failure of its many political and socio-economic programmes, derived from Enlightenment principles of secularism and reason. Paz himself was convinced that Mexico had to forge a modern politics and economy for itself. But, writing in the late 1940s, he found himself commending the ‘traditionalism’ of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.


pages: 392 words: 106,532

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

But in 1905, Japan, a rising non-European power, won a war it had started with Russia, one of the weakest of the European empires: that victory shattered the illusion that the Europeans, if challenged, would always win. The Europeans themselves then shattered another illusion—that of unity among themselves—by going to war in 1914. World War I, in turn, produced two compelling justifications for an end to colonial rule. One came out of the Bolshevik Revolution, when Lenin called for an end to “imperialism” in all its forms. The other came from the United States. When Woodrow Wilson made the principle of self-determination one of his Fourteen Points his intent had been to undercut the appeal of Bolshevism, but the effect was to excite opponents of imperialism throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The old dictator knew little about the “third world,” however, and undertook no sustained effort to project Soviet influence into it. Khrushchev was more energetic: unlike Stalin, he loved to travel abroad and rarely missed a chance to do so. Among his favored destinations were the newly independent countries that were emerging from European colonial rule. “I’m not an adventurer,” Khrushchev explained, “but we must aid national liberation movements.”6 The Americans feared precisely this. Colonialism, they believed, was an antiquated institution that could only discredit the West in the regions where it had existed, while weakening its practitioners in Europe, where they needed to be strong.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

At the time, Britain accounted for 20 per cent of world manufacturing output (as of 1860) and 46 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods (as of 1870), despite having only 2.5 per cent of the world population; these numbers can be put into perspective by noting that the corresponding figures for China today are 15 per cent and 14 per cent, despite its having 19 per cent of the world population. The US as the champion of protectionism The US case is yet more interesting. Under British colonial rule, its development of manufacturing was deliberately suppressed. It is reported that, upon hearing about the first attempts by the American colonists to engage in manufacturing, William Pitt the Elder, the British prime minister (1766–8), said that they should ‘not be permitted to manufacture so much as a horseshoe nail’.

Between the 1820s and the 1850s, a string of other countries were forced to sign them – the Ottoman Empire (Turkey’s predecessor), Persia (Iran today) and Siam (today’s Thailand), and even Japan. The Latin American unequal treaties expired in the 1870s and the 1880s, but the Asian ones lasted well into the twentieth century. The inability to protect and promote their infant industries, whether due to direct colonial rule or to unequal treaties, was a huge contributing factor to the economic retrogression in Asia and Latin America during this period, when they saw negative per capita income growths (at the rates of -0.1 and -0.04 per cent per year, respectively). 1870–1913: High Noon Capitalism gets into a higher gear: the rise of mass production The development of capitalism began to accelerate around 1870.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Arif Naqvi, 278 Grazer, Brian, 136 Guenez, Ghizlan, 36, 157, 193–94, 265 Gülen, Fethullah, 121 Guterres, Antonio, 222 Hamdan, Lawrence Abu, 248 Hameed, Asim, 285 Hamid, Wahid, 12, 81–82, 150, 172–73, 208, 213, 263–64 Hamilton Lane, 136–37, 151–52, 207, 213, 223, 242, 257, 289, 291 Hanadi bint Nasser Al Thani, Sheikha, 159 Hasan, Khaldoun Haj, 35–37 Hawaii Employees’ Retirement System, 213 Hepsiburada, 189 Hilal, Badruddin, 225–26 Hilton Hotels, 23 Hirsch, Erik, 137, 151, 207, 289 Hoffman, Reid, 101 Hohn, Chris, 216 Houlihan Lokey, 254 HSBC, 142, 285 Human Genome Project, 163 Hussein (king of Jordan), 78, 110 Hussein, Saddam, 25, 35 Husseini, Fayez, 77–78 Hydari, Imtiaz (partner), 16, 18–19, 27, 29, 31, 34, 51 impact investing Catholic Church and, 148–49 Kito de Boer on, 203, 236 development finance institutions and, 92–93 Bill Gates and, 216–17 as movement, 88–89, 90, 91 Arif Naqvi as impact investor, 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 91–93, 99–100, 172 Arif Naqvi’s speeches on, 92, 99, 134–35, 161, 191–92, 221–22 Palestine and, 198 Vatican conference on, 89–90, 91, 243 Inchcape, 18–19, 22, 23, 32, 124 India Abraaj Group’s acquisitions in, 74 Abraaj investments in, 174 British colonial rule of, 11, 24 demographics of, 202 economic expansion of, 139 Haveli mansions of, 51 population boom of, 45 relations with Pakistan, 47–48 inequality, 86–88, 294 Institutional Investor, 50 Integrated Diagnostics Holdings (IDH), 143–44, 152 International Finance Corp. (IFC), 95, 150, 161, 167–69, 176–78, 182, 226–28 Interpol Foundation, 142, 251, 271, 277, 278 investment capital.

(OPIC), 72–73, 76–77, 92, 98, 182, 224, 288–89 Oxfam, 168 Pakistan. See also Karachi Electric Abraaj Group’s acquisitions in, 74, 118 Abraaj Group’s attempts to bribe prime minister of, 6, 152, 154, 254 Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund in, 182, 190 academic debates on future of, 84 British colonial rule of, 9–11, 20, 24, 59 corrupt elite of, 53 failing economy of, 61–62 family-planning program in, 171 Federal Investigation Agency, 267–68 government policy in, 219 Haveli mansions of, 51 in hierarchy of Middle East nationalities, 27 income tax in, 293 Kashmir region and, 24 Arif Naqvi’s childhood and youth in Karachi, 3, 9–13, 43, 65, 108 Arif Naqvi’s knowledge of, 91 Arif Naqvi’s properties in, 110 national debt of, 58 political violence in, 58–59 population boom of, 45 relations with India, 47–48 removal of Nawaz Sharif, 209 social class in, 11–12 status of Pakistani passports, 108 U.S.


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

It was also completely and fundamentally exploitative, often violent, and, well, racist, favoring white settlers, landowners, and foreign entrepreneurs in every possible way. Kenya existed to make white people from far away rich. “But, in 1963, Kenya won its independence, and elected its first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and since that time, has fought an uphill battle to shake the last vestiges of colonial rule while hanging on to what worked. Things are, by most accounts, going well. Today’s Kenya is phenomenally beautiful. There is a growing middle class, a highly rated educational system, and an enthusiastic and multilingual professional sector.” ARRIVAL AND GETTING AROUND * * * Arriving in Nairobi, you’ll fly into Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (NBO), originally called Embakasi for the suburb in which it’s located, but renamed in 1978 for Kenya’s first president and prime minister.

Newly constructed hotels are largely empty, and outside tightly designated zones, visiting remains a dangerous and, in some cases, expressly forbidden proposition. Consult the advice of the US State Department, or the advice of your country’s embassy or mission, before planning travel. THREE CLASSICS IN YANGON * * * Tony’s preferred place to stay was the Strand, a relic of British colonial rule, built in 1901. Much like its grand counterparts in Singapore, Phnom Penh, Saigon, and Bangkok, the Strand has seen decades of high grandeur and extreme neglect. After a 2016 renovation, it’s currently operating in the former camp. THE STRAND: 92 Strand Road, Yangon, Tel +95 243 377, www.hotelthestrand.com (rooms start at about 500,000 kyat/US$300 per night) “Of course, morning in Yangon has always been about tea.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

The proposed American taxes and duties on sugar, official documents, and imported goods, including tea, comprised the sort of indirect taxation that the British had become used to. To the colonists, however, they came as a shock, partly because internal taxation was light, and partly because after years of benign neglect, London’s demands were a reminder of the realities of colonial rule. But the Americans’ explosive reaction when the 1765 Stamp Act was introduced pointed to the change of outlook that had taken place in the new, young generation of colonists. As poor, undermanned settlements, the colonies had had no choice but to accept London’s rule—the restrictions on what could be manufactured, from hats to pig iron, the prohibition on New England shippers selling cod to French sugar planters, the duties on Virginian tobacco, and the impressment, or forcible enlistment, of sailors from American vessels; but in the previous thirty years they had grown into wealthy, populous societies that resented and resisted affronts by an outside power.

Nevertheless, in a country that was primarily divided between the basin of the Mekong River in the south, source of most of the region’s rice, and the immense rubber plantations and mountainous, untouched forest in the north, the disparity of ownership was so gross that even Diem had promised land reform when he took power in 1954 following the collapse of French colonial rule. One in three of South Vietnam’s seven million peasants owned no land at all and most of the remainder worked plots of less than three acres that they did not own, while more than half the cultivated land belonged to an elite 3 percent of landlords with holdings that extended to thousands of acres containing several villages, each with twenty or thirty families paying as much as 60 percent of the value of their crops to rent the land.

Like many Islamic desert societies, ownership evolved a communal pattern, with tribes claiming use of particular areas and controlling access to unirrigated pasture and reserve land, while specific parcels of land, measuring around three acres, were recognized as belonging to individual families though liable to redistribution by village elders according to need and to rank. Under French colonial rule, ownership of the water, without which the land was useless, was vested in a shadowy government body, the Office du Niger. In 2009, however, this traditional shape was upset by forces from outside. The first of the outside elements was a sovereign fund from Colonel Muammur Gaddafi’s Libya that leased the water rights to a quarter of a million acres from the Office du Niger.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

A different but equally striking combination of ultramodern and early modern traits is present in the quasi-states on which Robert Jackson has focused his attention: In Third World regions such as Africa and South Asia, a student of Western history cannot help noticing apparent disjunctions between the existence of Western-looking twentieth-century armies, on the one hand, and the prevalence of military politics reminiscent of the Renaissance, between the apparatus of representative government and the arbitrary use of state power against citizens, between the installation of apparently conventional bureaucracies and the widespread use of governmental organization for individual gain. These disjunctions are more visible in states that have recently escaped from colonial rule than in the rest of the Third World. (Tilly 1990: 204) The resurgence of early modern forms of military politics in an ultraor post-modern world is not confined to Third World regions that have recently shaken off colonial rule. Well before the Second World of Communist regimes disintegrated into a host of ethno-nations actually or potentially at war with one another, a RAND report stressed the tendency for warfare to revert to early modern patterns: With continuous, sporadic armed conflict, blurred in time and space, waged on several levels by a large array of national and subnational forces, warfare in the last quarter of the twentieth century may well come to resemble warfare in the Italian Renaissance or warfare in the early seventeenth century, before 80 THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY the emergence of national armies and more organized modern warfare.

While the zone of amity and civilized behavior was extended to include the newly independent settler states of the Americas, and the right of Western nations to pursue wealth was elevated above the absolute rights of government of their rulers, non-Western peoples were deprived both in principle and in practice of the most elementary rights to self-determination through despotic colonial rule and the invention of appropriate ideologies, such as “Orientalism” (cf. Said 1978). At the same time, the nations that had become the constituent units of THE THREE I-IEGEMONIES OF HISTORICAL CAPITALISM 65 the interstate system under British hegemony were as a rule communities ofproperty-holders from which the propertyless were effectively excluded.


pages: 147 words: 39,910

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

When they tried to do something good, or even just benign, and instead brought calamity, we can safely assume the negative outcomes weren’t factored into the original thinking. Very often, the second level of effects is not considered until it’s too late. This concept is often referred to as the “Law of Unintended Consequences” for this very reason. We see examples of this throughout history. During their colonial rule of India, the British government began to worry about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. To reduce the numbers, they instituted a reward for every dead snake brought to officials. In response, Indian citizens dutifully complied and began breeding the snakes to slaughter and bring to officials.


Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

She turned Fela on to the hedonistic, drug taking, sexually liberated American counterculture, and tuned him in to the Black Power movement and the ideas of thinkers like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. “For the first time, I heard things I’d never heard before about Africa,” Fela later said. “She was the one who opened my eyes.”29 18 Fela Kuti These ideas intertwined in his mind with pan-African ideals that he had imbibed from his fiery mother, a leading agitator against British colonial rule who had often thrashed Fela as a child. He hung pictures of Kwame Nkrumah and other pan-African heroes at the Afrika Shrine in Lagos, the chaotic musical commune where he proclaimed himself chief priest and where traditional leaders offered libations as Fela worshiped his ancestors. (One visitor said the Shrine looked like a cross between a Black Panther safe house and the Playboy mansion.)

A third way of organizing the world is what most people in the West are familiar with: open markets, economic and political freedom, and the rule of law. This had clearly not rooted deeply in Malabo, either. Over the centuries, competing foreign powers had often tried to pull Equatorial Guinea into their orbits. At one point during colonial rule the Spanish here exported up to 40,000 tons per year of the world’s finest cocoa, grown on Bioko’s fertile volcanic soils. The colonizers grew rich, but scores died from malaria and yellow fever; and the lives of the conquered inhabitants were far worse. The residue from this colonial wrestling, and years of dictatorship, had—as my BBC friend had warned me—turned this into a peculiar place.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

The remnants of colonialism will linger as long as former colonizers continue to try to impose their economic and political models of development as the only worthy goals for the rest of the world.25 Thus, although historical colonialism might be over, we can still speak of coloniality, that is, of legacies of colonialism that have outlived colonial rule per se. Theoretical and critical approaches such as neocolonialism, postcolonialism, and decoloniality have emerged to help us come to grips with that legacy. Although these terms—neocolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial—are sometimes used interchangeably to describe similar projects of critique, it is important to locate their roots and differentiate their goals.

Around the time Columbus arrived in America, a typical European had an average per capita income three times that of someone living in what is now sometimes called the Global South. By 1850, that ratio had increased to five to one. By the early to mid-twentieth century, when around 85 percent of the world was under some form of colonial rule, the ratio was fourteen to one.5 The inequality that plagues us today is not entirely the result of colonialism but at the same time cannot be explained without it. From the perspective of postcolonial and decolonial studies (the disciplines that consider critiques of colonialism and capitalism from the viewpoint of the colonized), it is impossible to understand most aspects of our contemporary world—including, we propose, the role of data in our lives—without considering the unfinished history of colonialism and how it continues to shape former colonizers and the formerly colonized.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

That was damning enough, but when Green compared the situation in the bus to the suffering of Jews in railway carriages on the way to Nazi death camps, the entire book was deemed too incendiary for Palestinian consumption.17 Even in former colonies, the subject of colonialism has been closely controlled. Colonial rule was almost invariably replaced by regimes that proved no less repressive. If descriptions of life under foreign rule or of anticolonial resistance reflected poorly on the new states, however obliquely, they were likely to be censored. Indonesia is an example of this. In 1977, more than two decades after it gained independence, authorities banned Fons Rademakers’s Saijah and Adinda, a film adapted from a nineteenth-century novel that depicted the complicity of the Indonesian gentry under Dutch colonial rule. The government feared the film would give the impression that Indonesians were victimized by their own people rather than the Dutch—which could raise uncomfortable questions about the present.


pages: 1,509 words: 416,377

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The family had lived in Manchuria since the start of the century, he said, and one could imagine their feelings “at the sight of the independent homeland, a country of freedom and a state which was now rising magnificently on the debris, beneath the banner of self-reliance.”35 More significant was to prove the case of Korean nationals who had lived and labored in Japan as an oppressed minority since the period of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. In 1955, in accordance with Kim’s instruction that “the overseas citizens’ movement had to contribute to the Korean revolution,” pro-Pyongyang Korean residents banded together in Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan.36 Most of the members actually hailed from the southern part of the peninsula; their identification with the North over the South reflected leftist sentiment as well as the widespread perception that the North was doing better than the South economically.

According to one account, the young man displayed open contempt toward any Korean of his father’s generation who had shown any weakness toward the enemy and thus failed to meet Kim Il-sung’s high standard. “Comrade, how much did you devote yourself to the revolution at the time of the Japanese colonial rule?” he would ask one of his elders. “Did you ever commit anti-revolutionary acts?” (I encountered a similar attitude in a great many South Korean youngsters, of his and subsequent generations, who had little direct knowledge of the pressures and complexities of life under Japanese rule. They-were eager to reject and despise any authority figures—from parents right up to the late South Korean President Park Chung-hee, a former Japanese soldier—on the ground of insufficient patriotism.)

Even though they are alive, the people are worse than gutter dogs, and even if the mountains and rivers remain the same, they will not retain their beauty. —KIM IL-SUNG Writing those words in the memoirs that he began publishing in 1992,1 Kim Il-sung meant to contrast the horrors of Japanese colonial rule with the wonders achieved during his rule of nearly half a century. The main ruination brought by colonialism, in his view, was to national dignity. But by the time of his death in 1994 it would have been clear to almost any reader of his words that the harsh description applied, in material even if not in nationalistic terms, to the North Korea that he had created.


pages: 812 words: 205,147

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

British Empire, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, global reserve currency, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, land reform, lone genius, megacity, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, spice trade, surveillance capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile

See also Sushil Chaudhury, ‘The banking and mercantile house of Jagat Seths of Bengal’, in Studies in People’s History, 2, 1 (2015), pp. 85–95; Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Banias and the British: the role of indigenous credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the second half of the Eighteenth century’, Modern Asian Studies, 21, 3 (1987); Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Collaboration and Conflict: Bankers and Early Colonial Rule in India: 1757–1813’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 30, 3 (1993); Thomas A. Timberg, The Marwaris: From Jagat Seth to the Birlas, New Delhi, 2014, p. 22; Lokanatha Gosha, The Modern History of the Indian Chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars, & C., Calcutta, 1881. For the wider Indian economy at this time see also Rajat Datt, ‘Commercialisation, Tribute and the Transition from late Mughal to Early Colonial in India’, Medieval History Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (2003), pp. 259–91; D.

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, Oxford, 2004, p. 111. 64Anderson Correspondence, BL, Add Mss 45, 427, Wm Palmer to David Anderson, 12 November 1786, f. 196. 65Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, pp. 122–5. 66Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 111; Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, pp. 122–5; C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 466–7, 474, 479; Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, pp. 108, 150. 67Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Collaboration and Conflict: Bankers and Early Colonial Rule in India: 1757–1813’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 30, 3 (1993), pp. 296–7. This whole argument was first made in the 1980s by Christopher Bayly in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars and by Karen Leonard in her groundbreaking essay ‘The Great Firm Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21, 2 (1979), and in ‘Banking Firms in Nineteenth-Century Hyderabad Politics’, Modern Asian Studies, 15, 2 (1981).

Park, Urban Bengal, East Lansing, 1969 Carlos, Ann M. and Nicholas, Stephen, ‘Giants of an Earlier Capitalism: The chartered trading companies as modern multinationals’, Business History Review, vol. 62, no. 3 (Autumn 1988), pp. 398–419 Chandra, Satish, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1717–1740, New Delhi, 1972 Chandra, Satish, ‘Social Background to the Rise of the Maratha Movement During the 17th Century’, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, x, (1973) Chatterjee, Indrani, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India, New Delhi, 1999 Chatterjee, Kumkum, ‘Collaboration and Conflict: Bankers and Early Colonial Rule in India: 1757–1813’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (1993) Chatterjee, Kumkum, Merchants, Politics & Society in Early Modern India, Bihar: 1733–1820, Leiden, 1996 Chatterjee, Kumkum, ‘History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth Century Eastern India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (1998) Chatterjee, Partha, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, New Delhi, 2012 Chatterji, Nandlal, Mir Qasim, Nawab of Bengal, 1760–1763, Allahabad, 1935 Chatterji, Nandlal, Verelst’s Rule in India, 1939 Chaudhuri, K.


A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

Engagement and encouragement, and, indeed, validation, of the kind offered by Corbyn and many others on Labour’s left during the 1980s spurred on those in Sinn Féin who wanted to go down the political route. Indeed, without such support, the balance may well have tipped towards the militarists who were content to make ‘the long war’ against the British state even longer. Like many on the left, Corbyn saw Ireland as a classic struggle for national selfdetermination against colonial rule. But he was by no means alone. Nelson Mandela may be the safest of safe options for any politician responding to the question ‘who do you most admire in politics?’ but he was also a strong supporter of Irish Republicanism. It was an association that weathered his transformation into international statesman.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

Since the fifteenth century, the islands have seen a heavy Arab influence, thanks in large part to the Shirazi sultans who controlled several city-states on the African coast and moved to the islands, bringing Islam with them. Then, in 1841, the French took possession of Mayotte, and in the ensuing decades claimed the rest of the islands, which remained under colonial rule until 1912, when they were classified as a province of Madagascar. After World War II, the Comoros were “freed” from Madagascar to become a self-standing French overseas territory. Over the following decades, plans were made for the islands to become independent. Then, for the first and most likely last time in Comorian history, local leaders decided to work ahead of schedule, and called for national elections early, without informing the French.


pages: 427 words: 124,692

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

Like the Victorian socialist Annie Besant, they could find the colourful abundance of Indian spiritualism an intoxicating alternative: when she moved to India in 1893, Besant took to wearing Hindu mourning dress in grief at what the British had done to the country, and spent decades encouraging Indians to throw off colonial rule. Subversive figures like these were, of course, hugely outnumbered by the conventional memsahibs, exerting what they considered a civilizing influence in the military cantonments, towns, cities and hill stations. How many younger officers wanted to cohabit with an Indian woman when the colonel’s wife so clearly disapproved?

At one point he spluttered about Nasser on an open telephone line to his junior minister at the Foreign Office: ‘I want him murdered.’ The assassination did not happen. But the French government, which already loathed Nasser for his vocal support of Algerian nationalists fighting to escape French colonial rule, weighed in on Britain’s side. The political influence of both these colonial powers had been eclipsed by the United States, which continued to warn that world opinion would not tolerate a military intervention to regain the canal. But British newspapers thundered on, the Daily Herald pronouncing on its front page that ‘Britain and the other Powers must swiftly show Nasser that they are going to tolerate no more Hitlers!


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

He singled out Britain for special mention: “We, the Ijaw and Niger Delta people, want to remind the people of the world that Great Britain has facilitated the illegal, criminal and inhuman occupation and exploitation of our lands for 112 years.”51 It is interesting that Asari blamed the old colonial power for the problems of the Niger Delta, just as the new powers—America and China—were beginning to fight over Nigeria’s oil. There is no doubt that Shell benefited from British colonial rule in Nigeria, and its continuing dominance of the Nigerian oil industry is a colonial legacy. Its monopolistic position means that, ironically, for Shell, Nigeria remains a lethal legacy, too. In February 2006, Citigroup released an in-depth study on Nigeria. “Our analysis,” it said, “suggests that Nigeria is the major growth region for Shell to the turn of the decade.”

., and administration 66, 271, 278 and Iraq War 13, 28 Bush Agenda, The (Juhasz) 4, 275 Cabot Corporation 104, 112n32 Cameroon, foreign debt of 249 Canada 99, 101, 201, 268, 271 Canadian Export Development Corp. 201, 202, 203, 204, 206 capital flight 24, 43–44, 231–36, 253, 258n27 Carter, Jimmy 76, 140 Casey, William 70, 82, 90 Cavallo, Domingo Felipe 238 Cayman Islands, as offshore banking haven 65, 72, 73, 74, 75, 86 Center for Global Energy Studies 145 Center for Strategic and International Studies 119, 120 Central African Republic 231 Central Intelligence Agency 3, 5, 15 Afghan rebels and 70–71 BCCI and 69, 70, 71–72, 73, 76, 78, 79–82, 85 Saudi intelligence services and 75 Chad, foreign debt of 249 Chavez, Hugo 3, 25, 273 Cheney, Dick 28, 133 Chevron Oil 135, 138, 139, 144, 153 in Nigeria 123–24 Chile 236 1973 coup in 27 China 4, 229, 236 foreign debt 222–23 Third World resources and 5, 117–18, 120–21, 124, 126–27, 130 Chomsky, Noam Hegemony or Survival 4 Christian Peacemaker Team 96, 106–8 Citibank, Citigroup 75, 100, 130, 138, 226, 238, 268 Clifford, Clark 78–79, 85, 86, 88 Clinton, Bill, and administration 119, 120, 126, 212, 271 Coalition of Immokalee Workers 272, 280 COFACE 201, 205, 212 Cogecom 100 cold war 4 and decolonization 16–17 Colombia, human rights in 107 colonialism, decline of formal 13–14 coltan: efforts to control 5, 26, 95 shortages of 95 uses for 94 Commission for Africa 251 Communism: appeal of 14 fall of 4, 13, 27, 137–38, 238 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Perkins) 1–4, 6, 17 Congo, Democratic Republic of (Zaire): civil war in 26, 94–96, 108n3 corruption in 24, 254 foreign debt 220, 230, 247, 249 human rights in 107–8 rape as a weapon of war in 93, 96–98 Western role in 98–105, 109n4, 111n29 World Bank and 158 Congo Republic 230, 247, 249 cooperatives 276–77 corporations, as legal persons 277 CorpWatch 278 corruption: culture of 51–54 IMF/World Bank and 24–25, 157–74 offshore banking and 44–45, 52- power and 24 privatization and 24–25, 256n12 COSEC 209–10 Council on Foreign Relations 119–20 dam projects, 209–12 Dar al-Mal al-Islami 89 Daukoru, Edmund 125–27, 128 Davos see World Economic Forum DeBeers Group 101, 103 decolonization 13, 16–17 debt/flight cycle 231–36, 253, 258n27 debt relief, campaigns for 246, 252–55, 268 in U.S. 235 debt, Third World 32, 35 amount of relief 224–29 banks and 226–27, 229, 232–34 business loans 35–37, 227 cold war strategy and 17 corruption and 230, 231, 232, 253, 254, 257n23 1982 crisis 39, 55 disunity among debtor nations 237–39 dubious debts and 230, 235, 247, 253, 257n23, 261n68 growth of 18–19, 181, 229–36 as means of control 17, 23, 183–84 payments on 19, 190–91, 223, 228, 231, 247–48, 275 relief plans 220–22, 225–29, 239–52, 274 size of 221–24, 259n37, 260n46 social/economic impacts of 190–91, 231–36, 247–48 democracy: debt crisis and 236 economic reform and 276–79 global justice and 279–81 in Iraq 151–54 Deutsche Bank 226 drug trade 70, 80, 87 Dubai 73 Dulles, Alan 15 Eagle Wings Resources International 104 East Timor 205 economic development strategies: “big projects” and 16–17 debt-led 18–19 state-led 16–17, 19 economic forecasting 3 economic hit men 5 definition 1, 3, 18 John Perkins and 1–4, 17 types of 5, 18 Ecuador 236, 266 foreign debt 244 Egypt 14 Suez Crisis 15–16 Eisenhower, Dwight, and administration 15 elites, wealthy 4, 18, 57, 176, 183, 228, 232, 253 use of tax havens 43–44, 54–56, 65–66, 226, 232–34 El Salvador 26 empire see imperialism Eni SpA 144, 153 Enron 53, 54, 208–9 Ethiopia 230, 249 European Union 51 agricultural subsidies 22 environment degradation: development projects and 199, 200–211, 257n23 oil production and 115–16 export credit agencies: arms exports and 204–5 campaigns against 209–16 corruption and 200, 202–3, 205, 207–8 debt and 200 environmental effects 199, 200–211 nuclear power and 202, 205–6 operation of 197–201 secrecy of 205, 210–12 size of 201 World Bank and 199, 201, 202, 204 Export Credit Group 210, 215 Export Credits Guarantee Department 201, 205, 211 Export Finance and Investment Corp. 203, 204 export processing zones 178 Export Risk Guarantee 203, 211, 213 ExxonMobil 144 fair trade movement 280 Faisal, Mohammad al-89 Faux, Jeff Global Class War, The 4 Federal Bureau of Investigation 71 Federal Reserve Bank of New York 87 Federal Reserve System 78, 82, 88 Ferguson, Niall 13 First American Bankshares 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 88 First Quantum Materials 101 First, Ruth 26 Focus on the Global South 187, 273 foreign aid 19 in Congo civil war 99–100 France 236, 244 empire 13 Suez Crisis and 15 free trade 4, 19, 21–23, 268, 271 British development and 21 U.S. development and 21 Free Trade Area of the Americas 271 Friends of the Earth 104, 269 G8 summits 212, 213, 219–20, 221, 246, 250, 271, 275 Gambia 243, 249 García, Alan 74 Gates, Robert 85 Gécamines 100, 104 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade agricultural trade 186–87 establishment of 267 TRIPS 23 Uruguay Round 23, 267 General Union of Oil Employees 135–36, 141–44 Georgia 207 Germany 212, 213, 216, 236 export credit agency 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209–11, 212, 215–16 Green Party 206, 215 Ghana 16 development projects in 16, 207 foreign debt 230, 247, 249 impact of IMF SAP 5, 22 Giuliani, Carlo 271 Global Awareness Collective 278 Global Class War, The (Faux) 4 Global Exchange 278 globalization 3 alternatives to corporate 275–79 economic 176–79, 230, 236 impacts of 185–90, 234, 236, 263–65 of the financial system 55, 63–66 Globalization and Its Discontents (Stiglitz) 3, 4 Global justice movement: achievements of 276–79 campaigns 269–72, 274–75 in Global North 268–69, 271–72, 274 in Global South 271–74 origins of 268–69 proposals of 275–79 protests by 265–66, 270–71 Global South see Third World Gonzalez, Henry 72, 90 Gorbachev, Mikhail 137 Goulart, João 27 Groupement pour le Traitment des Scories du Terril de Lubumbashi 104 Guatemala 14, 236 Arbenz government 26 Guinea, foreign debt of 249 Guinea-Bassau 26, 247, 249 Guyana: export credit agencies and 203 environmental problems 203 foreign debt 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249 Haiti 236, 249 World Bank and 158 Halliburton 3, 133, 278 Hankey, Sir Maurice 145 Harken Energy Corp. 77, 78 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative 221, 225, 226, 230, 242–48, 275 conditions of 243–45 results of 248–50 Hegemony or Survival (Chomsky) 4 Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin 70 Helms, Richard 82 Henwood, Doug 23, 177–79 Heritage Foundation 121 Heritage Oil and Gas 100 Hermes Guarantee 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212, 215–16 Honduras, foreign debt of 249 Hope in the Dark (Solnit) 281 Hungary, Soviet intervention in 16 Hussein, Saddam 28, 90, 141–42 and BCCI 72 Hutu people 94–96 Hypovereinsbank 209 Ijaw people 116, 121–23, 128 Illaje people 123 immigrant rights movement 281 imperialism 13–14 coups d’état and 27 divide-and-rule tactics 25, 26, 265 post-cold war changes 4–5 pressure on uncooperative countries 25, 142 resistance to 28, 115–17, 121–30, 143–44, 151–54, 176, 191–92, 265–66 resources and 98–106, 118–21, 133–34, 136, 139–40, 145 as system of control 17–28, 176 use of force 5, 25–28, 111n22, 113–14, 115–17, 123, 111n22 India 16, 119, 229, 236, 266 foreign debt 222, 223 export credit agencies and 206, 208 Maheshwar Dam 209–10 Indonesia 236 corruption in 202–3 export credit agencies and 200, 202–3, 205, 207, 216 foreign debt 228, 230, 244 inequality 44 Institute for Policy Studies 278 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 157 International Development Association 157, 242 International Forum on Globalization 266 International Monetary Fund 3, 4, 19, 135, 275 conflicts of interest 244 debt relief and 221–22, 224, 226, 237, 240, 243–46, 250–51, 252 Iraq and 151–53 Malaysia and 273 neoliberalism and 176–79, 222 offshore banking and 43, 234 protests against 266 structural adjustment programs 22, 23, 245, 265–66 Rwanda and 100 Uganda and 100 International Tax and Investment Center 134–35, 138–39, 144–54 International Trade Organization 267 Iran 14, 90, 145, 200 coup against Mossadegh 14–15 nationalization of oil industry 14 Iran-Contra affair 71–72 Iraq: BCCI and 72 foreign debt 152 Gulf War and 28, 72, 140, 141, 146 human rights in 105–6 oil production and reserves 135–36, 139–54 production sharing agreements in 147–54 sanctions against 72, 142 social conditions in 135, 142, 143 U.S. occupation of 28, 140, 141–42, 146, 250, 275, 278 Israel: and Suez Crisis 15 Yom Kippur War and 17 Ivory Coast 230 foreign debt 244, 249 “jackals” 25–26 James, Deborah 273 Japan 216, 236 Japan Bank for International Cooperation 201, 202, 203, 241 Jersey 88 banking boom in 46–47 impact on island 46, 51–52, 56–62 as offshore banking haven 43, 45, 56–61 Johnson, Chalmers Sorrows of Empire 4 Jordan 241, 266 Jordan, Vernon 100 JPMorganChase 226, 238 Jubilee South 190 Jubilee 2000 268 Juhasz, Antonia Bush Agenda, The 4, 275 Juma’a, Hassan 135–36, 140, 142–44, 154 Kabila, Joseph 96 Kabila, Laurent 94, 96, 99 Kagame, Paul 94, 98–99 ties to U.S. 99 Kazakhstan 138, 139, 144, 150 Keating, Charles 83 Kenya 236 foreign debt 243, 244 Kerry, John 76 investigation of BCCI 79–83, 87, 89 Kirchner, Nestor 273 Korea, Republic of 229, 272 Korten, David When Corporations Rule the World 4 KPMG 52 Krauthammer, Charles 13 Krushchev, Nikita 16 Kurdistan 211–12, 214 Kuwait 133, 141, 146, 152, 154 labor exports 235–36 Lake, Anthony 119–20 Lance, Bert 77 Lawson, Nigel 242 Lawson Plan 221, 242 Lee Kyung Hae 272 Liberia, World Bank lending to 159–67 Liberty Tree Foundation 276 Li Zhaoxing 117–18, 124 Lu Guozeng 117 Lumumba, Patrice 26 Luxembourg, as offshore banking haven 72, 73, 74 Madagascar, foreign debt of 249 Mahathir, Mohamad 273 Malawi 254 foreign debt 243, 249 Malaysia 41–43, 229 defiance of IMF 273 Mali, foreign debt of 246, 249 Marcos, Ferdinand 31, 48, 175, 176, 181–85 markets, corporate domination of 16 Martin, Paul 54 mass media, manipulation of 25 Mauritania, foreign debt of 247, 249 McKinney, Cynthia; hearing on Congo 98–99, 110n11 McLure, Charles 137–39 mercenaries: in Congo 111n22 in Nigeria 5, 25–26, 113–14, 115–17 Mexico 207, 256n14, 273 foreign debt 55, 227, 228, 230, 233, 240–41, 244 labor exports 236 Zapatista uprising 272 Middle East, and struggle for oil 27–28 military-industrial complex 99 military interventions 27–28 Mizban, Faraj Rabat 141 Mitterand Plan 221 Mobutu Sese Seko 24, overthrow of 94 Mondlane, Eduardo 26 Mongolia 207 Morales, Evo 277 Morganthau, Robert 69, 84–87 Moscow, John 58, 87 Mossadegh, Mohammad 3, 14–15, 27 Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta 122–24, 129 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement) 272 Mozambique 26, 27, 230 foreign debt 241, 246, 249 Mueller, Robert 87 mujahadeen (Afghanistan): and BCCI 70 and drug trade 70 Mulroney, Brian 100 Multilateral Agreement on Investment 269–70, 281 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative 222, 225, 230, 250–52 Multilateral Investment Agreement 269 multinational corporations: export credit agencies and 209–11 export processing zones and 178 globalization, pressure for 138, 268, 275 mercenaries, use of 25–26, 111n22, 113–14, 115–17, 123 resources and 101–6, 111n29, 112n31, 112n32 scandals 5 transfer mispricing by 49–51 offshore banks, use of 24, 49–51 patents, control of 23 Museveni, Yoweri 95 Myanmar, foreign debt of 230 Nada, Youssef Mustafa 71–72 Namibia 95 export credit agencies and 207 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 15–16 National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia 88–89 National Family Farm Coalition 272 nationalism: pan-Arab 15 Iranian 14 Nehru, Jawaharlal 16 neocolonialism see imperialism neoliberalism 4, 19 critique of 176–79, 190–92, 234, 236 defined 176–77 economic development and 176–79, 232 economic strategies 178–81, 222, 230, 231, 236 Netherlands, overseas empire of 13 Newmont Mining Corp. 244 New World Order 27–28 Nicaragua 207 foreign debt 225, 230, 247, 249 U.S. proxy war against 26, 27, 79 Nicpil, Liddy 190–91, 192 Nidal, Adu 73 Niger, foreign debt of 241, 249 Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force 121, 123 Niger Delta Volunteer Service 122 Niger Delta region: attack on oil platforms 116–17 as “Next Gulf” 118–21 pollution from oil production 115–16 struggle against Shell 115–16, 121–24 Nigeria 200, 266 China and 117–18 colonial rule 115 corruption in 44–45, 230 foreign debt 223, 230, 233, 243, 244 oil production 115–16, 125–27 World Bank lending in 158, 167–69 Nkrumah, Kwame 16 nongovernmental organizations 239, 250 Noriega, Manuel 80 and BCCI 72, 79 North American Free Trade Agreement 4, 268, 272 nuclear power 205–6, 210 Obasanjo, Olusegun 125, 127 Obiang, Teodoro 48 O’Connor, Brian 144–45 OECD Watch 105 offshore banking havens: arms trade and 71–73 campaign against 62–64 central role in world trade 44, 47–48, 64–65 corruption and 24, 44–45, 52–56, 64, 231–33, 253 drug trade and 70 extraction of wealth 43, 54–56, 64–65, 226, 231–33, 253, 258n58 financial centers and 234, ignored by academia 44, 234 secrecy and 47–48, 53, 66 tax evasion and 43, 48, 49–51, 54, 57–59, 64–65, 226, 232 terrorism and 71, 88 Ogoni people 122–23, 125 Okadigbo, Chuba 116 Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi 118 Okuntimo, Paul 123 Oil Change International 278 oil price spikes 236 oil production and reserves: future shortages of 28, 140 Indonesia 207 Iraqi 135–36, 144–54 Nigerian 113–14, 128–29 strategies to control 25–26, 27–28, 139–40 OM Group, Inc. 104, 112n31 OPEC 125–26, 128 1973 oil embargo by 17 dollar deposits in First World 17–18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 135, 269 “Action Statement on Bribery” 216 export credit agencies and 210, 215 Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises 101, 102, 105–6, 112n31 “OECD Arrangement” 215 Overseas Private Investment Corp. 204, 206–9 Oxfam 43, 62–63, 250 Pakistan 90 Afghan mujahadeen and 70–71 BCCI and 70 export credit agencies and 207 foreign debt 244 Panama 3, 26, 72 as offshore banking haven 73, 74 Papua New Guinea: export credit agencies and 204 mining and environmental problems 204 Paris Club of creditors 220, 225–26, 227, 228, 242, 252 Peru 74 foreign debt 241 impact of IMF SAP 22 petrodollars, recycling of 17–18 Perkins, John 19 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man 1–2, 17 Pharaon, Ghaith 76, 77, 86, 87, 88 Philippines, the 31–34, 35–36 corruption in 181–82 democratic movements in 182–85, 236 economic decline in 187–89 emigration from 189, 236 foreign debt 181, 190–91, 230, 241, 244 Marcos regime 31, 34, 175, 176, 180–85, 261n61 martial law in 180–85 social conditions in 179–80, 185–86, 189–91 U.S. rule 175–76 World Bank and 158, 178–81 Pinochet, General Augusto 27, 45–46, 48 PLATFORM 140, 156n28 Portugal 209–10 Posada Carriles, Luis 26 poverty reduction strategy programs see structural adjustment programs Price Waterhouse 83–84 privatization 191 production sharing agreements 147–54 protectionism 21, 181, 186–87 proxy wars 27, 70–71 Public Citizen 269, 273 public utilities, privatization of 191, 261n61, 277 Rahman, Masihur 85 Reagan, Ronald, and administration 19, 79, 87, 136–37, 239 Iran-Contra affair 72 Rich, Marc 90 Rights and Accountability in Development 101, 104, 105 Rio Tinto Zinc 204 Ritch, Lee 79–80 Robson, John 138 Roldós, Jaime 3, 26 Roosevelt, Kermit 15 Rumsfeld, Donald 138 rural economic development 183, 186–87 Russia: debt relief and 225 oil industry 154 transition to capitalism 137–39, 258n28 Rutledge, Ian 149 Rwanda 94–96, 98, 249 massacre in 94, 99 SACE 201 Sachs Plan 221 Saleh, Salim 95 Saõ Tomé, foreign debt of 247, 249 Saud al-Fulaij, Faisal 86, 87 Saudi Arabia 3, 88 and BCCI 70, 75 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 125–26 Scholz, Wesley S. 104 Scowcroft, Brent 72 Senegal 16, 249 Senghor, Léopold 16 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks 71 Shell Oil 144 Nigeria and 113–15, 122, 123, 125–29 at World Economic Forum 127 Shinawatra, Thaksin 54 Sierra Club 269 Sierra Leone 247 SmartMeme 276 Solnit, Rebecca Hope in the Dark 281 Somalia 251 Sorrows of Empire (Johnson) 4 South Africa 236 military interventions 27 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 26 Soviet Union 13, 14 de-Stalinization 16 Hungary, intervention in 16 influence in Third World 14 U.S. and 137 Stephens, Jackson 76, 77 Stiglitz, Joseph 24 Globalization and Its Discontents 3, 4 structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 19, 229–30 in Ghana 5, 22 in Peru 22 in the Philippines 176–79, 183–85, 190–92 in Zambia 22 Sudan 230, 251 Suharto 200, 202–3 Syria 211 Switzerland, as offshore banking haven 45, 65, 72 Taco Bell, boycott of 280 Tanzania, foreign debt of 247, 249 tax evasion 43, 48, 49–51, 54, 57–59, 64–65 Tax Foundation 137–38 tax havens see offshore banking havens Tax Justice Network 63 Tax Reform Act of 1986 138 Tenke Mining 99 terrorism: as EHM strategy 26, 72 financing of 42, 88–89 inequality and 44 Islamist 71–72, 89 Palestinian 73 Thatcher, Margaret 19, 138 Third World: as commodity producers 17, 23 conditions in 5, 96–97, 106–8, 116, 179–80, 185–90, 234, 236 development strategies 176–79 divisions among countries 265–68 elites in 25, 28, 43–44, 176, 226, 232–34 emergence of 14 lack of development in 232, 237 terms of trade and 22, 178–79 Third World Network 269 Tidewater Inc. 113 Torrijos, Omar 3, 26 Total S.A. 144, 153 trade unions 135–36, 141–44, 180, 186, 269, 274 transfer mispricing 49–51 cost to Third World 50 Transparency International 45 Turkey: export credit agencies and 206 Ilisu Dam 211–14 Turkmenistan 200 Uganda 94–96 foreign debt 241, 246, 249 Union Bank of Switzerland 57, 58, 77, 226, 250 United Arab Emirates 69, 73 United Fruit Company 15 United Kingdom 213 NCP for Congo 102–3 empire 13–14, 115, 129, 145 Iran and 14–15 Iraq occupation and 146, 151, 152 offshore banking and; Suez Crisis and 15 United Nations: trade issues and 265, 276 Panel of Experts, Congo 100–106, 112n32 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 220, 265, 267 United States: agricultural subsidies 22 aid 98 as empire 13, 28 cold war strategy of 16, 17, 24, 26 in Congo 99, 104, 105 debt-led development strategy of 176–79 Iran coup and 14–15 Iraqi oil and 133–34, 136, 139–40 Iraq wars 72, 133, 141–42 Islamists and 26 Nigerian oil and 118–21 Philippines and 175–76, 180 strategic doctrines 27–28, 118–19 support of Contras 72 trade deficit 23 trade policies 267 U.S.


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The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

But in the words of George Orwell, “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield,”83 which is precisely what happened on the battlefield in the Great Revolt, to the Palestinians’ lasting detriment. * * * AFTER 1917, THE Palestinians found themselves in a triple bind, which may have been unique in the history of resistance to colonial-settler movements. Unlike most other peoples who fell under colonial rule, they not only had to contend with the colonial power in the metropole, in this case London, but also with a singular colonial-settler movement that, while beholden to Britain, was independent of it, had its own national mission, a seductive biblical justification, and an established international base and financing.

When Palestinian envoys had managed to meet with foreign officials, whether in London or Geneva, they were condescendingly told that they had no official standing, and that their meetings were therefore private rather than official.18 The comparison with the Irish, the only people to succeed in (partially) freeing themselves of colonial rule between World Wars I and II, is striking. In spite of divisions in their ranks, their clandestine parliament, the Dail Eirann, their nascent branches of government, and their centralized military forces ultimately out-administered and outfought the British.19 During these critical years leading up to the Nakba, Palestinian disarray in regard to institution-building was profound.


From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

In April 1943, the ‘liberation of Asia’ became Japan’s official war objective; later that year, the Greater East Asia Congress in Tokyo revealed that pan-Asianism was more than a Japanese fantasy.11 Jawaharlal Nehru had spoken often of how ‘we feel as Asiatics a common bond uniting us against the aggression of Europe’.12 Writing from a British prison in 1940, just seven years away from India’s freedom from colonial rule, Nehru said, ‘My own picture of the future is a federation which includes China and India, Burma and Ceylon, Afghanistan and possibly other countries.’13 In Tokyo, Subhas Chandra Bose, surrounded by adoring Indian students, described the congress as a ‘family party’ where all the guests were Asians.14 The Philippines’ ambassador to Japan claimed that ‘the time has come for the Filipinos to discard Anglo-Saxon civilization and its enervating influence … and to recapture their charm and original virtues as an oriental people’.15 The Burmese leader Ba Maw (1893 – 1977) felt the ‘call of Asiatic blood’.16 ‘We were Asians,’ he later recalled, ‘rediscovering Asia.’17 Ba Maw later said that the congress of 1943 created the spirit that then went into the Bandung Conference of 1955, where some of Asia’s greatest leaders gathered and subsequently formed the Non-Aligned Movement.

This revolutionary recipe for self-strengthening and pride, generous in its emancipatory promise, consisted of the institutions and practices of the nation-state: clear boundaries, orderly government, a loyal bureaucracy, a code of rights to protect citizens, rapid economic growth through industrial capitalism or socialism, mass literacy programmes, technical knowledge and the development of a sense of common origins within a national community. Fulfilling either some or the barest minimum of these conditions, an assortment of new nation-states filled the immense vacuum created by the dissolution of European empires. In the period following the end of the Second World War, many Asian countries achieved independence from colonial rule; and more than fifty new states with new names, borders and currencies appeared in just two decades after 1945. Formal decolonization itself was always unlikely to guarantee true sovereignty and dignity to Asian nations. In the 1950s, Nehru often stressed the urgent task facing postcolonial leaders like himself: ‘What Europe did in a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, we must do in ten or fifteen years.’


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

I was on a short visit to Auroville, a town in south India founded in 1968 by Mira Alfassa, a nonagenarian Frenchwoman whom everybody calls Mother. She had named the town after Sri Aurobindo, one of India’s most celebrated spiritual leaders, whose life’s journey, from student years at Cambridge to underground activism against British colonial rule and finally incarnating as a teacher-savant in a charming corner of peninsular India, merits a book or two in itself. Mother, André told me, had “departed her body” in 1973, twenty-three years after Sri Aurobindo, but, fortunately for the questing Frenchman, several months after he had arrived in Auroville.

What I did not say was that I felt India had labored too long under the burden of spiritual greatness that Westerners have for centuries thrust upon it and which Indians had themselves got into the habit of picking up and sending back (with a cherry on top). Over the centuries, and particularly during the era of British colonial rule and its aftermath, many Indians endorsed in one form or another the view that India was a uniquely metaphysical civilization. To most Indians this self-image was certainly preferable to the belittlement that was doled out by many, although not all, of India’s colonial rulers. Lord Macaulay, who authored India’s first national penal code, infamously wrote that the entire corpus of Indian philosophy and literature was not worth a single bookshelf of Western writing.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It was one of the rebels’ greatest tactical advantages, allowing them to move people and supplies through neighboring Laos and Cambodia undetected and launch deadly raids deep in South Vietnamese territory. With Project Agile, Godel was determined to take that advantage away. The British Empire had pioneered the use of defoliants as a form of chemical warfare, using them against local movements that opposed colonial rule. In the fight against communist rebels in Malaya, Britain ruthlessly deployed them to destroy food supplies and jungle cover.5 British military planners described defoliants as “a form of sanction against a recalcitrant nation which would be more speedy than blockade and less repugnant than the atomic bomb.”

The bulk of French military efforts seemed to focus on protecting their supply convoy lines, which were constantly attacked by massive guerrilla forces that seemed to materialize out of the jungle, deploying up to six thousand men along a three-mile stretch of road. The French were essentially stuck in their fortifications. They had “lost most of their offensive spirit” and were “pinned to their occupied areas,” Godel’s colleague described. “The way Godel saw it, the French colonialists were trying to fight the Viet Minh guerrillas according to colonial rules of war. But the South Vietnamese, who were receiving weapons and training from the French forces, were actually fighting a different kind of war, based on different rules,” writes Annie Jacobsen, who excavates William Godel’s forgotten story in The Pentagon’s Brain, her history of ARPA.30 This “different kind of war” had a name: counterinsurgency.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

In much of Asia ‘liberation’ is not exactly the right word for events following the surrender of Japan. The European empires attempted to reassert their dominion over their old colonies: the French in Indo-china, the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in Malaya and Singapore, but they couldn’t sustain traditional-style colonial rule for long. The agony of withdrawal was worse and more bloody for some than others – humiliatingly for France in Vietnam for example. In the sub-continent, the British were desperate to leave as soon as they could; with indecent haste according to many critics, who argue that the British ‘scuttled’ and caused the violence that accompanied the partition of India and Pakistan.

The line about ‘striking at their pockets’ shocked millions of people, especially in the United States. Instead of the earlier sympathy of a few, the balanced editorials suggesting that Britain did not have entirely easy decisions to make in Palestine, there was now scorn for the arrogance and intolerance of British colonial rule. Attlee gave Barker a personal reprimand, and he was sent home in disgrace. But the damage to British prestige was immense and long-lasting. The contempt for Barker would have been even greater – and the loathing the Jews had for him more profound – if people had known his private views. Barker, married and the father of a small child back in England, was having a passionate affair with one of the most famous women in Palestine, Katy Antonius.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Some 30,000 mulattoes and free Negroes enjoyed economic privileges but not social and political equality, the origins of the class difference that led to harsh repression after independence, with renewed violence today. Cubans may have seemed “of dubious whiteness,” but the rebels who overthrew colonial rule did not approach that status. The slave revolt, which had reached serious proportions by the end of 1791, appalled Europe, as well as the European outpost that had just declared its own independence. Britain invaded in 1793; victory would offer “a monopoly of sugar, indigo, cotton and coffee” from an island which “for ages, would give such aid and force to industry as would be most happily felt in every part of the empire,” a British military officer wrote to Prime Minister Pitt.

Or, assuming that such idealism would be too much to ask, why did Hull not at least accept the Japanese offer for mutuality of exploitation? Such thoughts go beyond legitimate bounds, reaching into the forbidden territory of “American motives.” In the real world, Japan’s aggression gave an impetus to the nationalist movements that displaced colonial rule in favor of the more subtle mechanisms of domination of the postwar period. Furthermore, the war left the US in a position to design the new world order. Under these new conditions, Japan could be offered its “Empire toward the South” (as Kennan put it) under US control, though within limits: the US intended to maintain its “power over what Japan imports in the way of oil and such other things” so that “we would have veto power on what she does need in the military and industrial field,” as Kennan advised in 1949.20 This stance was maintained until unexpected factors intervened, notably the Vietnam war with its costs to the US and benefits to Japan and other industrial rivals.


pages: 487 words: 139,297

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns

Berlin Wall, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, technology bubble, transfer pricing, unemployed young men, working-age population, éminence grise

On numerous occasions, Mobutu had to call on his foreign allies or mercenaries to prop up his floundering army. The roots of the army’s weakness lie in the Belgian colonial state. The Force Publique, as the army was then called, was formed to maintain law and order and suppress any challenge to colonial rule. It conflated military and policing functions, and control of military units was strongly decentralized to serve the needs of the territorial administrators, who used the army for civilian tasks as well as to suppress dissent. The Belgian authorities never thought to create a strong army; up until the late 1950s, they thought that independence was still decades away and that they would continue to control the state and its security forces.

Since the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when European and Arab slave traders penetrated deep into the country and captured hundreds of thousands of slaves, often in complicity with local chiefs, hastening the disintegration of the great kingdoms of the savannah that ruled from the Atlantic seaboard throughout the center and south of the country, the Congo has suffered a social and political dissolution. It was the victim of one of the most brutal episodes of colonial rule, when it was turned into the private business empire of King Leopold; under his reign and the subsequent rule by the republican Belgian government, the Congo’s remaining customary chiefs were fought, co-opted, or sent into exile. Religious leaders who defied the orthodoxy of the European-run churches faced the same fate: The prophet Simon Kimbangu died after thirty years in prison for his anticolonial rhetoric.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

The first wave came as merchants arrived, becoming central figures in such trading centers as Palembang and Surabaya in the course of the fourteenth century, although they were largely assimilated into the local population over the following two hundred years.3 The second and most numerous wave of migration arrived in Southeast Asia at the high tide of European colonialism during the late nineteenth century, with many being driven from China by the poverty and ruin caused by the Taiping rebellion (1850 –1864). In Southeast Asia, the Dutch, French, and British colonizers used these new migrants not only as laborers on plantations but often also as tax collectors and low-level administrators of colonial rule. This socially complex work earned them not only modest wealth but also frequently the enmity of indigenous populations such as the pribumi of Indonesia. The turbulence of early twentieth-century China, the revolution of 1949, the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong’s 1997 reversion, and the Chinese globalization that followed all produced new waves of migrants from China to Southeast Asia.

Chinese immigrants were fortunate at an early stage to be befriended and highly evaluated by Thai royalty; indeed, King Rama I, who founded the present Chakri dynasty in 1782, was partly Chinese.4 For over four hundred years, Thai and Chinese elites have thus intermingled and assimilated, without the complexities of colonial rule that set Chinese and indigenous peoples against one another across the rest of Southeast Asia. History thus provides a solid platform for a major Chinese political-­ economic presence in Thailand, centering on the massive overseas Chinese community of Yaowarat, Bangkok’s Chinatown, which constituted over half of the capital’s population until the 1950s.5 Even today, overseas Chinese make Southeast Asia 125 ta b l e 6 . 1 The varied patterns of overseas Chinese presence in Southeast Asia (2011) Country Indonesia Thailand Malaysia Singapore Philippines Myanmar Vietnam Laos Cambodia Brunei Total Overseas Chinese Population (thousands) 8,010.72 7,512.60 6,540.80 2,808.30 1,243.16 1,053.75 992.60 176.49 147.02 51.00 28,536.44 Total Population (millions) 248.00 64.26 28.73 5.26 95.83 62.42 89.32 6.56 14.43 0.41 615.22 Overseas Chinese Share of Total Population (%) 3.23 11.69 22.77 53.39 1.30 1.69 1.11 2.69 1.02 12.44 4.64 Assimilated?


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

Except, of course, for the inconvenient reality that this land was already owned by others, by communities who had a prescribed right to have and to hold on to it. So, what would eventually happen in Oklahoma, and which was centered most profoundly around the distribution of land, was now firmly on the horizon. What would be particularly egregious examples of land grabbing now simply required the passage of time—a century and a half of further colonial rule, then the creation of the United States out of the divided remains of the gigantic American fiefdom of the British empire, and a century more of Washington’s independent governance, briefly fractured though it was during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. During all of these periods of North American history, native lands were being thinned and culled and native people were being slain and pinioned into remote reservations, tracts that were often waterless or infertile or both, impenetrable laagers that no white man would ever wish for.

George Washington was one such who was angered by the proclamation: as a professional surveyor he could well recognize the finer and more valuable tracts of land he encountered, and when bounty from his participation in the French and Indian War came in the form of land, he gathered some choice tracts for himself—a total of 32,000 acres of fine farmland that was now most inconveniently sited to the west of the Proclamation Line, and which he was now ineligible to possess. The consequences of his irritation at such a colonial ruling were legion: the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the six years of fighting between redcoats and patriots that followed have the matter of Indian lands as one of its many causal origins, and George Washington’s eventual leadership—and presidency of the new republic—a natural culmination. The Proclamation Line was drawn at the end of Britain’s victorious Seven Years War with France—or the French and Indian War, as it was named in North America, since various Indian tribes allied themselves with the two warring sides.* When Britain did win all of the hitherto French-held territory, this so-called Ohio Country—the huge and richly fertile landscape much admired by Washington, dominated by the Ohio River at its center, lying between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River—was transferred by treaty to British rule.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The AU came out in the middle of the bombing, reiterating its call for diplomacy and making detailed proposals, in this case about a peacekeeping force.15 They were totally dismissed, of course. You don’t listen to Africans. The AU had a pretty interesting explanation of its stand. Essentially they were saying, Africa has been trying to free itself from brutal colonial rule and slavery for years. The way we’ve been doing it is by establishing the principle of sovereignty in order to protect ourselves from a return of Western colonization. And we have to perceive an attack on an African country over the objections of Africa, without any concern for sovereign rights, as a step toward recolonization that is very threatening to the whole continent.


pages: 287 words: 9,386

Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander

car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, David Sedaris, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Slavoj Žižek

Yoga is much more than just an activity, it is a chance to showcase $80 pants that are tailor-made for the rigors of yoga. And last, but not least, yoga feels exotic and foreign. It has become sort of like a religion that prizes flexibility and expensive clothes. Also, deep down, white people feel that their participation makes up for years of colonial rule in India. 16 Gifted Children White people love “gifted” children. Do you know why? Because an astounding 100 percent of their kids are gifted! Isn’t that amazing? I’m pretty sure the last nongifted white child was born in 1962 in Reseda, California. Since then, it’s been a pretty sweet run.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

As British foreign secretary Jack Straw put it in 2002, “A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past . . . the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis—again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one.”10 Israel is far from the only botched handoff. In Korea, Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945 meant the end of Japanese colonial rule. But Japan was in no position to make contingency plans for maintaining legal order. The collapse of colonial rule set off a rush by the Soviets and Americans to establish control. In a hasty deal established to prevent conflicts between wartime allies, the Americans and Soviets drew a line at the 38th parallel to delineate the two occupying forces.

He liberally dispersed his letters of marque at the bustling waterfront, commissioning four ships of privateers and rechristening them the Républicain, Anti-George, Sans Culotte, and Patriote Genêt. He empowered local French consuls to act as prize courts, thus bypassing the American judicial system. He also assembled bands of adventurers to overthrow British and Spanish colonial rule. Having completed this phase of his mission, Genêt traveled overland to Philadelphia so that he could bask in the adulation of the crowds along the way, a detour that took him twenty-eight days to complete.15 Given his leisurely pace, news of Genêt’s exploits preceded his arrival on May 16. George Hammond, the British ambassador, had complained to Thomas Jefferson, the secretary of state, about the commissions and outfitting of privateers in Charleston.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Operation Climate Change While the scale and connectivity of this kind of anti-extraction activism is certainly new, the movement began long before the fight against Keystone XL. If it’s possible to trace this wave back to a time and place, it should probably be the 1990s in what is surely the most oil-ravaged place on the planet: the Niger Delta. Since the doors to foreign investors were flung open near the end of British colonial rule, oil companies have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of crude out of Nigeria, most from the Niger Delta, while consistently treating its land, water, and people with undisguised disdain. Wastewater was dumped directly into rivers, streams, and the sea; canals from the ocean were dug willy-nilly, turning precious freshwater sources salty, and pipelines were left exposed and unmaintained, contributing to thousands of spills.

(Though heading an oil company that actively sabotages climate science, lobbies aggressively against emission controls while laying claim to enough interred carbon to drown populous nations like Bangladesh and boil sub-Saharan Africa is indeed a heinous moral crime.) Nor were the movements that ended slavery and defeated colonial rule in any way bloodless: nonviolent tactics like boycotts and protests played major roles, but slavery in the Caribbean was only outlawed after numerous slave rebellions were brutally suppressed, and, of course, abolition in the United States came only after the carnage of the Civil War. Another problem with the analogy is that, though the liberation of millions of slaves in this period—some 800,000 in the British colonies and four million in the U.S.

The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat—to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid—is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to follow independence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring the jobs and homes that Martin Luther King dreamed of; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth. The fact that our most heroic social justice movements won on the legal front but suffered big losses on the economic front is precisely why our world is as fundamentally unequal and unfair as it remains.


pages: 184 words: 54,833

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

I made several visits to the country, and interviewed many of the guerrilla leaders in exile, of whom the most impressive was Robert Mugabe. His ultimate election victory in 1980, transforming Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, was a foretaste of the later triumph of Nelson Mandela. But the abolition of racism and the end of colonial rule was succeeded by a dirty war in Matabeleland against the supporters of Mugabe’s rival Joshua Nkomo, and by the awarding of confiscated agricultural property to the party loyalists of the regime. Displaying signs of megalomania, especially after the tragic death of his wife, Mr Mugabe set up a ‘youth brigade’ that was named the 21st February Movement in honour of his own birthday.


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

Both Buchanan and Lincoln declined to meet with them, however. 48 The 1983 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts would require a seceding state to assume an undefined “equitable” portion of the national debt, but it has been signed by only 22 countries and not by Canada or the United States. Daniel S. Blum, “The Apportionment of Public Debt and Assets during State Secession,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, vol. 29, no. 2 (1997): 263–98. Seceding states that emerge from colonial rule, as America did in 1776, would begin with a clean state, however. CHAPTER 4—BIGNESS AND BADNESS 1 James Boswell, “An Account of my last Interview with David Hume, Esq.,” in Boswell in Extremes 1776–78, ed. Charles Weis and F. A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), p. 11. 2 David Hume, “The Life of David Hume, Esq., Written by Himself: My Own Life,” in The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, Foreword by William B.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

DEMOCRATIC CHALLENGE Absolutism, the belief in the absolute right of kings, had been put to rest in England by 1689. The monarchy remained, however, and the nobles and other men of property who had secured the power of the vote for themselves showed no enthusiasm for broadening the democratic franchise at home or ending colonial rule abroad. Absolutist monarchy remained strong in much of the rest of Europe, particularly France, for another hundred years. However, the erosion of monarchy had begun. End of Monarchy As the American Revolution of 1776 challenged the concept of foreign rule, so the French Revolution of 1789 was a direct challenge to the institution of monarchy.

Reaching out beyond our own borders, we converted cooperative dictatorships into client states by giving their ruling classes a choice of aligning themselves with our economic and political interests and sharing in the booty or being eliminated by military force. Following World War II, when the classic forms of colonial rule became unacceptable, we turned to international debt as our favored instrument for imperial control and later to trade agreements that opened foreign economies to direct ownership and control by transnational corporations. As our history makes clear, democracy is not a gift granted by benevolent power holders.


Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

John Gunther, hardly a radical, summed up the situation this way: "So the first—and best—chance for building a united Korea was tossed away."21 And Alfred Crofts, a member of the American military government at the time, has written that "A potential unifying agency became thus one of the fifty-four splinter groups in South Korean political life."22 Syngman Rhee would be Washington's man: eminently pro-American, strongly anti-Communist, sufficiently controllable. His regime was one in which landlords, collaborators, the wealthy, and other conservative elements readily found a home. Crofts has pointed out that "Before the American landings, a political Right, associated in popular thought with colonial rule, could not exist; but shortly afterward we were to foster at least three conservative factions."23 Committed to establishing free enterprise, the USAMGIK sold off vast amounts of confiscated Japanese property, homes, businesses, industrial raw materials and other valuables. Those who could most afford to purchase these assets were collaborators who had grown rich under the Japanese, and other profiteers.

He called for the nation's economic as well as political liberation and did not shy away from contact with socialist countries. At the Independence Day ceremonies he probably managed to alienate all the attending foreign dignitaries with his speech, which read in part: Our lot was eighty years of colonial rule ... We have known tiring labor exacted in exchange for salary which did not allow us to satisfy out hunger ... We have known ironies, insults, blows which we had to endure morning, noon, and night because we were "Negroes" ... We have known that the law was never the same depending on whether it concerned a white or a Negro ...


pages: 570 words: 158,139

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

During an African safari in Zambia, the normal road to our base camp was flooded, forcing our Land Cruiser to take a circuitous route through the hills and allowing me a rare glimpse, at twilight, of one of Africa’s majestic sable antelopes. They could disappear, I was told repeatedly, since those wildlife parks are still viewed suspiciously as a legacy of white colonial rule rather than as an essential part of Africa’s culture. The most familiar countries offered surprises. During my first research trip to Cambodia I asked the minister of tourism a basic question: what is the most popular tourist spot in Phnom Penh, the capital? His answer was “Tuol Sleng.” I nearly dropped my pen.

Beneath the surface, the idea of a safari is loaded with the baggage of European colonization begun in the late-nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa” that didn’t fully end until the 1960s and beyond. The Europeans conquered some 10 million square miles of territory, tore apart traditional African nations and tribes, reassembling the land into thirty colonies ruled by white foreigners: British, French, German, Belgium, Portuguese and Italian. They extracted great wealth and treasure and subjugated the natives in a rivalry for empire. The Europeans also treated the immense continent as their private hunting ground, killing Africa’s magnificent animals for trophies and sport at such a rate that some Europeans began to worry.


Yucatan: Cancun & Cozumel by Bruce Conord, June Conord

Beryl Markham, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, feminist movement, if you build it, they will come, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Yogi Berra

Eight companions were garroted and 200 were flogged and had one ear cut off to mark them as rebels. One result of the crackdown by conservatives was the expulsion of the Jesuit order, who had been rivals of the Franciscans. This impaired the peninsula’s educational system, further retarding social progress. n Independence Day On September 28, 1821 three centuries of Spanish Colonial rule ended and Mexico, a free nation, was born. By then, the Yucatán reflected the turmoil that was going on back in Europe, where the French had overthrown the Spanish monarchy; and in Mexico, where elements of liberalism agitated for civil rights. Soon blood spilled. Traditional rivals, Campeche and Mérida fought for power while the entire peninsula ignored the rest of Mexico, which was embroiled in a series of continuing revolutions.

A church was built on this location by Montejo in 1541, almost as soon as the Spanish had established themselves in the peninsula, but the cathedral that replaced it – begun in 1639 – wasn’t finished for a century and a half. One of its spires is known as the “Spanish Tower” because it was completed during Colonial rule in 1760. The other is “La Campechana,” which was finished in 1850. Farther down Calle 10 is the Mansion Carvajal !E!. This stately building has rich marble floors, undulating Arabic arches and a sweeping staircase. It was the former home of Don Fernando Carvajal Estrada, one of Campeche’s richest hacienda owners.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

rubber was also extracted from parts of Central and South america and in several african countries, most notably liberia. See Marc Edelman, “a Central american Genocide: rubber, Slavery, nationalism, and the Destruction of the Guatusos-Malekus,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 2 (2004): 356–390; Emily lynn Osborn, “‘rubber Fever’ Commerce and French Colonial rule in Upper Guinée 1890– 1913,” Journal of African History 45, no. 3 (2004): 445–465; robtel pailey, “Slavery ain’t Dead, it’s Manufactured in liberia’s rubber,” in From the Slave Trade to “Free” Trade: How Trade Undermines Democracy and Justice in Africa, ed. patrick Burnett and Firoze Manji (nairobi: Fahamu, 2007), 77–83.

O’rourke, Morgan. “locked Out.” Risk Management 51, no. 12 (2004): 8–9. O’rourke, p. J. Republican Party Reptile: Essays and Outrages. new york: atlantic Monthly press, 1987. O’russell, David. I Heart Huckabees. Fox Searchlight pictures, 2004. Film. Osborn, Emily lynn. “‘rubber Fever’ Commerce and French Colonial rule in Upper Guinée 1890–1913.” Journal of African History 45, no. 3 (2004): 445–465. O’Toole, randal. The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future. Washington, DC: Cato institute, 2007. ———. “is Urban planning ‘Creeping Socialism’?” The Independent Review 4, no. 4 (2000): 501–516.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

The ecstatic celebrations that followed were not confined to Côte d’Ivoire. Forced labour had become a brutal fixture in other French territories too – in the rubber plantations of French Guinea, and the salt mines of Senegal – and now it was over, thanks to Felix the Battering Ram. He had eliminated the hated symbol of colonial rule, and, in doing so, created a legend around himself overnight. Other decrees granted at the same time brought about the abolition of the indigénat, the harsh system of arbitrary justice in the colonies, and also opened the way for the establishment of African political parties. But it was the Houphouet-Boigny Law of 3 April 1946 that earned the Ivoirian leader the gratitude that would sustain him in power over the next five decades.

He was photographed beside his friend, the justice minister François Mitterrand, white silk scarf knotted flamboyantly, trilby in hand, footmen helping him with his heavy coat. There were cocktail parties, lavish meals, visits to the theatre. He purchased properties around the capital, and spent more time in France than at home. But the winds of change sweeping across British territories had also reached those of the French. Many were no longer content living under colonial rule, albeit with democratic tweaks. Only self-government would do – a complete break with Paris. When change came, it was through France’s most bloody colonial conflict. By 1958 the French grip on its most promising source of oil – Algeria – was weakening, at the hands of the nationalist guerrillas of the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale.


pages: 488 words: 150,477

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, colonial rule, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, one-state solution, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, three-masted sailing ship, Yom Kippur War

Much of the friction had its roots in the Arab Rebellion. Nationalists, aligned with the ex-mufti, saw the elite or "notable" class as too willing to sell out Palestine to the Jews; for the notables, it was better to get something than nothing: Arabs had to accept the reality of the Zionists. The surrounding Arab states, just emerging from colonial rule into fledgling independence, had their own agendas. Publicly, Arab governments proclaimed their support for the ex-mufti's goal of a single independent state in Palestine and pledged to send armies to defend the Palestinian Arabs if necessary. Privately, however, some Arab leaders harbored deep reservations about joining any future conflict and were wary of one another's territorial ambitions for Palestine.

Whatever the circumstances, the news itself would not be forgotten: On the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, the UN General Assembly had voted, thirty-three states in favor, thirteen opposed, with ten abstaining, to partition Palestine into two separate states—one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. A UN minority report, which recommended a single state for Arabs and Jews, with a constitution respecting "human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction as to race, sex, language or religions," was rejected. Palestine was to be divided. After three decades of colonial rule, the British would leave on May 15, 1948. If all went according to plan, the Arab and Jewish states would be born on the same day. The Khairis were in shock. Under the UN partition plan, their hometown of al-Ramla, along with neighboring Lydda and the coastal city of Jaffa, was to become part of an Arab Palestinian state.


Lancaster by John Nichol

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Louis Blériot, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

A fellow crewman, Sam King, a future Mayor of Southwark (the first black mayor in London, and one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival), remarked that, ‘The RAF taught me two things: the importance of discipline and the importance of honesty.’4 * * * Cy’s friend, eighteen-year-old William ‘Billy’ Strachan, had left school in Kingston, Jamaica, in December 1939 and started work as a Civil Service clerk. Like so many of his contemporaries, he still regarded Britain as the Mother Country, even though there had been nothing particularly motherly about her administration in the Caribbean. There had been some slow improvement in the twentieth century, but colonial rule had been divisive and discriminatory. By the mid-1930s, the seeds of independence were already sown, but when Billy heard appeals on the radio to members of the Empire to take part in the war effort, he was inspired by the spirit of adventure and the desire to prevent an evil regime from imposing itself on humanity.

I also think that his awareness of my mother’s huge suffering and loss in war made him feel that his experience was somewhat privileged.’8 * * * Former Lancaster pilot Billy Strachan hoped to settle once more in Jamaica with his wife Joyce and their three young sons. The spirited youth was now a war hero held in high regard, but gaining promotion in the Civil Service under white colonial rule remained as difficult as ever. He returned to Britain, where he became a senior Law Court clerk, and later head of equal opportunities with the Inner London Education Authority. After playing his part in the defeat of Nazism, he found himself immersed in a lifelong battle for equality. ‘We passionately believed that the abolition of exploitation of man by man, of oppression and of human degradation, could be achieved.’


Fodor's Essential Belgium by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, bike sharing, blood diamond, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Easter island, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute cuisine, index card, Kickstarter, low cost airline, New Urbanism, out of africa, QR code, retail therapy, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

While much of its collection is invaluable from a scholarly point of view, it came at an incalculable cost, rooted in Leopold II’s brutal colonial rule. Even the building itself, built for Leopold II’s 1897 Exposition trumpeting his violent success in the Congo Free State (1885–1908), commemorated the names of those Belgians who died there, etched into its very walls; nothing on the 10 million Congolese estimated to have died under Belgian rule. It reopened in 2018 with less emphasis on explorers and stuffed wildlife (though there is still some). The new version focuses more on Congolese voices and accurately reflecting the horrific consequences of Belgium’s colonial rule (1908–62) of a country 76 times its own size.


pages: 1,000 words: 247,974

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

This was only a minuscule part of German cotton imports (indeed, Germany never got more than half a percent of its cotton supply from its colonies), but the rate of expansion (increasing by a factor of thirty-five in seven years) suggested that colonial cotton would have a bright future.64 Yet despite such a promising beginning, after 1909, further increases in cotton exports eluded the Tuskegee experts, the Colonial Economic Committee, and the German colonial administration. In 1913, the last full year of German colonial rule in Togo, cotton exports were slightly lower than they had been in 1909. The limits to such an expansion were largely rooted in the ways cotton fitted into the agricultural schemes of local producers. Ewe cultivators, after all, had their own ideas about commodity production, ideas that did not necessarily correspond with those of the Tuskegee experts or the German colonialists.

There too, the promotion of cotton industrialization became a deliberate project of the state.42 Japan experienced an even greater boom in cotton manufacturing. Indeed, it was of such magnitude that Japan became in the course of just a few decades the world’s dominant cotton manufacturing power.43 Japan’s history shares some features with Brazil in the late nineteenth century: Neither of these countries was subject to direct colonial rule, but they were vulnerable to significant influences from abroad. They faced huge cotton textile imports. Their economic elites were rooted in a political economy radically different from that of domestic industrialization, but those elites saw new elements emerging that altered the sources of their income and the policy predilections of their class.

hidReportRetrievalName=Table+04+Cotton+Area%2c+Yield%2c+and+Production&hidReportRetrievalID=851&hidReportRetrievalTemplateID=1; Biedermann, “Die Versorgung,” 3. 42. Revue des cultures coloniales 12–13 (1903): 302. 43. For Central Asia, see for example Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 135–36; Toksöz, “Çukurova,” 1, 13, 37, 79; Osterhammel, Kolonialismus, 17ff. 44. Nebol’sin, Ocherki torgovli Rossii, 25; Kostenko, Sredniaia Aziia, 213. 45. Nebol’sin, Ocherki torgovli Rossii, 25; Rozhkova, Ekonomicheskiie, 68; Whitman, “Turkestan Cotton,” 199, 200; Schanz, “Die Baumwolle,” 88, 368; Biedermann, “Die Versorgung,” 72; Sahadeo, “Cultures,” 3. 46.


pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

In fact, the power struggle between the new president and his CIA director started before Kennedy was even sworn in, when Dulles took advantage of the transition period to carry out a brazen act of insubordination. Patrice Lumumba was fleeing for his life. Sworn in less than six months earlier as the Congo’s first democratically elected leader, following the end of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule, Lumumba was now on the run from the CIA-backed Congolese military forces that had deposed him. Lumumba had broken free from house arrest in the capital, Leopoldville, on the evening of November 27, 1960. He was now making his way through a tropical downpour across the countryside to Stanleyville, a bastion of loyal nationalism some 750 miles to the east, where he hoped to raise an army and reclaim his office.

As he continued to wrestle with fallout from the Bay of Pigs crisis, JFK was suddenly besieged with howls of outrage from a major ally, accusing his own security services of seditious activity. It was a stinging embarrassment for the new American president, who was scheduled to fly to Paris for a state visit the following month. To add to the insult, the coup had been triggered by de Gaulle’s efforts to bring French colonial rule in Algeria to an end—a goal that JFK himself had ardently championed. The CIA’s support for the coup was one more defiant display of contempt—a back of the hand aimed not only at de Gaulle but at Kennedy. JFK took pains to assure Paris that he strongly supported de Gaulle’s presidency, phoning Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, to directly communicate these assurances.

But to Kennedy—exhausted from the constant barrage of Cold War crises abroad and the turmoil within his own administration—that sounded exactly like what he wanted: a pleasure trip to Ireland. For Kennedy—whose eight great-grandparents had all left Ireland for Boston, part of the heartbreaking depopulation of the island under British colonial rule—returning to Ireland was both a homecoming and a farewell. The first U.S. president to visit Ireland—and an Irish American one at that—JFK was embraced by the Irish people as one of their own as he traveled throughout the island, visiting his ancestral homes and drinking tea and eating cold salmon sandwiches with his few remaining Irish relatives.


What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, lone genius, spice trade, women in the workforce

The later rise of the other new Asian economic powers brought only reproach. The proud heirs of ancient civilizations had got used to hiring Western firms to carry out tasks that their own contractors and technicians were apparently not capable of doing. Now they found themselves inviting contractors and technicians from Korea—only recently emerged from Japanese colonial rule—to perform these same tasks. Following is bad enough; limping in the rear is far worse. By all the standards that matter in the modern world—economic development and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights—what was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low.


pages: 186 words: 57,798

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

There are several problems with this argument, the first being that the Danes and isolated groups of religious pacifists in other countries had demonstrated that even against Nazis nonviolence could achieve some goals. But those who dismiss Gandhi's accomplishments because they were “only against the British” are also overlooking how ruthless and brutal British colonial rule could be. The history of British rule on the Subcontinent belies this myth, especially their treatment of the Pathans along the Hindu Kush, with its strategic Khyber Pass, where the British tried to control by fear the gateway from Afghanistan to India for a century. In 1842 the British attempted to secure the area by sending their 4,500-man Army of the Indus through the Khyber Pass.


pages: 1,327 words: 360,897

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Winston Churchill’s ‘half-naked fakir’ had helped bring an empire to its knees but he was unable to hold back the violent passions checked by colonial rule. After being shot by a fellow Hindu in January 1948, the funeral of the penniless anarchist and pacifist became a huge State affair, organized by the military authorities, with a British general in charge. It was the final irony of a complex life. Gandhi once defined himself as a politician trying to be a saint. He was certainly a practical politician, ready to make compromises and forge temporary alliances in his overriding drive to make India independent of colonial rule. Even so, as George Orwell observed, he managed to shake empires by sheer spiritual power and ‘compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!’.

He wanted to restrict government to the regulation of contracts and provision of public works. Yet in arguing his case for representative government, he called for plural voting in which the educated would have more votes than the ignorant. Above all, he followed Rousseau in arguing that ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,’ thereby justifying colonial rule.11 It is Mill’s belief in the guiding role of an intellectual elite which prevents him from being regarded as an anarchist. He may have been a great libertarian in his defence of the freedoms of thought, expression and individuality, but he frequently stresses the need for intellectual authority rather than ‘intellectual anarchy’.12 He often pictured the happy society as one in which the people are voluntarily led by an elite of wise guardians.

P. 378 Pol Pot 629 The Pole Star 310, 366 pulis 71, 564, 603, 608, 613 Polish nationalism 33, 255, 270, 271, 285, 310 Politics 502 Poll Tax riots (London) 494, 638 Pope, Alexander 15 Popular Front (Spain) 657 popular sovereignty 125–6 Popular State 325–6 Popular Will 305 population growth 198, 212, 331, 620, 627 Porete, Marguérite 88 Portugese Revolution 468 Possibilist Party 436 Post-Impressionism 431, 664 post-anarchism 677–9 post-left anarchism 672, 676, 679–80 post-modern anarchism 672, 678–9 post-structuralist anarchism 672, 677–8 Pouget, Emile 437, 441, 442 poverty 210, 237, 243, 326, 388 power 45–8, 647–8; Ballou 82; Comfort 594; Foucault 585–6; Nietzsche 159, 585; will to 47, 159, 232, 561; see also authority Powys, John Cowper 492 Prada, Manuel 509 Prague: Congress (1848) 271; rising (1848) 272; (1968) xiv Pravda 466 primirivism 683–4, 689 prisons 31, 585 El Productor 514–15 progress 202, 340 proletariat, dictatorship of 259, 297, 301, 304, 477, 508; see also class promises 205 property: State ownership 282; workers’ associations 281–2 property, views on: Aquinas 76; Bakunin 277, 281–2; Carpenter 169; De Sade 145, 147; Gandhi 531; Godwin 76, 210–11; Goldman 403; Kropotkin 326; Landauer 413; Malatesta 360; Morelly 118, 239; Proudhon 145, 211. 230, 238–9, 243–4, 253–4, 385; Reclus 343; Rousseau 123–4; Stirner 227, 230; Tolstoy 376, 378; Tucker 390; Warren 385; Winstanley 99 La Protesta 505 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 234–62; anarchist position ix, x, xiii, 5, 238, 239, 433–4, 682; association 625–7; attitude to women 49, 157, 256; authority 43; Bakunin 269–70; Christianity 74, 80; competition 218, 627; contracts 23, 247; democracy 23; direct action 7; equality 49, 255–7, 277; ethics 249–52; federalism 252–3, 255, 259; Fourier’s influence 149, 237–8, 242; freedom 40; government 1, 19–20; Holyoake on 134; human nature 248–9, 260, 322; ideal 303; imprisonment 245; influence 262, 270, 364–5, 366, 375, 431, 435, 446, 469, 479, 490, 498, 507, 543, 574, 587, 632, 682; justice 39, 49, 250, 255, 260; law 247; liberty 16, 575; Marx’s attack 26, 27; Morelly 118; motivation 156; nationalism 32, 33; natural order 16, 17, 592; politics 252–62; 657; property 145, 211, 230, 238–9, 243–4, 253–4, 497; revolution 658; society 13, 625, 628; Spencer on 167; State 245–6, 391; Tolstoy meeting 366; translations of works 389, 413, 453, 479, 498 Proudhonism 7, 236 Prove 553–4 Provo movement xiv, 485–6, 553–4, 638, 699 Prussia 285 psychiatry 31 public opinion, role of 649, 650–1; Bakunin’s view 278, 299; Godwin 31, 217, 329, 338, 372; Kropotkin 31, 329, 338; Proudhon 251; Tolstoy 372, 377; see also censure Pugachev, Yemelyan Ivanovich 283, 469 punishment, views on: anarchist 649; Foucault 585, 649; Godwin 29–31, 208; Kropotkin 31, 314–15; Stirner 230–1; Tolstoy 29, 380–1; Warren 387; Wilde 178–9 Purchase, Graham 689 Qobbath, King 86 Quakers 102–3, 496 La Questione Sociale 347, 505 Quit India movement 425 Rabelais, François 37, 108–9, 114, 344, 431, 604 race, views on: Bakunir 270, 306; Kroporkin 328; Proudhon 256–7; Reclus 340–1 Radical Review 389 Radin, Paul 607 Radowitsky, Simon 505 Ramaer, Hans 486 Rand, Ayn 561, 562 Ranters 4, 77–8, 96, 100, 102–7, 392, 487 Raspail, François Vincent 244 Ravachol, François-Gaudius 343, 438, 440 Rawls, John 50 Razin, Stepan Timofeyevich (Stenka) 283, 469 Read, Herbert 587–93, 602; anarchism 492, 580; Camus preface 582, Carpenter’s influence 169; education 589–90, 600; liberty and freedom 36; Nietzsche 155; Stirner 220, 221 Reagan, Ronald xiii, 559 Reason 249, 487, 592, 612 El Rebelde 516 Reclaim the Streets 697 Reclus, Elie 437 Reclus, Elisée 339–44, 437, 605, 693, 703; anarchy 189, 436; Bakunin correspondence 305; Bakunin’s funeral 436; First World War 353; food production 627; freedom 37; imprisonment 435; influence 439, 515, 516, 520, 689; Ishikawa 525; Kropotkin editions 313; Malatesta friendship 347; revolution 634 Red Brigades 452, 558 Red International 498 Reformation 78, 93, 96 Regeneración 510, 512 Reich, Wilhelm 41, 149, 540, 586, 592, 596 Reid, Jamie 493 Reinsdorf, August 481 Reitman, Ben 407–8 religion: Bakunin 80–1; De Sade 147; Godwin 201; Huxley’s Island 572–3; Left-Hegelians 223; relationship with anarchy 75; see also Buddhism, Christianity, Church, God Renaissance 4, 96, 108–9, 324 Le Représentant du Peuple 243 Resistance 502 Revelation, Book of 75, 87 Revolt 492 La Révolte 313, 341, 437 Le Revulté 313, 437, 632 La Revolution Ptolétarienne 584 revolution, views on: Bakunin 283–8, 299–308; Bookchin 616, 617; Camus 582, 583, 593; Comfort 596; Engels 637; Foucault 586; Godwin 218, 630; Goldman 405; Kropotkin 325–6; Landauer 412; Malatesta 357–8, 360; Most 416; Proudhon 243; Reclus 344; Stirner 583, 593 Rexroth, Kenneth 502 rhizomes 696 Rhodakanaty, Plotino 509–10 Richard, Albert 286 Richard II, King 90–1 Richards, Vernon 401, 465, 492 rights: anarcho-capitalist view 564; Bakunin’s view 296; Godwin 204–5; natural 110, 134; Paine 204; Stirner 226; Wollstonecraft 204 Ristori, Oreste 508 Ritter, Alan 40, 44 Rivera y Orbaneja, Miguel Primo de 457 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 148 Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore de 128, 144, 146–7, 432, 629 Rocker, Rudolf 417–21, 482; anarchism 641; Arbeter Fraint 417–18, 482, 490; Chelčický 92; imprisonment 351; influence 578, 674; Jungen 417, 481; La Boétie 111; Landauer 414; Nation-State 34–5, 419; Nietzsche 155; revolutionary plans 444; Russian regime 477; wealth 356 Rodosha Rentai Undo 527 Roig de San Martin, Enrique 514 Roman: Church 75; Empire 18; Stoics 70 Romans, Epistle to 75, 106 Romanticism 122 Roosevelt, Theodore ix, 499–500 Rose Street Club 489 Rossetti, Arthur 491 Rossetti, Helen 491 Rossetti, Olivia 491 Rossetti, William Michael 491 Rossi, Giovanni 508 Roszak, Theodore 543, 603 Rothbard, Murray 561–2; anarchist position 641; individual bargaining power 46; La Boétie’s influence 112; Lockean position 560; Right libertarianism 642; Spooner’s influence 389, 502; Tucker’s influence 502 Rotten, Johnny 493–4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 121–8, 683, 684: civil liberty 37, 127; colonial rule 165; Enlightenment 115; freedom 38, 127; general will 18, 119, 127; influence 153, 246, 363, 431, 524; laws 126–7, 269; nationalism 32, 33; natural order 15, 124, 169, 643, 686; popular sovereignty 125–6; social contract 22, 126, 224, 228; State 18, 124, 126 Roux, Jacques 433 Royal Geographical Society 315 Rubin, Jerry 502, 543 Ruge, Arnold 222, 267, 268–9, 479 Rumpff (police officer) 481 Ruskin, John 331, 422 Russell, Bertrand 566–70, 676; anarchism xv; education 578; Goldman 400; law 648, 651; power 45; Rocker 419; State 645; work 655; world government 572 Russell, Dora 569 Russia 469–78, 699–70; empire 33; famine (1891–2) 370; Goldman’s stay 399–400, 404–5; narodniks 236, 311–12; Soviet Republic 334; Tsarist 266, 269, 273–4, 283, 309–13, 362–6, 370, 378–9, 382; see also Soviet Union, Ukraine Russian Revolution (1905) 379, 470 Russian Revolution (1917) x-xi, 5, 27, 333–4, 337, 353, 399–400, 470–1, 501, 504, 516, 524, 637, 681 Russo-Japanese War 524 Sacco, Nicola 501, 568, 634 Sadduccees 85 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 234 St George’s Hill, Surrey see George’s Hill Saint-lmier Conference (1877) 505, 510 Saint-lmier International (1872) 302, 484 St Petersburg 311–12 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de 17, 152, 164, 238, 256, 479 Salmon, Joseph 102 Salome, Lou 157 Salt, Henry 491 Samuels, H.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In this respect, postindustrial immigration to the United States was not unique. European countries were experiencing the same phenomenon. Industrialization had been accompanied, everywhere that it occurred in the late nineteenth century, by colonial expansion—military, political, and economic. (Sometimes this expansion took the form of direct colonial rule; sometimes it consisted of informal means of control.) Deindustrialization, in the late twentieth century, was accompanied by immigration from former colonies. These different events were part of an interconnected historical process, and to understand the differences between the two waves of immigration, we need to understand the entire historical process.


pages: 204 words: 60,319

Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel

colonial rule, double entry bookkeeping, Georg Cantor, high-speed rail, offshore financial centre, seminal paper, Y2K

It was fun to speculate on such things, and it kept me entertained as I waited to hear about the fate of my precious find. In Bangkok, it helped me relieve the immense tension of waiting for news about the fate of K-127 and whether Hab Touch would follow through on his promise. George Cœdès returned to his native France some years after French colonial rule in Indochina ended, as these new nations grappled with questions of democracy, parliaments, monarchy, and Communism. In Paris, he had a prestigious academic position and continued to write papers and books about Southeast Asia. He was highly decorated, having been awarded the rank of commander in Thailand’s Order of the White Elephant, as well as France’s prestigious Legion of Honor.


pages: 200 words: 64,329

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

They stopped grieving over the loss of the thirteen American Colonies in the exhilaration of making the Industrial Revolution and acquiring a new empire in India. In our day we have had recourse to this simple but effective British philosophy once again in meeting our own generation’s ordeal. Recognising, as we did in good time, that the days of colonial rule were numbered, we decided to make the liquidation of our 19th-century Empire into a festival instead of a funeral. We christened it the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth… Simultaneously we found another new world to win within the coasts of our own island. In our generation we have won not only the Commonwealth but the Welfare State… The Welfare State and the Commonwealth are obviously two of those exhilarating enterprises that are England’s traditional prescription for easing the painfulness of change.


pages: 600 words: 165,682

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, bank run, colonial rule, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, old-boy network, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Terrorism, says Rapoport, was invented to “provoke government to respond indiscriminately, undermining…its own credibility and legitimacy.”14 Fatah cribbed the strategy from The Wretched of the Earth, psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s treatise on decolonization, which anointed “absolute violence” as the only means of ending colonial rule. By killing, rebels would spur rulers to slaughter, in turn provoking more of the oppressed to rise up. Murder, wrote Fanon, is also therapeutic; it “frees the native from his inferiority complex…it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”15 Put bluntly, he prescribed killing to heal the injured masculinity of the colonized.

The rest of the land could conceivably, in some indefinite future, be turned over to Jordan, he said, though the economic ties would remain. Explaining why Israel should spend money on social services for the territories, he recalled a visit to the West African country of Togo. People still had good memories there of German colonial rule before World War I, he said; the Germans “left orchards and culture.” Israel, he argued, should follow the example of benevolent colonialism. “I’m going to explode,” Sapir interrupted, saying he cared more about poverty inside Israel than “the Bedouin woman in the Sinai you describe so emotionally,” and insisting that Dayan’s “integration” meant annexation.38 Sapir had more support in the cabinet than in Beersheba, and Dayan’s proposals were rejected.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

Melby, was a joint State Department–Defense Department diplomatic effort to determine the long-range nature of American objectives in the region. Its real purpose, classified secret, was to examine how communist-backed fighters, also called insurgents or guerrillas, were resisting and undermining French colonial rule in Vietnam. When the Melby-Erskine team arrived in Vietnam, French military officers handed General Erskine and his associates five thousand pages of reports to read. Erskine found the request ridiculous. The French “haven’t won a war since Napoleon,” he told Godel and the team. “Why listen to a bunch of second raters when they are losing this war?”

To Godel, the ramifications were profound. The French wanted the soldiers’ minds; the South Vietnamese brought them heads. French commanders wanted intelligence; South Vietnamese soldiers wanted revenge. The way Godel saw it, the French colonialists were trying to fight the Viet Minh guerrillas according to colonial rules of war. But the South Vietnamese, who were receiving weapons and training from the French forces, were actually fighting a different kind of war, based on different rules. Guerrilla warfare was irrational. It was asymmetrical. It was about cutting off the enemy’s head to send a message back home.


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

One wrote that the Filipinos have already accepted the arbitrament of war, and war is the worst condition conceivable, especially when waged by an Anglo-Saxon race which despises its opponent as an alien or inferior people. Yet the Filipinos accepted it with a full knowledge of its horror and of the sacrifices in life and property which they knew they would be called upon to make.108 The period of explicit colonial rule, lasting from 1898 to 1946 (with a brief World War II interregnum of Japanese occupation), was characterized by economic and political domination by U.S. administrators and a local and U.S.-based economic elite. The local elite was made up largely of major landholders whose interests were cemented to those of the United States by the privileged U.S. market position of Philippine sugar, though there was also a business class, partly independent but much of it servicing predominant U.S. economic interests.

The Philippine Communist Party (PKP), which had been in the forefront of the anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle, attempted “to enter the Philippine political arena legally through a front political party, the Democratic Alliance (DA),” but “failed, as DA-elected members of the Philippine Congress were denied their seats...”110 The insurgency that followed was suppressed with extensive U.S. aid. This peasant rebellion had its roots in grievances and injustices that had become increasingly severe under U.S. colonial rule, and was a direct consequence of the violence and lawlessness of the elites linked to the U.S. colonial system and the brutal postwar repression of the anti-Japanese resistance forces by the United States, which lent its support to the Japanese collaborators among the landowning classes and devoted itself to destruction of the anti-Japanese resistance, very much as in Thailand, and for essentially the same reasons.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

For centuries, scholars from all over the Muslim world have come to Cairo to study at al-Azhar University, the Islamic world’s leading academic institution. Among them were many Afghans, figures of considerable learning and stature who transmitted the new ideas of the Muslim Brothers back to their home country. One of the most influential Islamists of the century was neither an Arab nor a Persian. Abul Ala Mawdudi was born under British colonial rule in India in 1903. Mawdudi chose a religious education, but for family reasons he ended up attending several seminaries rather than completing his studies at a single one, as was the norm. This exposure to a variety of schools, as well as his fluency in English, uniquely predisposed him to a vision of Islam that ignored parochial bounds.

By the time the lease approached its renewal date, it was clear that the era of colonialism had passed and that the Chinese government was no longer willing to consider an extension of the arrangement. And if Britain could no longer control the New Territories, it could no longer hope to hang on to Hong Kong proper, either. It was time for colonial rule to end. But there is, of course, a deeper logic to the visual union of Thatcher and Deng—though it is not mentioned on the commemorative plaque. It was these two figures who did more to promote the market-driven globalization of the late twentieth century than just about anyone else. Their ideological origins could not have been further apart—Deng the devoted Communist, Thatcher the dedicated Cold Warrior—but their rhetoric was often strikingly similar.


pages: 538 words: 164,533

1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, feminist movement, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, land reform, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

The French government had grown concerned at the level of animosity that France’s allies had been directing at it. France was enjoying a quiet and prosperous moment. After World War II, the Republic had fought its own Vietnam war, a fact that de Gaulle seemed to have forgotten. Ho Chi Minh, America’s enemy, had been born under French colonial rule the same year as de Gaulle and had spent most of his life fighting the French. He had once lived in Paris under the pseudonym Nguyen O Phap, which means “Nguyen who hates the French.” During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had warned de Gaulle that after the war France should give Indochina its independence.

Díaz Ordaz, as president of Mexico, the appointed leader of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was heir to the revolution and guardian of the stated contradiction in the ruling party’s carefully worded name. In 1910 Mexico had been a labyrinth of political chaos and social injustice. Centuries of inept colonial rule followed by corrupt dictatorships and foreign occupations then culminated in thirty years of one-man rule. It was a familiar pattern. After years of chaos, the dictator Porfirio Díaz offered stability. But in 1910 he was eighty years old and had arranged for no successor or any institutions to outlast him.


pages: 555 words: 163,712

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, computer age, defense in depth, European colonialism, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, plutocrats, Scientific racism, undersea cable

Besides that, citizens had been imprisoned without charges “for the security of the state.” When Prime Minister Mustafa el-Nahas had held elections in March, “certain opposition candidates were told to withdraw… opposition voters were thrown into jail.” The British maintained “their 19th century tradition” of colonial rule by force, Fellers said. Only a few patriotic Egyptians showed leadership, preventing a rebellion by relying on Islam’s rationalist tradition and its prohibition of treason. When the war ended, Egypt would demand that Britain leave and give up control of the Suez Canal Zone. “Should these demands be rejected fighting will begin,” he concluded.13 The report sounded credible, certainly as a description of an educated political class that could read Mein Kampf.

Churchill spoke, characteristically, against tyranny and for the “liberation of the peoples of Europe.” He also declared that he had “not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” His words revealed the contradiction in the entire British imperial project, and in Churchill himself: the tectonic clash between democracy at home and colonial rule over hundreds of millions of people outside Europe.3 Churchill wanted to believe that the war would be a mere interlude and that the empire would endure. His words suggest he knew differently. The war could not preserve the empire. But in complex ways, it shaped what happened afterward, when the empire came undone.


Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, blood diamond, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, crossover SUV, Donald Davies, European colonialism, failed state, feminist movement, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, mass immigration, megacity, oil rush, prediction markets, random walk, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, unemployed young men

The presence of longstanding ethnic divisions further muddies the picture. Religious, language, and racial divides form the fault lines of today’s conflict. Chad’s south is mainly Christian and black, while northerners look to the Arab and Muslim worlds for identity and inspiration. Until the start of French colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, much of Chad’s black African population was enslaved by Muslim northerners, and not just by a privileged elite: even working class Muslim fishermen on Lake Chad owned black slaves. Chad seems caught in a “conflict trap”: poverty drives a desperate population to armed violence; armed violence begets more poverty; and the growing economic desperation generates ever more recruits for warring factions.


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

These new colonial borders often split up large, harmonious ethnic groups. Suddenly, some members of the group became residents of one new country; others, a second country—along with, often, members of a different ethnic group with whom the first group wasn’t so harmonious. Ethnic strife tended to be tamped down by colonial rule, but when the Europeans eventually returned to Europe, the African countries where unfriendly ethnic groups had been artificially jumbled were far more likely to devolve into war. The scars of colonialism still haunt South America as well. Spanish conquistadors who found silver or gold in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia would enslave the locals to work in the mines.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

To suggest that we could reform the EU in a progressive, democratic way today is on a par with those who suggested it was possible to reform England’s absolute monarchy, to make it less autocratic and meet the needs of the people, right until the morning of the execution of King Charles I in 1649; or those who proposed a reformed, more consensual form of British colonial rule at the moment when the Declaration of American independence was being signed in 1776. As Tom Paine put it, arguing for ruling monarchies to be abolished rather than reformed and preserved in the revolutionary era of the eighteenth century: ‘It will always happen when a thing is originally wrong that amendments do not make it right, and it often happens that they do as much mischief one way as good the other.’3 There are moments in history where the only hope for freedom lies with beheading the tyrant, or kicking out the oppressors.


pages: 244 words: 69,183

Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaf

3D printing, Anthropocene, colonial rule, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Skype, wikimedia commons

Our knowledge of these evolutionary changes owes a tremendous debt to one particular location on the planet where the soft bodies of coleoids fossilized in abundance.24 In 1883, when Palaeoctopus was first described, the rocks it came from were part of the Ottoman Empire.25 In 1944, when the French paleontologist Jean Roger published “Le plus ancien Céphalopode Octopode fossil connu,” the newly independent Lebanese government had just overturned French colonial rule.26 It’s time to take a little detour into the intertwined history of humans and fossils. Fossils in History: From Fishing Fields to Buffalo Stones People have noticed fossils of shelled cephalopods all over the world since ancient times, but soft-bodied fossils have been much harder to come by.


pages: 265 words: 71,143

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order by Jason Sharman

British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, death of newspapers, European colonialism, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land tenure, offshore financial centre, passive investing, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, profit maximization, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs

In Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliances, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World, edited by Wayne E. Lee, 81–106. New York: New York University Press. Peers, Douglas M. 2015. “Military Revolution and State Formation Reconsidered: Mir Qasim, Haider Ali and Transition to Colonial Rule in the 1760s.” In Chinese and Indian Warfare: From the Classical Age to 1870, edited by Roy Kaushik and Peter Lorge, 302–323. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Perdue, Peter C. 2005. China Marches West. The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Phillips, Andrew. 2011.


pages: 221 words: 71,449

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming

British Empire, colonial rule, Downton Abbey, financial independence, friendly fire, Skype

It had been part of the British Empire since the early nineteenth century, and its huge rubber and tin resources made it a hugely valuable asset to the UK. But after the Second World War, Malaya saw growing unrest as its economy suffered, and soon the Malayan National Liberation Army, the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party, began a campaign to disrupt British trade in an attempt to overthrow its colonial rule. In 1948 three European plantation managers were murdered and what became known as the Malayan Emergency began. (Actually the Malayans called it the “Anti-British National Liberation War,” but the rubber and tin companies used the term “emergency” because they would not have been able to claim for any losses from Lloyds of London had the term “war” been used.


The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

In 1962, Arnold Toynbee made a crucial point about the ways in which the English had historically avoided occasions for self-pity: In the past the English have avoided the awful mistake of crying over spilt milk. They have quickly found and milked new cows, instead of standing still and wringing their hands. … In our day we have had recourse to this simple but effective British philosophy once again in meeting our own generation’s ordeal. Recognising, as we did in good time, that the days of colonial rule were numbered, we decided to make the liquidation of our 19th-century Empire into a festival instead of a funeral. … Simultaneously we found another new world to win within the coasts of our own island. In our generation we have won not only the Commonwealth but the Welfare State… The Welfare State and the Commonwealth are obviously two of those exhilarating enterprises that are England’s traditional prescription for easing the painfulness of change.29 Toynbee’s point about the Commonwealth is probably, in the long term, wrong – it may have eased the pain of withdrawing from Empire but it has never been an English exhilaration.


Great American Railroad Journeys by Michael Portillo

Alistair Cooke, California gold rush, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, invention of the telephone, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, railway mania, short selling, the High Line, transcontinental railway, union organizing

Mindful of the scale of loss without resolution, he wanted to keep up morale in the Union and steady the nerve of those who had doubts. Yet he also hoped to reach out to those in the south who were also mourning their dead and feeling disillusioned by the war. Instinctively, he knew he needed to reference the lofty ideals of the Declaration of Independence, to recall how courageously Americans had freed themselves from colonial rule less than a century previously. Crucially, he wanted to remind people that liberty and equality were at the heart of those actions. The battle at Gettysburg left thousands dead and was the most costly confrontation of the war in human terms. It compares with fewer than 5,000 fallen soldiers at the first Battle of Bull Run.


pages: 243 words: 77,516

Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals by John Lefevre

airport security, Bear Stearns, blood diamond, buy and hold, colonial rule, credit crunch, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, income inequality, jitney, junk bonds, lateral thinking, market clearing, Occupy movement, Sloane Ranger, the market place

Carpet or Cock Living in the Mandarin Oriental is great while I get acclimated, but after a few months, I’m ready to move into my own apartment, which according to my company’s housing allowance turns out to be a three-bedroom on the forty-sixth floor of a brand-new luxury Mid-Levels tower. Bear in mind that the average-sized apartment for a family of four in Hong Kong is approximately 550 square feet, and that I’m coming in at over three times that size, as a single guy who will spend most of his time in the office or on an airplane. That, added to the legacy of decades of colonial rule, may help explain why there is some resentment toward expats in Hong Kong, particularly in the office. My first order of business, after taking down half the Minotti store, is to find a suitable maid. There is no shortage of experts to guide me in this process. During my many “Welcome to Asia” dinners, this becomes a frequent topic of conversation.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Rattails were being turned in by the dozens, but the rats in the street didn’t seem to be getting any less numerous. Instead, the clever Vietnamese were severing the tails, turning them in for the money, and releasing the rats back into the sewers to make more baby rats whose tails could eventually be lopped off. A similar incident was observed in India during the time of British colonial rule. A reward was set for every dead cobra and so enterprising Indians began to – you guessed it – raise cobras on snake farms. The Cobra Effect is now shorthand for what is officially referred to as Campbell’s’ Law, which states, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Campbell says of the tendency for measurement to corrupt efficacy, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”


pages: 232 words: 78,701

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

affirmative action, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, clean water, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Skype, Snapchat, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, upwardly mobile

History is crowded with people who just randomly showed up in Africa and grabbed some land, like the cradle of civilization is a Monopoly board. There are too many countries on the continent that celebrate fifty-year (or less) national anniversaries because they just recently got independence from Britain, Spain, or France. The only African country to have never been under colonial rule at any point is Ethiopia. Robbing a place of its resources and pilfering the land dry can get tiring after a couple of centuries, so when colonialists decided to be done with wherever they had conquered, they left behind political, socioeconomic, and class-structure issues that rendered countries in shambles.


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

After spending several winter nights grazing my way across Seoul’s vibrant street-food scene and following a strict diet of skewers of food grilled on open-air braziers, the private tatami room at the Millennium Hilton is a pleasant change; the quiet also makes it easier for me to hear the pair of interpreters who are with us. Korea is an unlikely laboratory for experiments in shortening the workweek. In 1953, after decades of Japanese colonial rule, World War II, and the devastation of the Korean War, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Nearly seventy years later, its economy had grown an astounding 31,000 fold, and it was one of fifteen countries in the world with an annual GDP of more than $1 trillion. Hard-driving high-tech companies like Hyundai, Samsung, and LG helped transform this small, resource-poor, and rugged country into a global economic and cultural powerhouse.


pages: 235 words: 73,873

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe by Andrew Adonis

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Dominic Cummings, eurozone crisis, imperial preference, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, oil shock, Suez crisis 1956

As Bew suggests, if we are to learn lessons from his great reforming government, it is more in terms of its ethos than in its specific policy programme. We cannot go back to 1945, in foreign policy terms as much as in any other respect. Nor should we wish to. When Attlee died, Britain still had an empire and we should be proud of the role that Labour governments played in ending colonial rule over much of the world. But there are also profound challenges that any social-democratic government faces today which Attlee did not have to take into account to the same extent, notably those challenges we associate with a globalised economy and powerful multinational corporates. In the aftermath of war, Britain’s institutions and its political class emerged strengthened in the political and popular imagination.


Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

India is like an old couple that has won the lottery and Cameron just happened to ‘pop by’ with the head of HSBC to see if there’s any gardening he can help them with or if they need anything from the shops. While in India, David wore a bandana, went barefoot and made a chapatti. So, that should make up for years of colonial rule and the Amritsar massacre. Cameron’s going to divert money from the foreign aid budget to defence, by cleverly rebranding missions as ‘conflict prevention’. Fair enough. After all, the more people that die in military activity, the less there are left to need aid. But the charities aren’t happy.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Then he encountered a book that would change the course of his life. 2 THE PRESENT IS NO DIFFERENT PYONGYANG 1968 Kang Chol-hwan was born in 1968 in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, but his parents were brought up mostly in Japan. From the late 1950s, Zainichi Koreans—ethnic Koreans who had migrated to Japan during Japan’s colonial rule over Korea or in the late 1940s in search of better opportunities—were steadily fed propaganda promoting North Korea as a socialist paradise. Kim Il-sung himself delivered remarks welcoming returnees, dangling a life with quality education and dignified work as rightful citizens. The call for repatriation was a joint effort.


Frommer's Egypt by Matthew Carrington

airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, colonial rule, Easter island, Internet Archive, land tenure, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, open economy, rent control, rolodex, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, Yom Kippur War

Debts driven by the expense of modernization, a profligate elite, and 1875 Egypt’s financial situation were so precarious that the country’s share of the Suez Canal was sold to the British. 301 THE BRITISH INVASION The British seizure of power was more like a bank sending in the bailiffs to secure the assets of a failed business than a military conquest. A small force of British soldiers landed in Ismailia in the fall of 1882, ostensibly to put down an army mutiny. They were to stay in Egypt until the mid1950s, propping up a series of rulers who were little more than facades maintained to provide local legitimacy to colonial rule. The major development in Egypt under the British occupation was commercialized tourism. Fueled by images of ancient ruins brought back by the French expedition, Egypt quickly became a required stop on any grand tour. At first, the reserve of the wealthy few, by the end of the 19th century, with British troops on the ground in Cairo to guarantee the safety of Her Majesty’s middle classes, Egypt had become open to anybody with time for a vacation and the money for passage on one of the regular liners.

German and Italian tank and infantry had been making rapid eastward progress that, had it not been halted, would have resulted in them capturing strategically vital supply routes and oil supplies and dealing the Allied war effort in Europe a serious blow. Ultimately victorious at Al Alamein, however, the Allies were then able to reverse the defeats of the previous months and put an end to German and Italian ambitions in the Middle East. THE MODERN PHARAOHS By the end of World War II, it was clear that the era of direct colonial rule in the region was over. The process of a negotiated British 14_259290-bapp01.qxp 7/22/08 12:40 AM Page 305 H I S TO RY 1 0 1 withdrawal from Egypt had actually started in the mid-1930s, with treaties such as the 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty, which provided for the withdrawal of British troops from the country.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Moreover, the historian Neeti Nair has shown how the wording of another section of the penal code, 295A, which forbids outrage to ‘religious feelings’ and insult to the religious beliefs of any ‘class’, was actively shaped by Indian politicians and intellectuals in the 1920s, while still under colonial rule.65 Yet the results are often perverse. Section 295A has been used to go after one of India’s most famous artists, M. F. Husain, for his abstract paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses, and to ban books on important Indian historical themes. Community leaders now routinely make political capital out of demanding the prosecution of someone who has allegedly offended their community.

And even if it was justified a year ago, is it still necessary now? In general, the experts agree that there is a tendency for judicial deference towards the executive on matters of national security. An example is the Indian Supreme Court which, following the wording of an Official Secrets Act originally passed under British colonial rule in 1923, almost invariably seems to leave it to the government to decide what should or should not be an official secret.54 By contrast, Israel’s Supreme Court is often cited as a model of how judges can openly scrutinise state actions justified by national security. The Israeli Supreme Court’s judgements on issues such as targeted killings and preventive detentions have on occasion exemplified careful ethical as well as legal weighing of extraordinarily difficult issues.


pages: 306 words: 79,537

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

There are several hundred languages, but the widespread use of French bridges that gap to a degree. The French comes from the DRC’s years as a Belgian colony (1908–60) and before that when King Leopold of the Belgians used it as his personal property from which to steal its natural resources to line his pockets. Belgian colonial rule made the British and French versions look positively benign and was ruthlessly brutal from start to finish, with few attempts to build any sort of infrastructure to help the inhabitants. When the Belgians left in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together. The civil wars began immediately and were later intensified by a blood-soaked walk-on role in the global Cold War.


pages: 288 words: 85,073

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

It had moved me to send blankets and medical equipment. More than 1.5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans had died. Was this how the city commemorated such a catastrophe? Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed. Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He drove a little way further, and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He said, “Here is where we commemorate our war heroes.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

So, when the fiscal weakness of the British state came to the fore, its fast-declining industry proved unable to provide London with the necessary revenues, the Labour Party swept to power in 1945, and Britain’s political elite displayed a certain reluctance to come to terms with the impending end of empire, the scene was set for Britain’s marginalization. The final straw was the slide of the pound to eventual non-convertibility. It gave the New Dealers an excuse to leave Britain on the margins of the Global Plan. It took the 1956 Suez Canal trauma and the CIA’s constant undermining of its colonial rule in Cyprus throughout the 1950s for Britain to realize this turn in US thinking.6 Once Britain was deemed ‘inappropriate’, the choice of Germany and Japan appeared increasingly logical. Both countries had been rendered dependable (thanks to the overwhelming presence of the US military); both featured solid industrial bases; and both offered a highly skilled workforce and a people that would jump at the opportunity of rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

He praised a blogger who advocated the deportation of Muslims and the closure of mosques as “probably the most imaginative and interesting right-wing writer on the planet.” Hectoring a Swarthmore history professor in the comments section of the academic’s personal blog, Yarvin rhapsodized on the superiority of colonial rule in southern Africa. He expressed special fondness for the former colony of Rhodesia, where wealth and land ownership were prerequisite to political enfranchisement. Yarvin also declared that blacks in South Africa were better off under apartheid. As more people came to know what the name Moldbug stood for, Yarvin began to have more trouble in mixed company.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

Statues are always at odds with the ambiguities and inconsistencies of personality. In this way, they are vertiginous things, swinging in and out of focus as their subject, Alice-like, shrinks and expands before us. There are those who acknowledge the disrepute of these historical, statuesque subjects – the architects and administrators of colonial rule, for instance – but who feel that to erase their public prominence is an unhelpful purge of the past. They argue that the plinth should become a kind of stocks, or a less gruesome version of the head-on-a-spike, in which disgraced figures are preserved for posterity, lest we forget. This approach demands a more complex attitude to commemoration, whereby a statue may both be an honour and a rebuke.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

When Russia threatened to turn the gas off from the Ukraine pipeline if it joined Nato, that was one of the problems of interdependence. But the cultural awareness of interdependence can be traced back at least as far as the depiction of city life depending on its rural hinterland in Virgil’s Eclogues, written over 2000 years ago. More recently, during India’s struggle to escape British colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century, Gandhi went to great lengths to demonstrate the simultaneous importance of interdependence. In 1929, he said: Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as selfsufficiency. Man is a social being… If man were so placed or could so place himself as to be absolutely above all dependence on his fellow beings, he would become so proud and arrogant as to be a veritable burden and nuisance to the world.4 The UN conference on human rights in 1993, which produced the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, said that: ‘All human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated.’


pages: 241 words: 83,523

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

banking crisis, blood diamond, British Empire, colonial rule, energy security, Golden arches theory, informal economy, Kickstarter, megacity, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, trade route, UNCLOS, wage slave

Among non-fiction, Where Vultures Feast by Oronto Douglas and Ike Okonta is a passionate and insightful account of the crisis in the Niger Delta. The Next Gulf by Andrew Rowell, James Marriott and Lorne Stockman takes a broad and helpful look at Nigeria and the politics of world oil. I found both Michael Crowder’s A History of West Africa Under Colonial Rule and the British National Archives records very useful in understanding Nigeria’s place in the world imperialist jigsaw. Finally, Omoyele Sowore and his colleagues at Sahara Reporters – www.saharareporters.com – have delivered regular brilliant exposés on the vast nexus of corruption around oil in Nigeria.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

This was first fully outlined in Skinner’s bestselling science-fiction utopian novel, Walden Two.45 The title evoked the libertine philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, and Skinner even expressed some interest in nineteenth-century anarchism. But the utopian community of the book is closer to the ‘Bensalem’ of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, a New World colony ruled by a scientific caste dedicated to enlightenment. Rather than being run by scientists directly, however, Walden Two is ruled by behavioural engineering: a sort of algorithm, manipulating the environment to produce good citizens. The algorithm could go on being updated to account for the latest scientific research, and it would be free of the moralism and bullying associated with doctrines of ‘free will’.


How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers by Richard Cohen

Anton Chekhov, Bonfire of the Vanities, colonial rule, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Joan Didion, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, University of East Anglia

In an essay of 1992, printed eleven years after Midnight’s Children was published, Salman Rushdie discusses the unreliable narrator at the heart of that novel. “I hope,” he writes, “that Midnight’s Children is far from being an authoritative guide to the history of post-independence India.” The years after colonial rule are seen through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, who makes various mistakes of reporting during the course of the book. Rushdie points out that, although he did make some errors unintentionally (in his description of the Amritsar massacre, for example, he describes the “fifty white troops” who opened fire, when in fact they were not white), he went to some trouble to get things wrong.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Scholars have often noted that the majority of politically stable democracies in the developing world are former British colonies, a legacy of British institutions and culture. Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, considered the British tradition of effective, clean bureaucracy to be one of the key reasons for his city-state’s success, despite other onerous aspects of colonial rule. And yet, Britain has adopted the same anti-government ideology as the United States since the 1980s. It, too, has starved its domestic agencies in the name of efficiency and, in Boris Johnson, is run by a populist leader who scorns experts and views beureaucrats with great skepticism. His government, presiding over a state hollowed out by austerity, fared unusually poorly in its initial battle against Covid-19, far worse than Northern Europe did.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

But people coming from the colonies didn’t arrive naïve to the racism they would experience; some had been involved in dynamic anti-colonial struggle and understood the nature of British oppression. Radical black activists rejected the term ‘migrant’, calling themselves instead ‘failed refugees’, coming from independent countries that hadn’t achieved transformative emancipation after formal colonial rule ended.42 ‘We’re here because you were there’ became one of the rallying cries of the movement against racism. Decolonisation and anti-colonial movements had challenged the supposed wisdom of the racial hierarchy, producing anxiety that the UK’s mythical superiority was going to be exposed for what it was.


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

Document #105-96959-A, the news clipping, names The Wretched of the Earth (1963) as Fanon’s most important book, stating, “its sales have run unusually high lately, especially among young Negroes.” Document #105-96959-2, the FBI’s own review of Caute’s biography, describes Fanon as a “black intellectual,” a “radical revolutionary,” and “a philosophical disciple of Karl Marx and Jean Paul Sartre, [who] preached global revolt of the blacks against white colonial rule,” and says that Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is “often quoted and misquoted by Stokely Carmichael and other black power advocates, both foreign and domestic.” This review also claims that “Fanon’s importance has been inflated into exaggerated dimensions by the need of black revolutionaries for philosophical justification and leadership.”


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The following month, the largest textile mill in Bombay changed its clocks to the new standard time without informing its 4,500 workers. When they turned up that morning to begin their shifts and discovered what had happened, they immediately went on strike and began to pelt the mill’s clock tower with stones. Protests about Bombay’s time were really an expression of unrest among the native populace about British colonial rule. Clocks could be weaponized by local politicians who wanted to affect public opinion on wider political issues. As agents of centralized control, power and domination, clocks arouse and inflame human emotion, which can lead to resistance—to violent attack. Authority breeds resistance. Standardization gives rise to dissent.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

The existence of inclusive institutions might partly explain why the Industrial Revolution first began in Britain of all places, whereas the presence of extractive institutions may shed light on why some previously colonised parts of the world continue to lag behind, decades after their official liberation from colonial rule. Institutional Origins of the British Ascent Britain’s unprecedented leap forward during the Industrial Revolution allowed the country to seize control of vast swathes of the planet and build one of the most powerful empires in history. And yet for most of human history, the inhabitants of the British Isles lagged behind their neighbours in France, the Netherlands and northern Italy in terms of wealth and education; Britain was a mere backwater on the edges of Western Europe.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

Singapore is top-down, led by the strong hand of a philosopher king, where nothing was left to chance. Both cities prospered, but in entirely different ways. Hong Kong became a public transit mecca, Singapore a city with a green thumb. These differences can be traced back to 1965, in the aftermath of British colonial rule, when the Malaysian parliament voted unanimously to expel Singapore from the Federation of Malaysia. In this watershed moment, Singapore became the first nation-state to unwillingly gain independence. This left the small country, lacking natural resources, in a tough position. The new country’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, had major challenges to solve.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

This account ignores two important contextual factors: first, the miners were all products of an Anglo-American culture where respect for individual property rights was deeply embedded; second, these rights came at the expense of the customary rights to these territories on the part of the various indigenous peoples living there, which were not respected by the miners. 6 Charles K. Meek, Land Law and Custom in the Colonies, 2d ed. (London: Frank Cass, 1968), p. 26. 7 Quoted in Elizabeth Colson, “The Impact of the Colonial Period on the Definition of Land Rights,” in Victor Turner, ed., Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. Vol. 3: Profiles in Change: African Society and Colonial Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 203. 8 Meek, Land Law and Custom, p. 6. 9 Colson, “Impact of the Colonial Period,” p. 200. 10 Paul Vinogradoff, Historical Jurisprudence (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 327. 11 Meek, Land Law and Custom, p. 17. 12 Vinogradoff, Historical Jurisprudence, p. 322. 13 For a discussion of the pros and cons of traditional land tenure, see Curtin, Holzknecht, and Larmour, Land Registration in Papua New Guinea. 14 For a detailed account of the difficulties of negotiating property rights in Papua New Guinea, see Whimp, “Indigenous Land Owners and Representation in PNG and Australia.” 15 The modern economic theory of property rights does not specify the social unit over which individual property rights extend for the system to be efficient.

Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trivers, Robert. 1971. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Quarterly Review of Biology 46:35–56. Turner, Victor, ed. 1971. Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960, Vol. 3: Profiles in Change: African Society and Colonial Rule. New York: Cambridge University Press. Twitchett, Denis, ed. 1979. The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 3: Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, Part I. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———, and Michael Loewe, eds. 1986. The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1: The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

But, for the most part, they were less concerned with the culture of Taíno people than with making fortunes off their backs. To rule the Taíno, the Spanish used the same means they had developed in Hispaniola. In both places (and later across Mexico and South America), the foundation of early colonial rule was a system called encomienda. Under its provisions, the Spanish governor assigned each local ruler (cacique) with all the people of his village to a Spanish settler, now an encomendero. Some encomenderos received perhaps three hundred Natives; a few received more; some just forty or sixty. The cacique was then responsible for sending groups of laborers to the mines for months at a time to harvest gold for the encomendero.

As if to flaunt its iron-fisted hold on the island, Madrid conferred a new honorific title on Cuba: “siempre fiel,” or ever faithful. The phrase would be stamped atop official state documents in Cuba until the end of Spanish rule more than seventy years later.15 The restoration of absolutism and the hardening of colonial rule created deep unease in Cuba. Initially, some antigovernment plots surfaced. In addition to the 1823 Masonic plot, there were minor conspiracies in the 1820s, led mostly by men with little financial stake in slavery and sometimes with the participation of free people of color. The year 1825 also saw a rebellion involving African-born slaves on coffee plantations in Matanzas, the same region where Senator James DeWolf and other Americans owned plantations.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Wendy Hall demonstrating Microcosm in her research lab in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. To use one of Wendy’s examples, say I’m browsing the Mountbatten archive using her system, Microcosm, circa 1989. I’m interested in Mountbatten’s career in India, a two-year period during which he oversaw the country’s transition from colonial rule to independent statehood. This history has its recurring characters: his field marshal, the leader of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, and of course, Mahatma Gandhi, whose name is everywhere in the source material. Say also that within the Microcosm linkbase, an instance of the name “Mahatma Gandhi” has been linked to some multimedia information—a video, perhaps, of a Gandhi speech.


pages: 267 words: 91,984

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

airport security, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Elisha Otis, out of africa, The Soul of a New Machine

In the present, medical school comprised a world all its own, both to him and, he thought, to most of his classmates. It claimed most of his time and energy. But by now even he couldn’t help paying some attention to politics, first of all to nearby international politics. There was war up north in Rwanda. Its roots lay in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when colonial rule had ended. In Burundi, Tutsi elites had claimed power. But in Rwanda the opposite had happened: Hutu elites had supplanted the former Tutsi aristocracy. In Rwanda, during the struggle for power, thousands of Tutsis had been killed, and hundreds of thousands had fled. Some had settled in Uganda.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

BRAZIL With more than 200 million inhabitants, Brazil is the world’s fifth most populous country. Recognized as having the greatest biodiversity on the planet, Brazil has an economy that has grown swiftly in the twenty-first century, and it has pioneered conditional cash transfer programs that have lifted millions of people out of poverty. After three centuries of Portuguese colonial rule, Brazil declared its independence in 1822, abolished slavery in 1888, and became a presidential republic in 1889. For much of the twentieth century, until 1985, it was shaped by authoritarian military regimes that guided the country through various more or less 1.0 (state-centric) stages of economic development.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The most important powers were Great Britain, which controlled 24 percent of the world population, and France, with about 6 percent. 12. In some individual cases, however, Europeans might have fared better by going to colonies than by staying at home. 13. “Marxist analysis should be always slightly stretched when we deal with the colonial rule.… It is neither the act of owning factories, nor [landed] estates, nor a bank balance which distinguishes the governing classes. The governing class is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, ‘the others’ ” (Fanon 2005, 5). 14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Sochineniya, xxii, 360 (quoted in Carr [1952] 1973, 187).


pages: 288 words: 90,349

The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, deliberate practice, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, sustainable-tourism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

It began on my first day of primary school, when I was too young to appreciate the deliberate trivialization of my culture and the political, economic, and social impact of the colonial administration's imposition of their culture on ours. I absorbed a beautifully prepackaged set of beliefs intended to indoctrinate and prepare my community for a long colonial rule without any resistance: once Africans accepted our second-class position, we would be safe and taken care of—happy slaves in our own land. It was not until I went to the United States in 1960 to begin my university education that I started to become interested in my cultural roots. Recalling what my grandparents told me of the history of our community, I began to realize that, unlike what I had been taught, much of what occurred in Africa before colonialism was good.


pages: 313 words: 95,361

The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest by Broughton Coburn

Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Great Leap Forward, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

The Indian military had been beefing up its northern borders ever since the Sino-Indian War of 1962, when the Chinese Army (with its better-acclimatized and better-equipped troops) stormed through a string of border outposts in northeast India. At the same time, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was hesitant about partnering with America. The legacy of British colonial rule had made India distrustful of the Western world. India was also offended that the United States was providing military support to Pakistan, their mortal enemy. The United States had previously been conducting overflights of China with the U-2 spy plane, based out of an airfield in Pakistan. But Pakistan withdrew the use of its airfield in 1960 when a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union.


pages: 304 words: 88,495

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve Levine

colonial rule, Elon Musk, energy security, Higgs boson, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Yom Kippur War

The lab’s next recruit would complete its special tandem—a pair of battery men who sat astride both the scientific and commercial worlds. 9 The Man from Casablanca The Moroccan village of Benahmed is a quick half-hour drive down a smooth highway from Casablanca. But when Khalil Amine was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, the trip took twice as long, winding down narrow roads on a bus. Benahmed was a clean, bright town with a small French population that stayed on after the end of colonial rule a few years before. Amine’s father, an Arab intellectual who taught school, and his mother, a Berber, produced seven boys. Khalil was the second. Of his mother’s family, Amine said, “The Berbers are extremely good in business.” Family lore went back to the first decade or so of the twentieth century, when Amine’s maternal grandfather, Benadir, was a twelve-year-old shepherd in the mountains around the port of Agadir.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

Surprising as it may be, African nations didn’t suddenly sprout medical systems the moment the Gates Foundation emerged on the global health scene less than twenty years ago. African communities have been battling to improve community-based infrastructures since before the colonial era.31 After independence from colonial rule, many incumbent governments treated healthcare as a fundamental goal. Ghana, for example, implemented free public healthcare services to all after gaining independence from Britain in the 1950s. Its health system slowly deteriorated under economic stagnation in the 1970s, compounded by IMF and World Bank lending requirements.


China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

The British realized that a key aim of the United States was to end the British imperial presence in Asia, which would boost American commercial prospects in the region in the postwar.53 China being thrust into global status was an honor, but it was also a great burden to load onto the shoulders of a country that was much poorer and less industrialized than any of the other powers that fought in the war, and had been torn apart by bombing, refugee crises, and economic blockades. The nomination of China as one of Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” (with the United States, the USSR, and Britain) was a major elevation for a country that had still been subject to colonial rule on significant parts of its territory at the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937. The American position helped to define a vision of postwar Asia in which China would play a major regional role. Japan, of course, would be under American control, and in the immediate postwar period, the British and French expected that they would regain control of the colonies that had been seized by Japan (including Malaya, Singapore, and Indochina).


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Holmes said that they use an extensive set of questions about indirect impacts to assess new projects.II When we fail to anticipate second-order consequences, it’s an invitation to disaster, as the “cobra effect” makes clear. The cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. The name derives from an episode during the UK’s colonial rule of India, when a British administrator was worried by the prevalence of cobras in Delhi. He thought: I’ll use the power of incentives to solve this problem! A bounty on cobras was declared: Bring in a dead cobra, get some cash. “And he expected this would solve the problem,” said Vikas Mehrotra, a finance professor, on the Freakonomics podcast.


The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky

clean water, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

In June, when Admiral Richard Howe sailed into New York Harbor and General B e c o m i n g t h e Wo r l d ’s O y s te r • 91 William Howe landed and encamped a large force on Staten Island, both carrying a conciliatory message to the locals, New Yorkers began to evacuate their occupied city. Many of Manhattan’s houses were dark and empty. Under colonial rule the city had established a fairly effective fire department. The first fire engine was imported from England in 1731, and by 1737, New York had an organized volunteer fire department. In 1740, they were issued new leather helmets designed to let water run down the back or, reversing the headgear, shield the face from the heat of flames.


pages: 1,194 words: 371,889

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

.), Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960, Cambridge, 1969–75: 1, The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1870–1914 (1969); 11, The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1914–1960 (1970 – reprinted 1982); III, Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule, ed. V. Turner (1971); iv, The Economics of Colonialism (1975); v, A Bibliographical Guide to Colonialism in Africa (1973). (eds.) African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa, New York, 1978. Gardiner, A. G., The Life of Sir William Harcourt, (2 vols.), 1923 Garvin, J. L. and Amery, Julian: The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, (6 vols.), 1932–69 Gessi, R., trans., Seven years in the Soudan, 1892. Gifford, P. and Louis, W. R. (ed.), Britain and Germany in Africa. Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, Yale, 1967. France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, Yale, 1971 Glass, S., The Matabele War, 1968 Gleichen, Count, With the Camel Corps up the Nile, 1888 Gooch, G.

France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, Yale, 1971 Glass, S., The Matabele War, 1968 Gleichen, Count, With the Camel Corps up the Nile, 1888 Gooch, G. P., and Temperley, H. W., British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, 1926–38 Goodfellow, C. F., Great Britain and South African Confederation 1870–1881, Cape Town, 1966 Gordon, C. G., Colonel Gordon in Central Africa 1874–1879, from original letters and documents (ed.) G. B. Hill, 1881 Letters of General C. G. Gordon to His Sister, M. A. Gordon, 1888 The Journals of Major-General C. G. Gordon CB at Khartoum, (ed. A. Egmont Hake), 1885 Gordon, R.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

With mounting difficulties, the Belgians – who in earlier decades had treated their possession with marked brutality and only belatedly introduced a more benign, paternalistic policy – were able to sustain their colony until armed conflict broke out in 1959. By then, the tide of anti-colonialism, backed by the United Nations, was surging strongly. Recognizing their own weakness and realizing the futility of trying to sustain colonial rule, the Belgians conceded independence to the Congo within a year, though they left behind a fragile state wracked by internal divisions that would soon descend into civil war. The size and geographical spread of the British empire meant that decolonization was bound to be a more complex process than it was for the Netherlands or Belgium.

In a sense, in fact, it was home, for Algeria (colonized since 1830) had been administered as an integral part of France since 1848 and, unlike other parts of the French empire, had attracted settlement by hundreds of thousands of European (not just French) colons or pieds-noirs (as they came to be known, perhaps, it was thought, because of the black boots that early settlers had worn). The level of political and economic discrimination by the settlers against the Muslim majority had led to protests against colonial rule already in the 1930s and the suppression of a nascent nationalist movement. Demands for reform arose again in the middle of the war. Anger at the limited French concessions to reform led to an outburst of violent protest at the end of the war, which was ruthlessly suppressed by the army and police, who killed several thousand Muslims.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

Asked by a House of Commons committee in 1857 about the likely consequences of abolishing the special privileges of Hudson’s Bay Company, a leading politician and former director of the company put it plainly: this would be of no consequence as long as “Canada shall bear the expense of governing [the territory ceded by the company] and maintaining a good police and preventing the introduction, so far as they can, of competition within the fur trade.”12 The company may not have been happy to see its monopoly go, but it could live with it as long as the prerequisites for doing business were henceforth to be supplied (and paid for) by the Canadian state. The abolition of the East India Company following the Indian Mutiny of 1858, and its replacement by direct colonial rule from London, provides another perfect example of the transition. When the private firm and its armies were no longer up to the task, the sovereign had to step in with his own, more effective powers of persuasion. Overcoming Transaction Costs A contemporary economist would summarize the argument thus far by saying that the role played by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the East India Company, and other chartered trading companies was to reduce the “transaction costs” in international trade to enable some degree of economic globalization.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

All this was amid a flood of very harsh condemnation of Japan for failing to give adequate recognition of its own guilt for bombing a military base in an American colony that had been taken from its inhabitants by force and guile half a century earlier. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a crime, but in the array of crimes it’s hard to claim that it ranks very high. Quoting from the Japanese apology, Japan had officially expressed “sincere repentance for our past, including aggression and colonial rule that caused unbearable suffering and sorrow” for China and other countries of Asia. That Japanese official statement was bitterly denounced in the United States, alongside sober articles about the strange flaws in the Japanese character that prevent them from acknowledging guilt. The reason was that the apology was accompanied by a mention of the fact that there had been other imperial atrocities in Asia, implying that the records of Holland, England, France, and the United States might also not have been utterly pure.


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

On August 9, 1945, a similar weapon was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Act 3 includes the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. From the bloodbath of the world wars, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the first global superpowers. There were many local wars, most aimed at overthrowing European colonial rule. But there were no more major international wars during the era of the Cold War. By now, all powers understood that there would be no victors in a nuclear war. But there were some close shaves. Soon after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President John Kennedy admitted that the odds of an all-out nuclear war had been “between one out of three and even.”1 The four decades after World War II witnessed the most remarkable spurt of economic growth in human history.


pages: 334 words: 103,508

Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

Buckminster Fuller, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, double helix, Easter island, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson

We are twenty million millennials on this planet, Shrike, condemned to live out every day of our lives. What mere form can hold us?” “Pretty abstract.” “Okay — I’ll be more concrete — why should we spend our lives making profits for Terrans? Why shouldn’t we — why can’t we — throw off Earth’s colonial rule?” “Perhaps we c—” “And so archaeology, you see Shrike? It’s the best way I can figure out to do it! I mean for me to do something to start it, or work in that direction, at least—” “All right, Hjalmar. All right. Calm down. Ha! I knew you wouldn’t fall into a funk. You were just on the big slide.


pages: 364 words: 103,162

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The critic Raymond Williams once wrote that romantic ruralism was connected with imperial exile, a refuge conjured up in the longing for home of a chap stuck deep in the bush, serving his queen: Its green peace contrasted with the tropical or arid places of actual work; its sense of belonging, of community, idealized by contrast with the tensions of colonial rule and the isolated alien settlement. The birds and trees and rivers of England; the natives speaking, more or less, one’s own language: these were the terms of many imagined and actual settlements. The country, now, was a place to retire to.4 By the time of John Major’s speech, the same idea could be applied not merely to the overseas victims of the English Tourist Board’s propaganda, but to millions of native English people living their lives in the suburbs and dreaming of a return one day to the Land of Lost Content.


pages: 307 words: 102,734

The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River by Dan Morrison

airport security, colonial rule, company town, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, off-the-grid, Potemkin village, Rubik’s Cube, satellite internet, Silicon Valley

“Would you like some more tea?” Simon interrupted. “Darling, perhaps you’ll put on more water while I show them the medallions from the old Egyptian Irrigation Department.” For decades in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Britain had controlled the White Nile through its colonial rule over East Africa and its de facto control of Egypt. Egyptian engineers like the hyacinth-slayers Schon and I met outside Kampala had been preceded by Britons who’d set up more than a dozen measuring stations along the river. Mbulamuti, where we’d spent our first night on the Nile, was one such station.


pages: 391 words: 99,963

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

The crisis also revived a long-standing debate within the scientific community over the fundamental causes of drought. The debate centered on the concept of desertification, a process whereby productive land is transformed into desert as a result of human mismanagement.9 The issue of desertification dates back to the 1930s, during colonial rule in west Africa. There was a growing concern that the Sahara desert might be slowly creeping into the Sahel. The colonial regimes blamed desertification on the African people, specifically on rapid population growth and poor agricultural practices. It was a new twist to an old story. Instead of studying the impact of climate on human history, scientists were studying the impact of human history on climate.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Few, if any, major war films have been made to honor their sacrifice, but many of the great British victories were in fact won with the spilled blood of Commonwealth soldiers from India, the Caribbean, and Africa. Then, decades later, when Europe looked more economically promising than the fledgling countries emerging out of colonial rule, Britain turned its back on these nations, closed off its borders, and implemented tough new immigration rules for Commonwealth citizens. At the same time, Britain began opening up nearly unrestricted immigration to European citizens, who were overwhelmingly white. It was out of this sense of deep unfairness that many people of color—people like Sanni’s friends and family, who were from Pakistan—had no affinity for the EU: They knew what it felt like to have to endure a Kafkaesque immigration system requiring them to prove every ounce of their worth.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The port was never intended to be Chinese owned and operated, but it was Chinese financed and built, adding to a debt that Sri Lanka could not repay.5 China now has a ninety-nine-year lease, the same length that Britain once secured for Hong Kong. No one needs to draw this connection for Sri Lankans, who won their independence from British colonial rule seventy years ago. These flagship projects are just a few episodes in China’s BRI, a global drama that is still unfolding, yet they evoke familiar plotlines. Since ancient times, infrastructure has been not only a feature or by-product of empire but also a tool for imperial expansion.6 Rome built a network of roads to carry commerce, information, and the most formidable soldiers in antiquity across an expanding domain.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

They raised funds and organised relief centres and the distribution of medicines, milk and blankets. In general, their efforts did not extend far beyond the urban centres either, but Gujarat was an exception. In that state, which is sometimes known as the cradle of free India–not only because Gandhi was born there, but also because of its long history of resisting colonial rule–something unusual happened. While the municipal authorities in Ahmedabad were refusing to allow a school to be turned into a hospital (despite taxes having been raised to augment the salary of the city’s health officer, something the local press was quick to point out), a pro-self-rule organisation that had helped organise the Kheda satyagraha, the Gujarat Sabha, set up an influenza relief committee to respond to the desperate need in the outlying villages of Ahmedabad district.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

Algernon Sydney, an English republican beheaded for expressing treasonous political views in 1683, vigorously denied being a proponent of pure democracy. So did the French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who pointedly worried about the “spirit of extreme equality” he assumed was typical of democracies. Even in the United States, in the wake of a war against colonial rule by a distant monarch, and in the context of expansive new assertions of the legitimate power of the people, serious political theorists gingerly handled the idea of democracy, if they acknowledged it at all. Still, some Americans, swept away by popular enthusiasm, began to conflate the ideal of a free republic and democracy, not unlike some of the writers of late antiquity.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

For examples, see Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, Gender, Racism, Ethnicity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 72–77; Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 31–37; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), chap. 1; Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2009); Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: NYU Press, 2016), chap. 4; Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), chap. 7; and Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015), chaps. 3–4. Horne, for instance, describes the efforts to create “cross-class, Pan-European” whiteness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to maintain slavery and colonial rule. A primary aim was to build a “white” coalition large enough to suppress African and indigenous uprisings in the European colonies, sometimes by granting limited (and temporary) privileges to groups discriminated against on European soil, such as Jews or Irish people. This led to the typical contradictions of racial categories, as Horne notes: “It was as if the elite did not interrogate ‘whiteness,’ then no one else would either, and the inherent frailty of this unstable category would somehow magically disappear.”


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

Following the Dutch victory over the Spanish, Belgium and the Netherlands had remained intricately linked. After a period of political uncertainty, French forces invaded the United Provinces in 1795, establishing a client state known as the Batavian Republic. A few years later, Napoleon installed his brother as King. To say that the Dutch were unhappy with this return to colonial rule would be an understatement. One French diplomat described them as ‘a people more rebellious than in any other country’. In 1814, when European leaders met in Vienna to gloat over Napoleon’s downfall, they agreed to form the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with the latest William of Orange as King, uniting the Netherlands and Belgium in a single state for the first time since they had split during the war with Spain.


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

Djamgoz didn’t know it at the time, but he was about to embark on the most complicated and frustrating seven years of his career. Good thing, then, that he was no stranger to complexity and frustration. Djamgoz grew up in Cyprus, whose Greek and Turkish residents have long been engaged in various territorial feuds. The island seethed under British colonial rule from 1878 to 1960, so when Djamgoz was born, every corner of his neighborhood was still festooned with characteristic British red telephone and post boxes. Throughout his childhood he dreamed of attending Imperial College, and as a teenager taught himself to build a radio transmitter from scratch.


pages: 316 words: 100,329

A Short Ride in the Jungle by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Global Witness, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Skype, South China Sea, trade route

wat: Buddhist temple (this word is used in both Lao and Khmer) wai: Greeting traditionally used in Thailand, Laos and other parts of Southeast Asia. Both hands are put together in a prayer-like position and the head bowed slightly. xin chào: Vietnamese for 'hello' xin lỗi: Vietnamese for 'sorry' TIMELINE OF THE SECOND INDOCHINA WAR 1840s to 1890s: Indochina falls under French rule. 1940–1945: Vietnam is under both French colonial rule and Japanese occupation. Ho and his Viet Minh organisation ally with the USA in their fight against the Japanese occupation. A fifth of Vietnamese die from famine. Summer of 1945: The Allies hand Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia back to the French at the Potsdam Conference. Ho ignores this and declares himself President of an independent Vietnam. 1946: France and Vietnam begin the First Indochina War. 1946–1954: The First Indochina War.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

World Bank Economic Review 15, no. 3 (2001): 367–91. 4 There are many antecedents to this view, though not necessarily in the precise way I have formulated it. One of the early formulations is by Albert Hirschman in The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958). 5 See Angus Maddison, “The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India,” chapter 3 of Class Structure and Economic Growth: India and Pakistan Since the Moghuls (New York: Norton, 1971). 6 E. Glaeser, R. La Porta, F. Lopez-de-Silanes, and A. Shleifer, “Do Institutions Cause Growth?” NBER Working Paper 10568, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2004. 7 See, for example, David S.


pages: 354 words: 110,570

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, failed state, family office, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, Global Witness, high net worth, junk bonds, low interest rates, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Virgin Galactic

Asian economies like Thailand and South Korea had been through a decade of heady growth, and bankers worked long hours, partied in the bars and fleshpots of Wanchai, the city’s entertainment district, and took jaunts to Hong Kong’s outer islands in private yachts on the weekends. By 1997, however, the party atmosphere was souring. After 156 years of colonial rule, Britain was handing Hong Kong back to China. The Asian financial crisis was in full swing, the result of years of reckless borrowing to finance investments in property and other risky sectors. It was a typical financial bubble, and when speculators like George Soros attacked the region’s overvalued currencies, angering Malaysia’s then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, foreign banks were forced to book losses on loans that went bad.


pages: 375 words: 109,675

Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India by Christian Wolmar

Beeching cuts, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, James Dyson, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, Meghnad Desai, Ponzi scheme, railway mania, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, women in the workforce

As we shall see in the next chapter, one consequence of the unions becoming stronger and more politicized was that the outbreaks of industrial unrest inevitably became increasingly entangled with the nationalist cause. SEVEN NOT ALWAYS LOVED THE RAILWAYS WERE not only the country’s largest industry and biggest employer, but also a visible and physical demonstration of colonial rule. By the turn of the century, through merger and expansion, the railway companies had become extremely powerful entities and the government responded by launching an inquiry into the administration and working of the railways. The period from the beginning of the century up to Independence was characterized by numerous such government-inspired inquiries and commissions into various aspects of the operation and development of the railways, stimulated by the ever-present feeling that the railways were not functioning effectively.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Indians were not expected to provide heavy industry; they were expected to fulfill only those niches that the imperial rulers thought advantageous, notably producing textiles using local cotton. As a result, in part, India was poorly suited for rapid industrial growth. Even today, the manufacturing share of Indian GDP is half that of China.59 In contrast, the absence of colonial rule may have contributed to Tokyo’s rapid ascendancy. There, the wealthy had a great interest in developing world-class transportation, port and industrial facilities, and an extensive basic education system. Tokyo’s resurgence after World War II would not have been so rapid but for its decades-long accumulation of industrial prowess and high education levels that contemporary megacities enjoyed at their time of independence.60 THE CITY OF DISAPPOINTMENT This difference in industrial structure and development may well determine the future of megacities; those that lack productive capacity may have trouble ever achieving basic affluence under current conditions.


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Virtually every country has its own ethnographic group noted for their success. For example, in the Gambia, a tiny indigenous ethnic group called the Serahule is reported to dominate business out of all proportion to their numbers; they are often called ”Gambian Jews.” In Zaire, Kasaians have been dominant in managerial and technical jobs since the days of colonial rule; they are often called ”the Jewsof Zaire.”28 And then, as we have seen, there is evidence of poverty traps at the national level. India was near the bottom in 1820 of the twentyeight nations on which we have data from 1820 to 1992. India was still near the bottom of these twenty-eight nations in 1992.


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

In the UK, where we have an historically blurred social structure, intermarriage between social groups is much more common, and interbreeding between the traditional upper and lower classes has occurred with the vigour of Lady Chatterley and her low-born lover. The houses of the elite rise and fall. In India, the social restrictions on caste are more strictly endogamous. For a time, there was a suspicion that the caste system was locked down in India during British colonial rule – that the British enforced and encouraged a pre-existing, more informal caste system as a means of social control. With genomics we can make an estimate of the point where a social convention impacted upon the Indian genome. Studies on the genome in 2013 revealed that alleles of caste began to become stratified via endogamy at least 1,900 years ago, a date different from and far more precise than that suggested by the blurred lines of history.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

A number of British declarations expressed this linear, Whiggish view of history, contending that the Empire was a kind of school attended by colonized populations, where they were prepared for their future self-determination and the creation of capitalist economies. It is true that many such declarations can be thought of as thinly veiled justifications for the continuation of colonial rule—for example, that of the British secretary of state Edwin Montagu, who saw self-determination realized “over many years, … many generations,” or of the United Kingdom’s confirming sixty-six times between 1882 and 1922 that Egypt would “soon” be ready for self-government (Tooze 2014, 186; Wesseling 1996, 67).


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Turin, Milan, Genoa, and other Italian cities had suffered extensive bombings, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw unparalleled devastation by atomic bombs. other European countries were also shell-shocked and went through an initial period of chaos. Further east, China and much of Southeast Asia were mired in internal conflicts. Economies in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia were still shackled by colonial rule. The Soviet Union had suffered enormous losses during World War II. Only the economies of the Americas, led by the United States, had come through the war largely unscathed. It was thus up to Washington and Moscow to lead the post-war era, each in its sphere of influence. In Swabia, then part of Allied-occupied Germany, the future depended in large part on the choices the United States would make.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Turin, Milan, Genoa, and other Italian cities had suffered extensive bombings, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw unparalleled devastation by atomic bombs. other European countries were also shell-shocked and went through an initial period of chaos. Further east, China and much of Southeast Asia were mired in internal conflicts. Economies in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia were still shackled by colonial rule. The Soviet Union had suffered enormous losses during World War II. Only the economies of the Americas, led by the United States, had come through the war largely unscathed. It was thus up to Washington and Moscow to lead the post-war era, each in its sphere of influence. In Swabia, then part of Allied-occupied Germany, the future depended in large part on the choices the United States would make.


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

The historian Bruce Cumings has noted that Kim “represented a younger generation of revolutionary nationalists filled with contempt for the failures of their fathers and determined to forge a Korea that could resist foreign domination.” In his memoir of more than two thousand pages, Kim put it this way: My life began in the 1910s when Korea had suffered the worst tragic calamities. By the time I was born, Korea was already under the Japanese colonial rule….The Korean people seethed with anger and wept with sorrow over the loss of their nationhood….Korea in those days was a living Hell, unfit for human habitation. The Korean people were, in all aspects, walking stiffs; their spirits were dead. This massive volume, published just before his death, takes on an almost Homeric rhythm, recounting the heroics of Kim and his followers, the depths of his despair as he shivered without a blanket on the Manchurian battlefield, and the heights of his optimism when encountering the kindness of villagers.


pages: 1,056 words: 275,211

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, defense in depth, European colonialism, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869

The “Essentials for Implementing Administration in the Occupied Southern Area,” a document prepared by the Foreign Ministry and adopted at the liaison conference of November 20 (that is, prior to the “Hull note” and the final imperial decision for war), stated that if Japan were to advocate “the liberation of the peoples of East Asia” from white supremacy and colonial rule, its war aims would “become altruistic and have little persuasive force on the nation…the world might regard it as a racial struggle. However, it might be all right to advocate this unofficially.”107 The emperor’s active role in composing and fussily checking the war rescript at all stages was in keeping with his character.

Western colonialism in Asia remained alive and well, which meant that the Tokyo trial highlighted, in a way that Nuremberg did not, the problematic relationship between imperialism and international law. The fact that no judges from either the “Dutch East Indies” or former colonial Korea sat on the bench was telling. Even more telling were the actions of the French and Dutch governments in seeking to restore their colonial rule in Southeast Asia, and the Americans their influence everywhere in Asia and the Pacific. The Truman administration gave economic aid to France while it was fighting against the Viet Minh. In China it permitted surrendered Japanese troops to fight on the side of Chiang Kai-shek, and provided Chiang’s military forces with equipment and advisers to aid in his renewed civil war against the Communists.80 In the underdeveloped parts of Asia and the Pacific, American leaders seemed to be following Japan’s example of keeping whole nations in their “proper place.”


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

Pervez Hoodbhoy Having come to the end of our journey, it is appropriate in this final chapter to take a closer look at the state of science and the spirit of rational enquiry in the Islamic world today. Has it recovered from recent centuries of decline, neglect, religious conservatism, stagnation, colonial rule and every other impediment to progress one cares to think of? Many commentators argue that to look back continually to the past glories of the scientific achievements of the Islamic world can actually impede the progress of Muslim countries today; that such reminiscing neglects the crucial difference between modern science, defined as that which began with the scientific revolution of Renaissance Europe, and the medieval thinking of the Islamic world, which, they claim, was no more than a kind of ‘proto-science’, crude attempts to make sense of the world blurred with theology and the occult.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

An African historian comments that “the same laudable object was before them both, [but] the African’s attempt was ruthlessly crushed and his plans frustrated” by British force. West Africa joined Egypt and India, not Japan and the United States, which were able to pursue an independent path, free from colonial rule and the strictures of economic rationality.7 The Haiti-Taiwan case, noted earlier, is another example. And these are not unusual, but more like the norm. The hazards of what is now called “neoliberalism” were recognized quite early. One prominent example is Adam Smith. The term “invisible hand” appears only once in his classic Wealth of Nations.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Fewer influential political scientists are likely to argue, as some did in Asia as recently as the 1990s, the merits of political order and controlled transitions, or to caution that some countries are not robust and cohesive enough for sudden democratic opening.2 Back in the 1970s, the celebrated Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington could point to numerous countries coming out of colonial rule or going through rapid social change and link the pace and scope of these changes to a pattern of violence, riots, insurrections, or coups. “Authority has to exist before it can be limited,” Huntington wrote, “and it is authority that is in scarce supply in those modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.”3 Such views are hard to locate today, except maybe in the doctrine and official press of the Chinese Communist Party or among those who fear that the demise of Middle Eastern dictators is destined to bring to power even more repressive and obscurantist dictatorships.


pages: 423 words: 115,336

This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War by David F. Krugler

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Berlin Wall, City Beautiful movement, colonial rule, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, full employment, glass ceiling, index card, launch on warning, Lewis Mumford, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, urban planning, Victor Gruen, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Let there be no doubt, communism was an enemy of liberty and capitalism, but American academic, popular, and governmental interpretations of Russian history, Soviet politics, and the writings of Marx and Lenin usually distilled a complex ideology into a simplistic formula: communists worldwide were locked in an unbending conspiracy to overthrow democracy and capitalism. Communism, like any other set of ideas and institutions, was shaped by the society, culture, and history of the people and places where it took root, resulting in often profound differences and goals between communist states or movements. The Viet Minh, who fought French colonial rule of Vietnam, were hardly Moscow’s puppets, while the Sino-Soviet split of the 1950s revealed fissures in the communist world. For a long time in the West, determination of the role of the United States in the Cold War’s origins hinged, creakily, on the validity of America’s anticommunist policies and actions.


pages: 390 words: 119,527

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

Though the city had fallen on hard times, the phantasmagoric mud mosques and street markets still attracted adventurous, well-heeled travelers. It even hosted two world music festivals, Sahara Nights and the Festival in the Desert. This part of Mali did not have a peaceful history. In the early twentieth century, it was a center of resistance against French colonial rule. In the early 1990s, portions of northern Mali and neighboring Niger were rocked by uprisings of the Touareg, nomadic Berbers who traditionally inhabited the Sahara and the Sahel. A “flame of peace” monument on the outskirts of Timbuktu marked the end of the most recent large-scale rebellion, in 1995, and the rusting barrels of weapons that were symbolically burned to mark the end of the conflict were embedded in the concrete.


Discover Great Britain by Lonely Planet

British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, G4S, gentrification, global village, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, New Urbanism, Stephen Hawking

Perhaps the greatest British novelist of the interwar period is DH Lawrence, particularly known for Sons and Lovers, following the lives and loves of generations in the English Midlands as the country changes from rural idyll to an increasingly industrial landscape, and his controversial exploration of sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, originally banned as ‘obscene’. Other highlights of the interwar years included EM Forster’s A Passage to India , about the hopelessness of British colonial rule, and Daphne du Maurier’s romantic suspense novel Rebecca , set on the Cornish coast. Evelyn Waugh tackled the themes of moral and social disintegration in Brideshead Revisited , and Richard Llewellyn wrote the Welsh classic How Green Was My Valley . After WWII, Compton Mackenzie lifted postwar spirits with Whisky Galore , a comic novel about a cargo of booze washed up from a sinking ship onto a Scottish island.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

But the aerial views of the multiple expressways under construction, the lush green plantations of the interior, and the new resorts facing the turquoise waters that drape the island helped convince me that Sri Lanka is no longer a land in waiting. In the 1960s Sri Lanka was billed as the next Asian growth miracle, only to be stymied by a tryst with socialism that played a direct role in igniting the civil war. Following independence in 1948, leaders of the Sinhalese majority set out to correct the injustices of British colonial rule, which had heavily favored the country’s Tamil minority. Tamils had gotten the bulk of top jobs in the British administration, and in the early years after independence Sinhalese nationalists aimed to put them back in a minority role. The Sinhalese leaders soon evicted Tamils from official posts and in the 1960s and 1970s began to lavish more public jobs, subsidies, and social benefits on their own kind, in the name of creating a prosperous and egalitarian Sinhalese nation.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

They were a “nuisance to others,” he wrote, because they had inherited ambition from their biologically superior white parents but “intellectual inadequacy” from their black ones. Mulattoes had no sagittal sutures in their skulls, preventing lateral expansion, the president of the Philadelphia County Medical Society asserted. Look at Haiti, other scientists said, where a 1791 revolution against French colonial rule had led to what Davenport’s colleague Harry Laughlin called a “reversion to African barbarism.” The lurid gossip they’d heard about the island, of cannibalism and worse, probably stemmed from its large mulatto population, they said. Research on the pressing question presented a range of practical difficulties.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

I joined the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, then the Sunday Express diary column, where I chased vicars who had run off with starlets. After three years, I begged The Times to hire me and they sent me to Northern Ireland to cover the vicious little conflict that had broken out in that legacy of British colonial rule. Five years later, I became one of those “soldiers” of journalism, a foreign correspondent. I was on a beach at Porto Covo in Portugal in April of 1976—on holiday from Lisbon where I was covering the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution— when the local postmistress shouted down the cliff that I had a letter to collect.

In Turkestan, where we were interested in preventing Germany from gaining access to cotton supplies, British forces actually fought the Russians with the assistance of Enver Pasha’s Turkish supporters, an odd exchange of alliances, since Tsarist Russia had been an ally of Britain until the 1917 Revolution. In just one corner of their former Turkish homeland, the Armenians clung on; in the province of Alexandretta and the now broken fortress of Musa Dagh, 20 kilometres west of Antioch, whose people had withstood the siege about which Werfel wrote his novel. Alexandretta fell under French colonial rule in the far north of Syria and so, in 1918, many thousands of Armenians returned to their gutted homes. But to understand this largely forgotten betrayal, the reader must travel to Aanjar, a small town of sorrow that blushes roses around its homes. From the roadside, smothering the front doors, all the way up Father Ashod Karakashian’s garden, there is a stream of pink and crimson to mock the suffering of the Armenians who built this town on the malarial marshes of eastern Lebanon in 1939.

One of the cartridges was clearly marked: “Federal Laboratories Inc. Saltsburg, Pennsylvania 15681 U.S.A.” It was not the Western provenance of these weapons that was important— though the anti-Western resentment within the FIS had been growing daily—but the pattern of repression which they represented. It was as if French colonial rule bequeathed not freedom but military force to the Algerians. Under the FLN’s post-independence dictatorship, the Algerian security services practised many of the same tortures as their French predecessors—“electricity with oriental refinements,” as one victim put it to me—and the French had themselves learned how to make men and women talk in the dungeons of the Gestapo during the Second World War.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

The knowledge system derived from the Koran as an inspirational document helps to explain the specific insistences of technology rejection. But it also provides cultural insights as to why technologies that initially encounter resistance are later adopted with a sense of urgency. Indeed, “When Muslims were under some form of colonial rule, and the threat of the West was more evident, the response was much more rapid, much more urgent. Within two decades of the beginning of the [nineteenth] century the Muslims of Tsarist Russia had seventeen presses in operation. By the 1820s in the Indian sub-continent Muslim reformist leaders were busy printing tracts.”13 Under such conditions printing became a source of entrenching local values and traditions as well as a way to counter colonial influence.


pages: 382 words: 127,510

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, laissez-faire capitalism, offshore financial centre, sensible shoes, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, the market place, three-masted sailing ship

The Walled City of Kowloon, neither truly a city, nor having any walls—the Japanese knocked them down in the Second World War—was specifically mentioned in the Convention as the one place that would remain under Chinese administration ‘except insofar as may be inconsistent with the military requirements for the defence of Hong Kong’. The British unilaterally revoked that particular clause of the Convention a few months after the lease had begun, and tossed the Chinese officials out. But the Walled City has never accepted colonial rule—it is a teeming, dirty little slum, unpoliced, unorganised, unfriendly and dangerous. There was never any town planning, though the Kai Tak airport authorities insisted recently that some buildings be lowered to an appropriate height, and so police moved in and obligingly lopped some storeys off.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Paramilitary groups were a common phenomenon in Haiti throughout these decades, and they remained a troubling weapon in the current government’s armory.9 Free speech was still far from protected, and journalists faced constant harassment.10 The reconstitution of the Haitian military in 2014 rang alarm bells for a nation facing no visible external threats and with a history of internal repression against its own citizens.11 Haiti was the first slave country in history to overthrow its rulers successfully. February 1794 saw the abolition of French colonial rule, and in 1804 Saint-Domingue became independent Haiti.12 It was a success constantly mentioned with pride during my visits, a reminder of a period in history when the people stood up and were not answerable to anyone except themselves. It was the kind of sovereignty the country’s citizens said they craved again.


pages: 410 words: 122,537

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Khartoum Gordon, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, V2 rocket

Outside Europe, there was in this period a succession of colonial wars which were, in various ways, to illustrate the importance of the railways as a weapon of warfare. Just before the Franco-Prussian War, there had been one of those small obscure wars in far-off places that were a recurring feature of British colonial rule. The Emperor of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), Tewodros II, was a weak and indecisive character who had locked up the British Consul and various missionaries on a pretext. After the failure of various diplomatic initiatives, in 1868 Britain sent a massive army at huge expense7 to rescue the consul and, more importantly, restore honour.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

That combination later migrated to the American colonies where it was preserved among New Englanders, beginning with John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, continuing with John Adams, and absorbed by aristocratically inclined Southern politicians, such as Jefferson and Madison.38 A republican elite led the opposition to colonial rule, directed the war against Britain, drafted the Constitution, staffed the new government, and established a party system. During the formative period from colonial times to the Jacksonian era, when fundamental political institutions and practices were being settled, republicanism dominated American politics.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

His solution, based on advice from colonial reformers, was a system in which the executive would be drawn from the majority party in the assembly. It would stimulate colonial expansion, strengthen the imperial connection, and minimize American influences. Durham’s report had been commissioned by the British government after the rebellion against British colonial rule; the rebellion had been easily crushed, but it led to reevaluation of the function of white settler colonies. In the 1840s there was more conflict between the Reform Party in the lower house and Conservatives in the upper house. The Reform Party wanted the governor to only appoint ministers who had the approval of the lower house.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

He founded De Beers and, when gold was discovered to the north of the diamond fields, launched Gold Fields of South Africa, which still ranks among the biggest gold miners, with mines from Australia to Peru. Rhodes, who served as prime minister of the Cape Colony for five years beginning in 1890 and had private armies at his command, was an avowed imperialist. He sought relentlessly to expand northward the interwoven projects of British colonial rule and his own corporate interests by way of treaties, force of arms and duplicity. His most hegemonic venture, the British South Africa Company, had a royal charter affording it powers akin to those of a government. The region’s black inhabitants, from the Xhosa of the eastern Cape – Nelson Mandela’s people – to Robert Mugabe’s Shona ancestors in Rhodesia, were gradually subjugated and marginalized.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

They offered evidence that their ancestors had already lived by similar rules that governed access by members of their community to the land and its resources. This basic governance structure had remained intact for centuries, notwithstanding dramatic 26 c h a P te r 2 changes, including their dislocation and decimation under colonial rule. Perhaps these use practices did not look like the private property rights that are typically used to turn simple assets into capital in capitalist systems. But nowhere in the Belize Constitution does it say that property rights have to take a specific form; i.e., that only rights that are purposefully installed to produce future returns rather than, say, to ensure the sustenance of a people and the sustainability of their environment, is a defining feature of property.


The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison

British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, financial independence, full employment, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, railway mania, stem cell, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, wage slave

There was only so much public benevolence to go around, and rather than directing it toward assistance for the anguished masses in Britain, Wilberforce drew off large amounts of it in his tireless campaigns to highlight the plight of the West India slaves. Cobbett fought ferociously to reset the reform and relief agenda. What did it matter that Jamaican slaves were suffering under British colonial rule? The poor in Britain were in great distress, and they urgently needed as much aid as possible. On one level, Cobbett compared the two labor forces and insisted that the West India slaves “were better fed and less hardly worked than the people of England.” But on another level, he damned such comparisons as in themselves injustices, for next to the “intelligent and ingenious people of England,” the “grossly ignorant Negro . . . rises even in mental capacity, generally speaking, not many degrees above that of numerous inferior animals.” 71 Robert Wedderburn also compared Jamaican slaves with the English laboring classes, and while he was often as inflammatory as Cobbett, he was also a great deal more constructive.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Mohajir Quami Movement (MQM, Pakistan) Mohammed, Jan Moheshkhali Island Morgenthau, Robert Mothers’ Front (Sri Lanka) Mountbatten, Lord Louis Mujib, Sheikh multinational corporations Munir, Syed. murder, adultery and. See also assassinations, political; death squads Muslim League Muslims; affirmative action programs for; American; and British colonial rule; in Kashmir ; in Pakistani government; population in India; in Soviet Union. See also Hindu-Muslim conflict; Islam; Islamic radicals Muslim United Front Nadvi, Shah Syed Fazal-ur-Rahman Waizi Naipaul. S. Najibullah Narang, Surjeet Singh Narayan (Hindu preacher) Nasser, Gamal Abdel nationalism; Afghani ; Hindu; Indian; Pakistani; Sinhalese; Sri Lankan Naxalites Nehru, Jawaharlal; and democracy ; and “mixed” socialism ; political legacy of ; as prime minister ; and religious conflict ; and Tribhuvan of Nepal Nepal; class conflict in; corruption in government; democracy movement ; monarchy in ; panchayat Nepal (cont.) system; poverty in Nepali Congress party nepotism New Delhi, India: anti-Sikh riots in ; cable television in; caste riots of 1990; rural migration to ; stone quarries newspapers Newstrack New York Times nonaligned movement Northwest Frontier, Pakistan nuclear weapons; Pakistan and Oldenburg, Philip Pakistan; in Afghanistan war ; Bangladeshi independence from; BCCI in; Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of ; and capitalism; cold war and; conspiracy theories in ; corruption in government; democracy in ; and economic reform ; economy ; elections ; feudalism in ; hostility to India; independence; Islamic radicals in; Islam in politics of; and Kashmir rebellion ; martial law under Zia ul-Haq; middle class in; military coups in ; nationalism; Nehruvian state in; and nuclear weapons; political violence in; poverty in; public-sector enterprises; and Rushdie edict; Sind guerrilla movement; Soviet Union and; tribalism in ; U.S. military aid to ; wars with India; World Bank and; Zia ul-Haq crash and ; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan air force Pakistan army; Benazir Bhutto and ; military rule; U.S. arms supplies to ; and Zia ul-Haq crash Pakistan Criminal Investigative Agency (CIA) Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI): in Afghanistan war ; U.S. military assistance to ; and Zia ul-Haq crash Pakistan People’s Party Pak One crash Partition Party of God.


Cyprus Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, New Urbanism, place-making, Skype

Agios Georgios Museum MUSEUM (Hlorakas; 9am-6pm) Buffs of recent Cypriot history may find this somewhat bizarre and nationalistic museum of interest. It’s located on the spot where the caïque Agios Georgios (now the museum’s prime exhibit), captained by EOKA rebel Georgios Grivas, landed in November 1954 with a large supply of arms and munitions, with the aim of overthrowing British colonial rule. His rebels were finally arrested two months later while attempting another landing. The museum walls document the capture and subsequent trial, including the rebels’ mug shots, as well as some of the seized rifles and ammunition. The site, known as ‘Grivas’ Landing’, is 4km north of Kato Pafos on the E701 and is easily identified by the large Agios Georgios church, built to commemorate the event, as well as the adjacent St George Hotel.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

But in 1994 a horrible tragedy went largely unnoticed. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow 159 Rwanda is one of the smallest countries in Central Africa, with just 7 million people comprised of two main ethnic groups: Hutu and Tutsi. Although the Hutu were the preponderant majority, the Tutsi minority were considered aristocracy during Belgian colonial rule. Following independence in 1962, the Hutu majority oppressed the Tutsis, who fled to neighboring countries where they formed a guerilla army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In 1990, this rebel army invaded Rwanda, and by 1993, the United Nations placed a peacekeeping force of 2,500 multinational soldiers to preserve a fragile cease-fire.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

By the middle of the century European explorers had discovered cave paintings, dried lakebeds and other signs indicating that the Sahara had once been wetter and greener. Joined with a self-serving, and misleading, reading of classical texts that portrayed the region as the ‘breadbasket of the Roman Empire’ was used to justify French colonial rule; the land’s fallen semi-arid state was taken to be the result of bad landscape management by its post-Roman inhabitants. Left in Arab hands, things would get even worse. ‘The Sahara, this hearth of evil, stretches every day its arms towards us,’ warned a panicked pamphlet in 1883; ‘it will soon enclose us, suffocate us, annihilate us.’


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

More information is available at www.africom.mil/AboutAFRICOM.asp (accessed 6 June 2008). 04-7561-4 ch4.qxd 9/16/08 4:11 PM Page 65 stephanie rupp 4 Africa and China: Engaging Postcolonial Interdependencies The alignment of Africa’s natural resource endowments with China’s core economic interests has placed Africa at the center of emerging geopolitical tensions. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, China is likely to succeed in securing economic and political ties to African nations that rival if not displace relations that Euro-American nations have dominated over 150 years of colonial rule and neocolonial influence. This chapter analyzes the nature of relations between China and Africa, unpacking the frequent characterization of China’s recent activities in Africa as “colonial” or “neocolonial” and asking if there might be an alternative framework for making sense of Africa’s contemporary position vis-à-vis China.


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

In 1957 King Faisal II commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design an opera house in the manner of Moscow’s unbuilt Palace of the Soviets. A colossal thirty-storey-high memorial sculpture of Iraq’s greatest Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, grandson of Baghdad’s founder, took Lenin’s place as its centrepiece. It would have been a piece of nation-building on an epic scale by an Iraq still emerging from British colonial rule. A commission for Walter Gropius to design a university was actually built. Le Corbusier also secured a commission in Baghdad from Faisal in 1956, designing an arena only completed after his death, when it became known as the Saddam Hussein Sports Centre. But Saddam Hussein wanted to do more than look modern.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

On his return, he was determined to turn Cairo into ‘the Paris of the Nile’.59 The square – midan in Arabic – was named Isma’iliya Square, after its creator. Following the 1952 revolution which swept King Farouk’s monarchy from power, President Gamal Abdel Nasser changed the names of many landmarks in Cairo, including Isma’iliya Square, which became Tahrir – or Liberation – Square to commemorate Egypt’s liberation from British colonial rule. In 1970, Tahrir Square became the focus of a national outpouring of grief when Nasser died suddenly. Many hundreds of thousands of people gathered there to mourn his passing. Centrally located in Cairo and bordered on one side by the River Nile, Tahrir Square has today become a vast traffic roundabout, with more than twenty streets leading into it, constantly jammed with cars and buses.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

There are active and heated public debates about revising the Internal Security Act (ISA) to limit the government’s power of preventive detention, initiating a freedom of information act, curbing restrictions on political assembly, decriminalizing homosexuality, and abolishing caning as a form of official punishment. For each such law, there is a historical and cultural context, whether British colonial rule, fear of Cold War Communist insurgency, or the values of an elderly Christian population. Singapore is not afraid to evolve its ethical codes, but it rightly remains paranoid. Even as the government learns to trust the public ever more with the responsibilities of freedom, it would be foolish to expect a country even more ethnically diverse than when it was founded to tolerate, in the name of free speech, reckless abuses of liberty such as inciting communal hatred.


pages: 572 words: 134,335

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In line with the thrust of universalism, and crucial with respect to mobilizing Social Democrats in particular, an attempt was made to base imperialist dominance more firmly in the local class structure in the periphery. In the Kennedy offensive, even more than in the Roosevelt or Marshall periods, the Americans probed beyond established colonial rule or military dictatorships for moderate nationalist, middle-class groupings in the underdeveloped world. This policy at the same time required a firm approach to those Third World states which were beyond imperialist manipulation. Embargoes like those imposed against Eastern Europe therefore were used to isolate bridgeheads of socialist revolution in the periphery.


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

That messenger was clutching a letter from the prime minister, a letter that would not only postpone Kitchener’s trip home but also set him on an unexpected course to become one of the pivotal figures in the story of mass attention capture.1 Kitchener was himself no stranger to attention. In 1911, he’d been appointed the king’s vice-consul in Egypt, becoming de facto ruler of the land of the pharaohs. By then he was already Britain’s best known military officer, a living embodiment of colonial rule. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of him, “He was in a very special sense a King-Man, one who was born to fashion and control the Great Affairs of Mankind.” And with his erect posture, large mustache, and taste for full dress uniform, he very much looked the part.2 The message from Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ordered the indispensable Kitchener back to London for a meeting of the War Council.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

In the 1890s, according to the British medical journal The Lancet, famine deaths in India totaled nineteen million, with the highest levels of fatality concentrated in the areas that had been transformed into cotton production for export. The forced production of raw cotton proved to be disastrous in India, and it was only to be replicated elsewhere. From 1860 to 1920, across the world 55 million acres of cotton came into cultivation, mainly in colonial areas. * * * — British colonial rule consciously and deliberately smashed Indian handloomed fabric. And precisely because of this, Mohandas Gandhi elevated traditional, handmade cloth into a symbol of resistance. As mass nationalism burgeoned in colonial South Asia in the 1920s, Gandhi inaugurated a swadeshi, or indigenous goods, movement, which aimed to achieve swaraj, “home rule,” by establishing India’s economic self-sufficiency from Britain.


pages: 393 words: 127,847

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

Our long overwater hours end as we cross the coast near Blouberg (meaning Blue Mountain, it’s home to a high density of archaeological sites and Stone Age burials of the Indigenous San and Khoe peoples, according to the archaeologist Jayson Orton, and it’s also the scene of an 1806 battle that advanced the transition from Dutch to British colonial rule), where later today hundreds of kitesurfers will skid over some of their city’s most reliably mighty waves. The controller at the airport gives us a heading to fly, from which we’ll intercept the radio signal that will guide us to Cape Town’s sole long runway. On as bright a morning as this, however, we hardly need such electronic handholding.


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

At the beginning—and at the time of the piracy trial—the Castle became the regional headquarters of the Royal African Company of England, the private British company that was given “for a thousand years” a British government monopoly to trade in slaves over the entire 2,500-mile Atlantic coastline from the Sahara to Cape Town. Though the monopoly ended in 1750, slavery endured for another sixty years and British colonial rule for another two hundred. The British turned the Castle into the imposing structure that remains today—and it has become sufficiently well known and well restored that it attracts large number of visitors, including many African-Americans who naturally have a particular interest in its story. The American president Barack Obama visited with his family in 2009, to see and experience what remains one of the world’s most poignant physical illustrations of the evils of slavery.


pages: 353 words: 148,895

Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, Mike Staunton

asset allocation, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, European colonialism, fixed income, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, purchasing power parity, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, yield curve

Table 2-3 shows that, mostly, the exchanges founded during the nineteenth century were set up either in Europe, or by Europeans abroad. Of the non-European exchanges that pre-date 1900, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Sri Lanka were all part of the British Empire, while Egypt was effectively a British protectorate. The exceptions to the European/colonial rule are the United States, Japan, Turkey, and the five Latin American markets, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela. The important issue that Table 2-3 raises is the extent to which the sixteen countries covered in this book and shown in bold typeface were representative of the world’s stock markets at the start of our research period in 1900.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech at the ‘stroke of the midnight hour’, when India became independent, spoke of ‘ending poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity’ and building a ‘prosperous, democratic and progressive’ nation. How has India done? For the first three decades after independence, growth performance was poor (though better than under colonial rule). The poverty ratio did not fall, and the number of people in poverty rose substantially. In those days, India was often compared to a slow-​moving snail or tortoise. It was thought of as ‘a country of the future that will always remain so’, a country that would never get its act together, even sometimes as a ‘basket case’.


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

In fact, the most crystalline example of it might come from Brewster’s own era, in the form of a footnote to the history of colonial Africa. In the mid-nineteenth century, France was experiencing difficulty in Algeria. The region’s Islamic holy men were using their status—and supposedly their supernatural powers—to encourage resistance to colonial rule, and the resulting rebellion was proving difficult to quell. Deciding to fight fire with fire, Napoleon III turned to one Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, an erstwhile watchmaker who had become an extraordinarily inventive and convincing illusionist. (Today Robert-Houdin is recognized as the father of modern magic, an honor that comes complete with a kind of figurative primogeniture.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

., 24 Letham, Isabel, 139 Leyte Gulf, 239–41, 240 Liaoning (Chinese carrier), 407–9, 415 Libby, Willard, 34 life, origin of, 322–23 Lindeman Island, 348 Line Islands, 367 Littoral combat ships, 421 Liu Huaqing, 411–17, 411 Locklear, Samuel, III, 242–43 Loma Prieta earthquake, 378–79 London, Charmian, 131 London, Jack, 121, 129–34, 137, 147 Long Beach, California, 139 Queen Mary and, 193 Long March, 412 Lop Nor atomic tests, 37 Lorikeet, 218n Los Alamos laboratories, 33, 47, 57–58, 67–69 Los Angeles, 25, 118 surfing and, 134–35, 140 Los Angeles Times, 144 Lucky Country, The (Horne), 267, 299n Lucky Dragon Five (fishing boat), 76–78 Lulu (research ship), 317, 319–22, 328 Lutherans, 44 Lutyens, Edward, 282 Luzon China and, 393, 413 earthquake of 1990, 380 Pinatubo eruption and Typhoon Yunya, 383 MacArthur, Douglas, 239 MacArthur villages, Philippines, 240 Macau, 228, 414 Macclesfield Bank, 396 Machu Picchu, 130n MacLehose, Murray, 221, 222 Madagascar, 430 Madden-Julian Oscillation, 263 Maersk shipping line, 405 Magellan, Ferdinand, 8, 23, 26, 40, 441, 443 magma, 314, 353 Magnavox, 113 magnetic field reversal, 311–12 Magsaysay, Ramón, 380 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 377, 411, 414 Majuro atoll, 3, 8, 11 malama honua (“care for island earth”), 427, 429, 440, 444 Malaya, colonialism and, 212–13 Malay people, 43, 293 Malaysia, 10, 18, 394, 394, 396 Malibu, California, 141 Manchuria, 155, 414 Manfred (Byron), 231 manganese nodule boom, 332 Manhattan Project, 47, 76n Manila, 5, 44, 372 Pinatubo eruption and, 380–81, 385n Manjiro, Nakahama, 358n Manoa, Hawaii, 5 Manus refugee camp, 300–301 Man Who Loved China, The (Needham), 102n Maori, 21, 27 Mao Zedong, 31, 37, 269 Marcos, Ferdinand, 25, 379 Marianas Islands, 8, 413 marine protected zones, 367 Marie Byrd Land, 18 marine life coral reefs and, 343–45 endangered, 366 plastic debris and, 365–66 Marine Park Authority (Australia), 348, 349 Maritime Continent, 18, 254 Marquesas, 5, 431 Marshall, Andrew “Yoda,” 416–19, 416, 422 Marshall, George, 153–55 Marshall, John, 43 Marshall Islands, 3, 8. See also specific Islands European discovery and, 43–44 German colonial rule, 9, 44–45 Japan and, 10–11, 45 missionaries and, 44, 50 nuclear tests and, 14–17, 19, 48–79 U.S. possession, 12–17, 45–46 WW II and, 45–46 Masterdom, Operation, 203 Mataiva Island, 438 Matsushita firm, 113 Maui, 370, 372–73, 437 McCoy, Mike, 434 Mead, Margaret, 300 Mediterranean, 22, 411 Melanesia, 215, 430, 440 Melbourne, 234, 302 Melville, Herman, 6 Mencken, H.L., 292n Menzies, Sir Robert, 268n, 279 Meteorological Office, 233 Micronesia, 4, 214, 430, 439 colonial history of, 8–12, 43–44, 214 Compact of Free Association and, 16 Hokule‘a and, 434, 439–40 as U.S. possession, 12 WW I and, 10–11 WW II and, 10–12 Microsoft, 96 Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 308, 310–11 Middle East, 410, 420 Mid-Oceanic Ridge system, 309–17 hydrothermal vents and, 326–28 mapping of, 316–17 smokers and, 328–32 Midway, USS (carrier), 177, 383 Midway Island, 357, 365 Mike thermonuclear test weapon, 42 Milton, John, 212 Minamata disease, 25 Mindanao, 237, 241n minerals, 270, 348 minimum central pressure (of storm), 244–45 mining, 366–67 deep-sea, 332–34 mining control vessel, 335 Misawa, Japan, 115 Mischief Reef, 395–96 Missouri, USS (ship), Japanese surrender on, 12 Mitsubishi, 99 Mitsui company, 107n Moho braccatus, 355 Monde, Le, 43 monsoons, 251–53, 262 Morita, Akio, 85–87, 89, 92, 93n, 94, 98, 100–101, 105–8, 112–13 Morita Company, 92, 93n, 95 Mormons, 371, 442 Moro people, 241n Mount Daisen, 116 Mount Fuji, 114 Mount Krakatoa, 315 Mount Mayon volcano, 379–80 Mount Newman, 11 Mount Pinatubo, 315, 378–86, 384, 389, 395n, 397, 409, 418, 421, 425 Mount Pinatubo (airplane), 380 Mount Popocatepetl, 315 Mount St.


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

In taking this "liberal imperialist" line, as Jacques also points out, these writers forget that "some of the greatest difficulties these countries have faced have been a direct result of the imperial legacy."155 The Western colonial empires overwhelmingly failed to develop most of their colonies, as witnessed by the catastrophic decline in Indian industries and share of world trade under British colonial rule. Indeed, that was part of the point, as the colonies were intended to be captive markets, not competitors—an approach replicated in the Bush administration's policy of distributing contracts to rebuild Iraq to American corporations rather than to Iraqi ministries. The only empires which successfully developed their imperial possessions were those of Russia and Japan, which treated them economically as part of the imperial metropolis itself.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

The state was not liberating and protective of its citizens, no matter what its propaganda claimed; on the contrary its gross effect was constricting and exploitative, or else, it simply failed to operate in any social sense at all."' 2 BASIL DAVIDSON The indigenous governments that replaced colonial rule in the countries that were not settled by Europeans drew their leaders and administrators from populations who had little experience or skill at running any type of large-scale enterprise. In many cases, especially in Africa, infrastructure inherited from the departing colonial powers was rapidly looted, destroyed, or allowed to fall into disrepair.


pages: 501 words: 145,097

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

It was a speech that spelled out President Obama’s unyieldingly optimistic belief in the future of a country that had allowed him, a young black man, to be invested, now for a second term, as the most powerful human being on the planet. He had been given this role, he said, with a new chance to perfect still further the immense entity that is the American union, more than two centuries after his country had declared its independence from colonial rule. Such was the crowd’s exuberance that much of what the president said was drowned in a cacophony of cheering and frenzied delight. Sensing the mood, he prudently kept what he had to say brief and to the point. After no more than ten minutes of high rhetoric, the tone of his voice fell and quieted—he was coming to the end.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Sandra Bao

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, income inequality, low cost airline, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

And as the capital of Yucatán state, Mérida is also the cultural crossroads of the region, and there’s something just a smidge elitist about it: the people who live here have a beautiful town, and they know it. History Francisco de Montejo (the Younger) founded a Spanish colony at Campeche, about 160km to the southwest, in 1540. From this base he took advantage of political dissension among the Maya, conquering T’ho (now Mérida) in 1542. By decade’s end, Yucatán was mostly under Spanish colonial rule. When Montejo’s conquistadors entered T’ho, they found a major Maya settlement of lime-mortared stone that reminded them of the Roman architecture in Mérida, Spain. They promptly renamed the city and proceeded to build it into the regional capital, dismantling the Maya structures and using the materials to construct a cathedral and other stately buildings.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

There are more than 300 ethnic groups in Nigeria, but broadly speaking the country is divided into three main language groups: the Yoruba in the west, including Lagos; the Hausa in the north; and the Igbo in the east. It is too crude to identify these as three separate peoples, as the differentiation within each language group is vast, rather like calling Russians and Poles part of the same tribe. After almost a century of colonial rule, the three groups embraced independence in 1960 with very different roles in the new state. By 1966, the Muslim Hausa had come to dominate the army; the Christian Yoruba provided much of the civil service and the intellectual elite of the country; and the Igbo in the east continued their role as some of the most effective traders in the world.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

It is the sixth largest supplier of imported crude oil to the United States.24 The tragedy, however, is that instead of benefiting from this wealth Angola has been at war for the last three decades. The result is that the country ranks 160th among the world's nations in terms of quality of life.2o The war in Angola can be traced to its abrupt independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975. At this time, several hundred thousand Portuguese—virtually the entire educated population—abandoned the country, but not before stripping it of everything of value, including, in many cases, even taking their doorknobs.2*1 The new Angolan nation was thus left with few citizens trained in statecraft, industry, or agriculture, but a ready supply of warring guerilla armies.


pages: 466 words: 146,982

Venice: A New History by Thomas F. Madden

big-box store, buy low sell high, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, Costa Concordia, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, financial innovation, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, spice trade, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

But by the late fourteenth century the rise of the signori had produced powerful and expansionistic states in Italy that could conceivably cut off Venice’s access to the trade routes, produce, and raw materials of the mainland. Indeed, that had been the goal of Genoa and Padua during the War of Chioggia. The Venetian government responded by first neutralizing the threat posed by the Carrara family, and then establishing colonial rule over lands stretching from the lagoon all the way to Lake Garda, near Verona. Once Venice was established as a mainland power, however, it was difficult for its people not to be drawn further into Italy’s politics and wars. Although the cities that Venice acquired were largely left to govern themselves, they nonetheless required Venetian officials, which provided lucrative jobs for nobles needing work.


pages: 566 words: 144,072

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones

belling the cat, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, failed state, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, open borders, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, zero-sum game

As Figure 6.2 illustrates, there are seven agencies (Khyber, Kurram, Orakzai, Mohmand, Bajaur, North Waziristan, and South Waziristan). There are also six frontier regions: Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, and Lakki Marwat. The Pashtun tribes that controlled this region had resisted colonial rule with a determination virtually unparalleled in the subcontinent. The tribes were granted maximum autonomy and allowed to run their affairs in accordance with their Islamic faith, customs, and traditions. Tribal elders, known as maliks, were given special favors by the British in return for maintaining peace, keeping open important roads such as the Khyber Pass, and apprehending criminals.


pages: 641 words: 147,719

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route by Rough Guides, James Bembridge, Barbara McCrea

affirmative action, Airbnb, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, colonial rule, F. W. de Klerk, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, out of africa, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, young professional

The island’s first prisoner was the indigenous Khoikhoi leader Autshumato, who learnt English in the early seventeenth century and became an emissary of the British. After the Dutch settlement was established, he was jailed by Jan van Riebeeck in 1658. The rest of the seventeenth century saw a succession of East Indies political prisoners and Muslim holy men exiled here for opposing Dutch colonial rule. During the nineteenth century, the British used Robben Island as a dumping ground for deserters, criminals and political prisoners, in much the same way as they used Australia. Captured Xhosa leaders who defied the British Empire during the Frontier Wars of the early to mid-nineteenth century were transported from the Eastern to the Western Cape to be imprisoned, and many ended up on Robben Island.


pages: 474 words: 149,248

The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--And the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation by James Donovan

active measures, colonial rule, cotton gin, El Camino Real, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, invention of gunpowder

Young Santa Anna had found his calling. A year later, in 1813, he marched hundreds of miles with General Joaquín de Arredondo and an eighteen-hundred-man royalist force across the arid desolation of northern Mexico. Their destination: that charming town of San Antonio de Béxar, scene of an uprising against colonial rule led by a mixed group of Mexican revolutionaries and Anglo filibusters who had defeated a Spanish army and boldly proclaimed themselves the Republican Army of the North. Arredondo, the commandant of Mexico’s Eastern Interior Provinces, had become brutally efficient over the last few years at suppressing revolts.


Discover Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bartolomé de las Casas, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, food miles, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban decay, urban sprawl

But the island is fascinating for exploring. The verdant rainforested interior has good hiking options, and vast banana plantations provide a timeless spectacle. Kingstown POP 32,300 Rough cobblestone streets, arched stone doorways and covered walkways conjure up a Caribbean of banana boats and colonial rule. Kingstown heaves and swells with a pulsing local community that bustles through its narrow streets and alleyways. Steep hills surround the town, amplifying the sounds of car horns, street vendors and the music filtering through the crowd. The nearby towns of Villa and Indian Bay are where you will find the majority of the resorts on the island.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

Sometimes they are smart enough to hear the chimes at midnight, but often they are not. The foreign investor then often expresses outrage that gambling has been going on with the company’s capital! This cycle seems to have been repeating since portfolio investors first plunged into emerging market portfolio assets with the liberation of Latin America from colonial rule in the 1820s. Revulsion, pursuit cycling and passionate intensity 3 August 1998, Regional On numerous previous occasions, The Solid Ground has quoted from Professor Kindelberger’s work, which was based on the model created by Hyman Minsky. That model proved useful in indicating that the conditions for a crisis were present.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Lucas Vidgen

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

And as the capital of Yucatán state, Mérida is also the cultural crossroads of the region, and there’s something just a smidge elitist about Mérida: the people who live here have a beautiful town, and they know it. History Francisco de Montejo (the Younger) founded a Spanish colony at Campeche, about 160km to the southwest, in 1540. From this base he took advantage of political dissension among the Maya, conquering T’ho (now Mérida) in 1542. By decade’s end Yucatán was mostly under Spanish colonial rule. When Montejo’s conquistadors entered T’ho, they found a major Maya settlement of lime-mortared stone that reminded them of the Roman architecture in Mérida, Spain. They promptly renamed the city and proceeded to build it into the regional capital, dismantling the Maya structures and using the materials to construct a cathedral and other stately buildings.


pages: 482 words: 150,822

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Black Lives Matter, classic study, colonial rule, COVID-19, critical race theory, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Lawson began with an overview of religion and philosophy, contending that all the great religions essentially sought to find justice. He would go on in later classes to review specific episodes and thinkers—Henry David Thoreau’s resistance to the American government, the American abolitionists, the German resistance to Nazism, and Gandhi’s campaign against British colonial rule. He threw in a bit of Chinese philosophy. He ended with a big dose of Christian faith. He taught that segregation was wicked and that it was wrong to submit to it. But he emphasized the necessity not to inflict suffering in attacking it and instead to take suffering upon oneself. “When you don’t retaliate with a personal insult, but instead offer a friendly gesture,” Lawson explained, “that’s what Jesus meant when he said, ‘turn the other cheek.’


A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, conceptual framework, distributed generation, financial independence, invention of writing, New Journalism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman

Lady Cromer took different groups of British ladies for a fortnightly audience with the khedive. According to one expatriate Englishwoman: ‘For many years the Khedive’s ball was the culminating event in the winter festivities in Cairo, and was as brilliant a function as oriental splendour and cosmopolitan fashion in combination could compass.’28 Throughout the period of colonial rule, the British simply never understood the Egyptians. They lived separate lives, in different worlds. Cromer, though he effectively ran Egypt for a quarter of a century, never learned Arabic. Many Europeans – figures like Lucie Duff Gordon were exceptional – thought the Egyptians indolent and in need of moral reform.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

Further regional autonomy is granted in 2012. 2010–11 Elections leave Belgian politicians unable to form a coalition government for nearly 18 months. 2018 Belgium’s soccer dream team reaches the semifinals of the World Cup. 2019 Luxembourg greenlights the country’s first floating solar plant. Set in a former steel-producing site, the plant is completed two years later and becomes a model for future renewable energy projects.. 2020 As the Black Lives Matter movement spreads, King Philippe becomes the first Belgian royal to express regret for its brutal colonial rule, and statues of King Leopold II are taken down. 2020 Some 652 days after the collapse of the previous government, Flemish Liberal Alexander De Croo is sworn in as Belgium’s new Prime Minister. 2021 Record rainfall across Europe causes one of the greatest natural disasters ever to strike Belgium.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Recall that for centuries, Britain’s major industry was wool production—an economic infrastructure comprising thousands of weavers, artisans, merchants, mechanics, and exporters. But from around the middle of the eighteenth century, a new industry emerged: cotton cloth production. Cotton had a key advantage—machines could process cotton fibers better than wool. Production was easier to automate. And cotton could be cheaply grown in a number of countries under British colonial rule. Cotton was a small industry in Britain in the early 18th century. By the end, it was a force gathering nearly unstoppable steam. Thanks to the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the power loom, England gained the ability to process cotton into cloth products at an unparalleled pace and scale.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

The first thing a slave did was to buy a shirt or an embroidered kofia. The Zanzibar archipelago was a thriving fashion scene (see Plate 13). A Swahili saying went in 1900: ‘Proceed cautiously in Pemba. If you come wearing a loincloth, you leave wearing a turban. If you come wearing a turban, you leave wearing a loincloth.’27 Colonial rule gave this spiral an additional twist. Colonial administrations controlled jobs, money and status. Spending on Western goods simultaneously indicated one’s proximity to colonial rulers and one’s distance from native groups at the bottom of society. In French Cameroon after the First World War, the Duala elite spent a small fortune on European clothes.

‘As to the Indian people generally, they are clear gainers; or they would surely not take the British goods, unless they were either cheaper or better than their own.’49 This was the voice of the free-trade empire: trade would bring specialization, greater efficiency and welfare. British rule was benign because it shifted resources from idle princes to the Indian people. The sad truth was that the British empire managed to do the first without accomplishing the second. Simply put, Indian society under colonial rule moved from the shape of an hourglass into that of a pyramid. At the top, the rich elite was slimmed. At the bottom, the poor were not getting poorer, but there were many more of them. The middle class and affluent workers remained few. Why India under British rule became locked into a cycle of pauperization has been one of the longest-standing debates in history and economics.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

When mayor Stefan Starzyński finally surrendered on September 25, the German overlords did not set up a Polish puppet regime, but instead created two zones of direct control: in the west, they annexed a band of territory directly to the Reich, while in Central Poland they established a Generalgouvernement for the Occupied Polish Territories (GG), using a French word evocative of colonial rule.13 In these two regions, German authorities subjected Poland’s population to genocidal rule on two schedules: rapid in the west, because of the area’s new status as German territory; but more gradual in the GG, which was slated to become fully Germanized in a generation. Thus, in the west, German officials immediately closed all Polish schooling, made public speaking of Polish a crime, and introduced compulsory labor from age fourteen for males and sixteen for females.

For him, all this social pluralism accounted for the “stability of the regime and the support it receives from public opinion.”67 “The Soviet empire,” Konrád concluded, “despite all of its internal difficulties, is in good shape, not headed toward collapse.”68 It was a superpower, whose conventional and nuclear forces caused great anxiety in the West, and whose Marxist ideology had legions of supporters in NATO countries. Moreover, having achieved nuclear parity with the United States, the Soviet Union competed for influence in Asia, Africa, and Central America, where populations were shaking off colonial rule. In the 1980s, one-third of the world’s population was ruled by Marxist-Leninist regimes, and the number seemed likely to grow.69 North Vietnam had just scored an impressive victory over the United States. Throughout South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America, millions looked with favor on state socialism, and Soviet advisors served in Mozambique, Syria, and Nicaragua, while proxy Cuban soldiers fought in Angola.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Instead, it was calculated to push people away from supporting the government.19 The instrumentality of mass killings lay in their role as a way of removing political opponents, as in the purges undertaken by communist countries, or in removing hostile populations, especially when it was difficult to expel them in sufficient numbers, or as a means of intimidating civilian sources of support.20 THE EXAMPLE THAT GAINED MOST ATTENTION DURING THE 2000S, and which was used to show that a harsh approach could be successful, was the Sri Lankan Civil War. Its origins went back to British colonial rule and the early days of independence which saw discrimination against the minority, and increasingly resentful, Tamils. Fighting began in 1983 with demands for an independent Tamil state, led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the Tamil Tigers. The tactics of the Tamil Tigers were vicious while Sri Lankan forces were hardly restrained.


Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, full employment, Howard Zinn, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, long peace, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing

Tucker, “Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, “America and the World 1988/89,” Winter 1989, featured lead article. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace (Oxford, 1987, 129). The effort to liberate Indochina from the U.S.-backed French forces was in part a civil war, as is generally true of struggles against foreign occupation and colonial rule—the American revolution, for example. It should be clear that this fact adds no credibility to the bizarre notion that the U.S. was “deterring aggression” by aiding the French effort to reconquer Indochina, even contemplating the use of nuclear weapons for this purpose. 8. See appendix V, section 8, for an example, though one beyond the norm. 9.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Once in Western universities, these students took advantage of the Internet to disseminate information and communicate among themselves—without fear of repression.27 In a span of a few years, Burmese activists were able to turn an obscure, backwater conflict into an international issue; force multinational corporations to divest from Burma; and make the so-called State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) one of the world’s most vilified regimes. Their tactics, which focus primarily on starving SLORC of foreign currency, were inspired by and modeled after the antiapartheid movement that freed South Africa from colonial rule. But while the South African boycotts took decades to take effect, the Internet was steadily increasing the effectiveness of activists and accelerating the speed of social change. In the United States alone, more than twenty states and local governments enacted laws to disqualify companies doing business in Burma from bidding on public contracts.


pages: 496 words: 162,951

We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Donald Davies, drop ship, friendly fire, machine readable, South China Sea

On the boat coming over I had reread Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy and I recognized that airstrip as the departure point for the French army's Group Mobile 100 on June 24, 1954, as it headed west on Route 19 and straight into the historic Viet Minh ambush that helped seal the fate of French colonial rule in Indochina. We stepped off the choppers into a tangle of trees, weeds, and brush, in the middle of what would become our airfield, the Golf Course. Brigadier General John M. Wright, assistant division commander, had decreed that the airfield for the 1st Cav's 450-plus helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft would have to be "smooth as a golf course."


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Many of these urban warlords descend from the original farming families when Lyari was a village, long before Britain decided to build a major warm-water port on the Arabian Sea near a small fishing enclave called Kolachi, in what was then part of India. As the two villages grew and merged, farmers opened shops, consolidated, became community fixers, made land deals, and became powerful in a city where laws were scorned under colonial rule, and now exist mainly on paper. British rule in India ended in 1947, a triumph for Mahatma Gandhi’s gentle civil disobedience. But Muslims who feared living under a Hindu majority demanded independence, and Pakistan was born in two Muslim majority regions cleaved from eastern and western India.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

In contrast, India is a large and slow-moving democracy, where local opposition can block land development and the state still reserves huge swaths of urban land for itself. As former World Bank China director Yukon Huang has pointed out, the sprawling urban estates reserved for civil servant housing and military cantonments are a legacy of colonial rule. In my experience, no capital in the emerging world has a neighborhood anything like Lutyens Delhi, named after the British architect who designed the administrative area of India’s capital city. This area includes a “bungalow zone” of hundreds of homes on more than twenty-five square kilometers owned almost entirely by the government and surrounded by verdant parklands and laced with wide tree-lined roads.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Lenin saw the shaping of public opinion as essential in bringing on the revolution, but to some extent all countries and all leaders develop narratives that shape how people perceive their government and country. Anticolonial leaders had an easier time persuading the citizens of their country of the illegitimacy of colonial rule. 2. Ads could provide information, e.g., about what goods are available at what prices. But statements about the attributes of a product by the seller (unless accompanied by a money-back guarantee) would be taken as just self-serving. There are Ptolemaic attempts to describe ads, like that of the old Marlboro cowboy (retired in the United States around the turn of the century after a forty-five-year stint), as providing consumers information: most individuals who buy the cigarettes are not cowboys, but may identify themselves as hardy, like a cowboy.


pages: 615 words: 175,905

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, South China Sea

The agreement temporarily partitioned Vietnam into north and south, limited the introduction of foreign troops into the region, and called for general elections to unify the country by July 1956. During the Geneva conference, Bao Dai appointed Ngo Dinh Diem, then living in Paris, as prime minister. As a young man, Diem had pursued a career as a politician and bureaucrat until he became frustrated with French colonial rule. He had long advocated Vietnamese independence, but rejected Ho’s Communist vision. In 1945 the Vietminh held Diem prisoner for six months until, after a brief meeting with Ho, he was released. While in captivity, Diem learned that the Vietminh had murdered one of his five brothers, Khoi, and Khoi’s son.


pages: 589 words: 162,849

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, disinformation, fake news, false flag, garden city movement, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, post-work, South China Sea, urban planning

Having suffering a nervous break-down, she was befriended by two neighbours, Thorberg and Ernest Brundin. Both were enthusiastic members of the Socialist Party of America and inspired Smedley with their devotion to the cause of justice for the oppressed. In 1917 Smedley moved to New York and became involved with Indian nationalists fighting British colonial rule in India, who recruited her to operate a front office for the group and publish anti-British propaganda. Most of these activities were covertly funded by Germany and Smedley changed addresses frequently to avoid surveillance by American and British military intelligence. Between May 1917 and March 1918 she moved ten times.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

At that time France still had a military draft, and my student deferment period had expired. I was lucky enough to spend the last year of my military service in Algeria as a civilian technical assistant, a sort of French version of the Peace Corps. Algeria had been independent for only 2 years after a bitter war to free itself from colonial rule. At the time, there were so few Algerian urban planners that the government appointed me “Inspecteur de l’Urbanisme” or “Urban Inspector” for Tlemcen, a city of about 80,000 people in the Western part of Algeria. My job consisted of preparing new land development plans, but mostly it required spending the majority of my mornings deciding the fate of building permit applications.


Lonely Planet Sri Lanka by Lonely Planet

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, digital map, European colonialism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, off grid, off-the-grid, period drama, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

The Tamils, whose Hindu identity had become more pronounced in the lead-up to independence, began to find themselves in the position of threatened minority. The Sinhala-only bill disenfranchised Sri Lanka’s Hindu and Muslim Tamil-speaking population: almost 30% of the country suddenly lost access to government jobs and services. Although tensions had been simmering since the end of colonial rule, this decision marked the beginning of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. A similar scenario played out in 1970, when a law was passed favouring Sinhalese for admission to universities, reducing numbers of Tamil students. Then, following an armed insurrection against the government by the hardline anti-Tamil, student-led People’s Liberation Front (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or JVP), a new constitution, which changed Ceylon’s name to Sri Lanka, gave Buddhism ‘foremost place’ in Sri Lanka and made it the state’s duty to ‘protect and foster’ Buddhism.


Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

While the plants would never grow in the GDR, perhaps a socialist partner state could be found to trade goods with, so that foreign currency would not be needed. Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the tropical state in South-East Asia had been struggling economically. Vietnam had been exploited for its resources for decades under French colonial rule before it came under brutal Japanese occupation during the Second World War. After 1945, the French returned and began a desperate struggle to hold on to their colonies in Indochina, culminating in the bloody battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the upshot of which was that they left their colonies but Vietnam was split in two.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Over the past four decades, as drug trafficking has increased, their rates of homicide have soared. Others, like Russia (29.7) and South Africa (69), may have undergone decivilizing processes in the wake of the collapse of their former governments. The decivilizing process has also racked many of the countries that switched from tribal ways to colonial rule and then suddenly to independence, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea (15.2). In her article “From Spears to M-16s,” the anthropologist Polly Wiessner examines the historical trajectory of violence among the Enga, a New Guinean tribal people. She begins with an excerpt from the field notes of an anthropologist who worked in their region in 1939: We were now in the heart of the Lai Valley, one of the most beautiful in New Guinea, if not in the world.

Where states are relatively weak and capricious, both fears and opportunities encourage the rise of local would-be rulers who supply a rough justice while arrogating the power to ‘tax’ for themselves and, often, a larger cause.”48 Just as the uptick in civil warfare arose from the decivilizing anarchy of decolonization, the recent decline may reflect a recivilizing process in which competent governments have begun to protect and serve their citizens rather than preying on them.49 Many African nations have traded in their Bokassa-style psychopaths for responsible democrats and, in the case of Nelson Mandela, one of history’s greatest statesmen.50 The transition required an ideological change as well, not just in the affected countries but in the wider international community. The historian Gérard Prunier has noted that in 1960s Africa, independence from colonial rule became a messianic ideal. New nations made it a priority to adopt the trappings of sovereignty, such as airlines, palaces, and nationally branded institutions. Many were influenced by “dependency theorists” who advocated that third-world governments disengage from the global economy and cultivate self-sufficient industries and agrarian sectors, which most economists today consider a ticket to penury.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

But, most problematically, the “risks to the regime’s long-term stability [were] increasing” due to its corruption and narrow social base, as well as the lack of a clear successor. The repressive nature of the Ben Ali regime was hardly news to the United States. He had persecuted all opposition groups since taking power in the “bloodless coup” of 1987. But Tunisia was a regional ally, and had been so since attaining independence from French colonial rule. The state provided crucial support in the “war on terror,” and as a result it was a priority recipient of US military aid. As the “fact sheet” on the website of the US embassy in Tunisia still boasts, “Tunisia has been one of the top twenty recipients of US International Military Education and Training funding since 1994; and since 2003 has ranked tenth in overall funding.”18 Tunisia’s armed forces do not exist primarily to project military power abroad.19 Rather, the regular army exists as the last line of civil defense protecting the secular, republican state.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

Indeed, the party exists mostly as an electoral machine; otherwise, it works through the government rather than through some independent grassroots organization. Lee Kuan Yew said in 1984, “I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP” (quoted in Milne and Mauzy 1990, p. 85). Overall, we see that Singapore moved to democracy and independence as its citizens protested against British colonial rule, but the PAP rapidly established one-party rule after 1963. Since then, the economy has boomed, inequality has been low, and the PAP has maintained power through relatively benign means, fostering popularity through extensive social welfare programs as well as engaging in threats and coercion.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Often, in centuries past, these poverty-stricken emigrants from China had little or no education and knew little of the language or customs of the countries they went to. Seldom did the laws or practices of the Southeast Asian countries in which the Chinese settled offer them equal rights with either members of the colonial ruling race or with the indigenous population. In colonial Malaya, for example, the British provided schools for the children of the Malays but the Chinese had to provide their own.19 In nineteenth century America, a long and painfully tragic story can be summarized by saying that the Chinese were treated even worse than in Southeast Asia.20 In Peru, guards were posted on an island where Chinese contract laborers were assigned the task of shovelling bird manure into sacks for export as fertilizer, working under stifling heat and stench.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

His dog was so lazy that he “lied his head agin the wall to bark.” In Lubberland, sloth was contagious, and Lawrence had the power to put all masters under his spell so that they fell into a deep slumber. As applied to the rural poor who closed themselves off to the world around them, the metaphor of sleep suggested popular resistance to colonial rule. Byrd found the people he encountered in Carolina to be resistant to all forms of government: “Everyone does what seems best in his own eyes.”36 The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670) portrayed an imaginary territory in which sloth is contagious and normal men lack the will to work.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Cult members worship Frum, a messiah with mutable characteristics. To some, he is white. To others, black. For most, he is American, likely based on a soldier who brought cargo to Vanuatu during World War II: “John from America.” Though Frum’s appearance varies, his mission is consistent: to shake off the restrictions of colonial rule and restore the independence and cultural freedom of the Tanna people. Cult followers believe Frum will return on February 15—an annual holiday known as John Frum Day—of an unspecified year, bearing food, household appliances, vehicles, and medicine. Celebrations on John Frum Day have a distinctly American feel.


Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Tom Masters, Kevin Raub

airport security, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Downton Abbey, El Camino Real, Francisco Pizarro, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, land reform, low cost airline, off-the-grid, race to the bottom, sustainable-tourism, urban sprawl

During the colonial period, the local demographic picture became increasingly complex, as the country's three racial groups – mestizos (people of mixed European-indigenous blood), mulattos (people with European-African ancestry) and zambos (African-indigenous people) – mixed. Independence from Spain As Spanish domination of the continent increased, so too did the discontent of the inhabitants – particularly over monopolies of commerce and new taxes. The first open rebellion against colonial rule was the Revolución Comunera in Socorro (Santander) in 1781, which broke out against tax rises levied by the Crown. It began taking on more pro-independence overtones (and nearly taking over Bogotá) before its leaders were caught and executed. When Napoleon Bonaparte put his own brother on the Spanish throne in 1808, the colonies refused to recognize the new monarch.


pages: 564 words: 178,408

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olson

Alistair Cooke, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, European colonialism, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, indoor plumbing, jobless men, old-boy network, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

-controlled territories viewed it that way, nor did the British, who had often used the altruism argument themselves when adding to their empire. Churchill and others in the British government also suspected that behind the Americans’ high-minded sermons about freeing British possessions from colonial rule was a generous dollop of economic self-interest. Their suspicions would certainly have been reinforced if they had overheard a casual comment that Roosevelt made to his son Elliott at Casablanca: “British bankers and German bankers have had world trade pretty well sewn up in their pockets for a long time, despite the fact that Germany lost in the last war.


The Rough Guide to Jamaica by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

buttonwood tree, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, ghettoisation, jitney, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Meanwhile, session musicians were conducting their own experiments, using the exaggerated shuffle rhythm of R&B and syncopated mento sounds. Somewhere along the way, the staccato, guitar-and-trumpet-led sound of ska emerged and captured the Jamaican musical imagination with effortless ease. Following independence from British colonial rule in 1962, the future seemed full of possibilities. You can hear the euphoria in the music of the time – joyous, up-tempo ska tunes that seem now not to express a care in the world – and the small independent record labels in west Kingston were at the cutting edge. Ska lyrics provide a window into the evolution of Jamaica and its music.


pages: 714 words: 188,602

Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq by Ashley Jackson

Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, out of africa, power law, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment

Exile, to an island fastness or the Savoy Hotel, had befallen many enemies of the British Empire, including Abdullah, Sultan of Perak, Cetshwayo, King of the Zulus, Khalid bin Barghash, Sultan of Zanzibar, Napoleon, Emperor of France, Mutesa, Kabaka of Buganda, Arabi Pasha, Egyptian nationalist and, soon, Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. For some years I’ve thought about writing a book on this subject, but recently learned that there is no need, with the forthcoming publication of Robert Aldrich, Banished Potentates: Dethroning and Exiling Indigenous Monarchs under British and French Colonial Rule, 1915–1955 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 80.Schubert, ‘The Persian Gulf Command’, p. 306. 81.For an overview, see Bonakdarian, ‘US–Iranian Relations’. 82.Camron Michael Amin, ‘An Iranian in New York: ‘Abbas Mas‘udi’s Description of the Non-Iranian on the Eve of the Cold War’, in Kamran Scott Aghaie and Ashfin Marashi (eds), Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), p. 170. 83.Bonakdarian, ‘US–Iran Relations’, p. 11. 84.On this intriguing historical whodunit, and diametrically opposed British and Iraqi constructions of historical truth, see Matthew Elliot, ‘The Death of King Ghazi: Iraqi Politics, Britain, and Kuwait in 1939’, Contemporary British History, vol. 10, no. 3 (1996), pp. 63–81.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

But the deeper issue was growing concern over the Hong Kong government’s collusion with the CCP in Beijing to destroy the principle of “one country, two systems.” The freedoms and political autonomy enshrined in the territory’s Basic Law, agreed to as part of the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to China, were promised to endure until 2047—and now they seemed to be in existential jeopardy.45 Hong Kong’s free press played a vital role in making the world aware of COVID-19 in the first place, calling attention to the efforts by Chinese officials to cover up the virus and silence health workers such as Li Wenliang.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Moreover, even within the defense perimeter in the Pacific, US strategists concluded, it made most sense to wield US power by air and sea rather than by land.13 Moreover, the United States was in favor of decolonization—getting the British out of India, the Dutch out of Indonesia, and other global powers out of the territories they had held for years. While the United States was happy to provide logistical support to the French, who were fighting a war against the communist Vietminh in Southeast Asia, it wanted the French to promise independence rather than further colonial rule as the end point. Acheson’s speech, however, did not specifically mention Korea or say how it fit into the defense perimeter in the Pacific. Did this omission tip the balance in Stalin’s mind? It may have. In June 1950, Stalin let slip the dog of war that was Kim Il-Sung and his Soviet-trained and supplied army.


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Taita social life was traditionally dispersed and strongly territorial, with each clan inhabiting a discrete area of the Taita Hills, south of what is now Tsavo West National Park. It was only after colonialism that a collective sense of Taita identity developed in earnest, a process accelerated by the intrusion of the railway through Taita lands; Mwangeka, a Taita hero, was lauded for his resistance to colonial rule. Taita religion was largely animist in nature, with sacred meeting places and elaborate burial rituals the defining features, although few Taita now live according to traditional ways. Northern Kenya Borana The Borana are one of the cattle-herding Oromo peoples, indigenous to Ethiopia, who migrated south into northern Kenya and make up less than 0.1% of the population.


Frommer's Mexico 2008 by David Baird, Juan Cristiano, Lynne Bairstow, Emily Hughey Quinn

airport security, AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, centre right, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, East Village, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the market place, urban planning

The Chichimecans resisted the encroachers, but epidemic diseases brought from Europe soon decimated the native population. The Spanish established mining cities in quick succession, stretching from Querétaro (established in 1531) north all the way to Zacatecas (1548) and beyond. They found quantities of gold, but silver proved so plentiful that it made Mexico world famous as a land of riches. For 3 centuries of colonial rule, much of the mines’ great wealth went to build urban centers of impressive and lasting architecture. It’s wonderful to walk leisurely through these cities and view them, not one building at a time, but in broad views of colonial cityscapes. Of the five cities, three (Guanajuato, Querétaro, and Zacatecas) have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

To this day, the two principal ethnic groups in Oaxaca remain the Zapotec and Mixtec, whose tonal languages are closely related to each other but far different from the Aztec language Náhuatl. The city of Oaxaca, originally called Antequera, was founded just a few years after the Spanish vanquished the Aztec. Most of Oaxaca’s central valley was granted to Hernán Cortez for his services to the crown. Three centuries of colonial rule followed, during which the region remained calm. In the years following independence, there was more or less continuous upheaval. From the 1830s to the 1860s, the Liberals and Conservatives fought for control of Mexico’s destiny, with the French eventually intervening on the side of the Conservatives.


pages: 637 words: 199,158

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

For a comprehensive survey of Anglo-German relations between 1890 and 1914, see Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), pts. 3–5. 71. See Prosser Gifford and William R. Louis, eds., France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971); J.A.S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Athlone, 1964); Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism; Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pt. 2; and the sources cited in Chapter 5, note 36, of this book. 72.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

But the concepts that enter into people’s thoughts and actions are often natural kinds and artifacts. To the extent that words for these concepts are rigid designators, the law’s attempt to replace them with definitions is impossible in principle. In Bad Acts and Guilty Minds, Leo Katz gives an example.14 During the era of colonial rule in Africa, the British administration passed a Witchcraft Suppression Act, which included a detailed definition of witchcraft. Unfortunately, the drafters were not experts in the local customs and they botched the definition, stipulating certain rituals as witchcraft though they were in fact methods of detecting witches.


pages: 803 words: 415,953

Frommer's Mexico 2009 by David Baird, Lynne Bairstow, Joy Hepp, Juan Christiano

airport security, AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, centre right, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, East Village, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, low cost airline, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the market place, urban planning, young professional

The Chichimecans resisted the encroachers, but epidemic diseases brought from Europe soon decimated the native population. The Spanish established mining cities in quick succession, stretching from Querétaro (established in 1531) north all the way to Zacatecas (1548) and beyond. They found quantities of gold, but silver proved so plentiful that it made Mexico world famous as a land of riches. For 3 centuries of colonial rule, much of the mines’ great wealth went to build urban centers of impressive, enduring architecture. It’s wonderful to stroll through these cities and view them, not one building at a time, but in broad views of colonial cityscapes. Of the five cities, three (Guanajuato, Querétaro, and 11 285619-ch07.qxp 7/22/08 11:05 AM Page 191 To Mexico City Acámbaro San Juan del Río C H OAC Á N M I CHOACÁ Moroleón Zamora de Hidalgo 43 la Piedad de Cabadas Ocoltán 35 L a g o de de La hapala C ha To Morelia 15D Salvatierra Celaya 45D 45 Salamanca Pénjamo 110 90 Arandas 15D Irapuato Tepatitlán de Morelos Guadalajara Sahuayo de José Morelas 45 57D 85 D A LG O H I DA Zimapán Querétaro QU E RÉ R É TA RO QUE 120 Guanajuato 80D Silao G UA N A J UATO 54 Jalpa Zacatecas) have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

To this day, the two principal ethnic groups in Oaxaca remain the Zapotec and Mixtec, whose tonal languages are closely related to each other but far different from the Aztec language Náhuatl. The city of Oaxaca, originally called Antequera, was founded just a few years after the Spanish vanquished the Aztec. Most of Oaxaca’s central valley was granted to Hernán Cortez for his services to the crown. Three centuries of colonial rule followed, during which the region remained calm. In the years following independence, there was more or less continuous upheaval. From the 1830s to the 1860s, the Liberals and Conservatives fought for control of Mexico’s destiny, with the French eventually intervening on the side of the Conservatives.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

T o cite John Stuart Mill, writing from a British/Smithian perspective in the middle of the nineteenth century, " . . . the tendency of every extension o f the market [is] to improve the processes of production." 17 EMPIRE AND A F T E R 435 All of these trade effects depended on the nature of colonial rule. Some masters were richer and more ambitious. The colonials typically built useful things—roads, railroads, port facilities, buildings, water supply, waste disposal units, and the like. They made the natives pay for these improvements in labor and taxes, but they could have just kept the money.

B a a r k , E r i k , a n d A n d r e w J a m i s o n , e d s . 1 9 8 6 . Technological Development in China, India and Japan: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. N e w Y o r k : S t . M a r t i n ' s P r e s s . B a b e r , Z a h e e r . 1 9 9 6 . The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India. A l b a n y : S U N Y P r e s s . B a e c h l e r , J e a n , J o h n A . H a l l , a n d M i c h a e l M a n n , e d s . 1 9 8 8 . Europe and the Rise of Capitalism. O x f o r d : Basil Blackwell. B a g c h i , A m i y a K u m a r . 1 9 7 6 . " D e - i n d u s t r i a l i z a t i o n in I n d i a in t h e N i n e t e e n t h C e n t u r y : S o m e T h e o r e t i c a l I m p l i c a t i o n s , " / .


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman; in the meantime, all one can do is to acknowledge the outstanding debt. There are places where suitors say this quite explicitly. Consider the Tiv of Central Nigeria, who we have already met briefly in the last chapter. Most of our information on the Tiv comes from mid-century, when they were still under British colonial rule.11 Everyone at that time insisted that a proper marriage should take the form of an exchange of sisters. One man gives his sister in marriage to another, that man marries the sister of his newfound brother-in-law. This is the perfect marriage because the only thing one can really give in exchange for a woman is another woman.


pages: 681 words: 214,967

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, trade route

The communique expressed the desire of the British government to con-vene a peace conference with Turkey, but stated that no such conference could convene under the gun of Turkish threats. It expressed fear of what the Moslem world might do if comparatively weak Moslem Turkey could be seen to have inflicted a major defeat on the Allies; presumably the rest of the Moslem world would be encouraged to throw off colonial rule. The communique made reference to British consultations with France, Italy, and the Dominions with a view toward taking common military action to avert the Kemalist threat.29 * The need for securing support from the Dominions arose from the change in their position that had come about after—and as a result of—the First World War.


The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

banks create money, barriers to entry, book value, British Empire, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, cotton gin, creative destruction, desegregation, double helix, financial innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, manufacturing employment, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

But on a single August night, the mill of the first slavery’s growth stopped turning. All across Saint-Domingue’s sugar country, the most profitable stretch of real estate on the planet, enslaved people burst into the country mansions. They slaughtered enslavers, set torches to sugar houses and cane fields, and then marched by the thousand on Cap-Français, the seat of colonial rule. Thrown back, they regrouped. Revolt spread across the colony.10 By the end of the year thousands of whites and blacks were dead. As the cane fields burned, the smoke blew into the Atlantic trade winds. Refugees fled to Charleston, already burdened by its own fear of slave revolt; to Cuba; and to all the corners of the Atlantic world.


pages: 897 words: 210,566

Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire, Brent Beardsley

airport security, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, global village, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, land reform, risk/return, Ronald Reagan

Brent and I managed to piece together a rough history from paper accounts and a few scholarly articles, which reduced a highly mplex social and political situation to a simple inter-tribal conflict. a confidence born of ignorance, we soldiered on. We traced the roots of the current hostilities back to the early twenand Belgian colonial rule. When the Belgians chased the out of the territory in 1916, they discovered that two groups people shared the land. The Tutsis, who were tall and quite lightened, herded cattle; the shorter, darker Hutus farmed vegetable The Belgians viewed the minority Tutsis as closer in kind to opeans and elevated them to positions of power over the which exacerbated the feudal state of peasant Hutus and overlord Enlisting the Tutsis allowed the Belgians to develop and exploit vast network of coffee and tea plantations without the inconvenience war or the expense of deploying a large colonial service.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

ATI-ATIHAN The mother of all Philippine fiestas, Ati-Atihan celebrates Santo Niño (Infant Jesus) with colourful, Mardi Gras–like indigenous costumes and displays in Kalibo on the island of Panay. ISLAMIC NEW YEAR This lunar new year is celebrated throughout the Muslim world, including Indonesia and Malaysia. MYANMAR’S INDEPENDENCE DAY The end of colonial rule in Burma is celebrated as a national holiday on 4 January. SULTAN OF BRUNEI’S BIRTHDAY Colourful official ceremonies are held on 15 January to mark the birthday of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah. In Bandar Seri Begawan, events include an elaborate military ceremony presided over by the supremo himself, smartly dressed in a medal-bedecked uniform.

Those who commit evil are recorded in a book made of dog skin. Arts For centuries the arts in Myanmar were sponsored by the royal courts, mainly through the construction of major religious buildings that required the skills of architects, sculptors, painters and a variety of craftspeople. Such patronage was cut short during British colonial rule and has not been a priority since independence. This said, there are plenty of examples of traditional art to be viewed in Myanmar, mainly in the temples that are an ever-present feature of town and countryside. Marionette Theatre Yok-thei pwe (Burmese marionette theatre) was the forerunner of Burmese classical dance.


pages: 753 words: 233,306

Collapse by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

That's what actually appears to have happened at Western Settlement, and possibly at Eastern Settlement as well. Just as in Iceland, the environmental problems that beset the medieval Norse remain concerns in modern Greenland. For five centuries after Greenland's medieval Norse died out, the island was without livestock under Inuit occupation and then under Danish colonial rule. Finally, in 1915, before the recent studies of medieval environmental impacts had been carried out, the Danes introduced Icelandic sheep on a trial basis, and the first full-time sheep breeder reestablished the farm at Brattahlid in 1924. Cows were also tried but were abandoned because they took too much work.


pages: 784 words: 229,648

O Jerusalem by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, land bank, lateral thinking, Mount Scopus, union organizing

The Jewish tendency to live within the framework of their own social systems, their tendency to patronize the Arabs, stirred Arab bitterness and suspicion, and helped widen the gap between the two communities. Half a century behind their Zionist neighbors in the development of their own nationalist aspirations, industrially and socially underdeveloped, having just emerged from centuries of repressive colonial rule, the Arabs responded to the situation simply and unsophisticatedly. They consistently refused every compromise offered them, insisting that since the Jewish claim to Palestine was invalid in the first place, any discussion of the subject would merely give it a validity it did not have. Repeatedly, their attitude, made unbending by the fanaticism of their leaders, lost them opportunities to set a limit on Jewish growth in Palestine and to define with precision their own rights there.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

In that period at Saudi high schools and universities, it was common to find Syrian and Egyptian teachers, many of whom had become involved with dissident Islamist political groups in their home countries. Some of these teachers were members of, or were influenced by, the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher, Hassan Al-Banna. The Brotherhood was initially a religious-minded movement opposed to British colonial rule in Egypt; later, its leaders continued their struggle against Nasser. In his approach to the Brotherhood, Nasser alternated between periods of accommodation and brutal crackdowns. Some of the Brotherhood’s organizers were forced into exile, and they began to form new chapters across the Muslim world.


Lonely Planet Mexico by John Noble, Kate Armstrong, Greg Benchwick, Nate Cavalieri, Gregor Clark, John Hecht, Beth Kohn, Emily Matchar, Freda Moon, Ellee Thalheimer

AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, Burning Man, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, language acquisition, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines, urban sprawl, wage slave

MUSEO CASA DE HIDALGO Miguel Hidalgo lived in this house ( 182-01-71; cnr Hidalgo & Morelos; Tue-Sat M$31, Sun free; 9am-5:45pm Tue-Sat, 9am-4:45pm Sun) when he was Dolores’ parish priest. It was from here, in the early hours of September 16, 1810, that Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende and Juan de Aldama set off to launch the uprising against colonial rule. The house is now something of a national shrine. One large room is devoted to a collection of memorials to Hidalgo. Other rooms contain replicas of Hidalgo’s furniture and independence-movement documents, including the order for Hidalgo’s excommunication. Festivals & Events Dolores is the scene of major Día de la Independencia (September 16) celebrations, when the Mexican president may officiate – according to tradition – in his fifth year of office.

History Francisco de Montejo the Younger founded a Spanish colony at Campeche, about 160km to the southwest, in 1540. From this base he took advantage of political dissension among the Maya people (Click here), conquering T’ho (now Mérida) in 1542. By the decade’s end, Yucatán was mostly under Spanish colonial rule. When Montejo’s conquistadors entered T’ho, they found a major Maya settlement of lime-mortared stone that reminded them of the Roman architecture in Mérida, Spain. They promptly renamed the city and proceeded to build it into the regional capital, dismantling the Maya structures and using the materials to construct a cathedral and other stately buildings.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Stretching from the majestic icebound peaks and bleak high-altitude deserts of the Andes to the exuberant rainforests and vast savannahs of the Amazon basin, it embraces an astonishing range of landscapes and climates, and encompasses everything outsiders find most exotic and mysterious about the continent. Three centuries of Spanish colonial rule have left their mark, most obviously in some of the finest colonial architecture on the continent. Yet the European influence is essentially a thin veneer overlying indigenous cultural traditions that stretch back long before the Conquest: while Spanish is the language of business and government, more than thirty indigenous languages are still spoken.

Chronology 1520 Ferdinand Magellan is the first European to sail through what is now the Magellan Strait. 1536 Expedition from Peru to Chile by conquistador Diego de Almagro and his four hundred men ends in death for most of the party. 1541 Pedro de Valdivia, a lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro, founds Santiago; a feudal system in which Spanish landowners enslave the indigenous population is established. 1808 Napoleon invades Spain and replaces Spanish King Ferdinand VII with his own brother. 1810 The criollo elite of Santiago decide Chile will be self-governed until the Spanish king is restored to the throne. 1817 Bernardo O’Higgins defeats Spanish royalists in the Battle of Chacabuco with the help of Argentine general José San Martín, as part of the movement to liberate South America from colonial rule. 1818 Full independence won from Spain. O’Higgins signs the Chilean Declaration of Independence. 1829 Wealthy elite seizes power with dictator Diego Portales at the helm. 1832–60s Mineral deposits found in the north of the country, stimulating economic growth. 1879–83 Chilean troops occupy the Bolivian port of Antofagasta, precipitating the War of the Pacific against Bolivia and Peru. 1914 With the creation of the Panama Canal, shipping routes no longer need to pass via the Cape, thus ending Valparaíso’s glory days.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

KI D S ’ N E W YO R K | Theater, circuses, and other entertainment 429 Contexts 431 Contexts History ...........................................................................................433 Books ............................................................................................441 New York on film ..........................................................................446 432 History To Europe she was America, to America she was the gateway of the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world. H.G. Wells Early days and colonial rule ong before the arrival of European settlers, New York was inhabited by several Native American tribes; the Algonquin tribe was the largest and most populous in the area that is now New York City. Although descendants of the Algonquins and other tribes still live on Long Island’s Shinnecock reservation, the appearance of Europeans in the sixteenth century essentially destroyed their settled existence, bringing an end to Native American life as it had existed here for several thousand years.


pages: 801 words: 242,104

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

That’s what actually appears to have happened at Western Settlement, and possibly at Eastern Settlement as well. Just as in Iceland, the environmental problems that beset the medieval Norse remain concerns in modern Greenland. For five centuries after Greenland’s medieval Norse died out, the island was without livestock under Inuit occupation and then under Danish colonial rule. Finally, in 1915, before the recent studies of medieval environmental impacts had been carried out, the Danes introduced Icelandic sheep on a trial basis, and the first full-time sheep breeder reestablished the farm at Brattahlid in 1924. Cows were also tried but were abandoned because they took too much work.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

Therefore, the net effect of price control was that “the city lived in high spirits until all at once provisions gave out” and Antwerp had no choice but to surrender to the Spaniards.{92} Halfway around the world, in eighteenth-century India, a local famine in Bengal brought a government crackdown on food dealers and speculators, imposing price controls on rice. Here the resulting shortages led to widespread deaths by starvation. However, when another famine struck India in the nineteenth century, now under the colonial rule of British officials and during the heyday of free market economics, opposite policies were followed, with opposite results: In the earlier famine one could hardly engage in the grain trade without becoming amenable to the law. In 1866 respectable men in vast numbers went into the trade; for the Government, by publishing weekly returns of the rates in every district, rendered the traffic both easy and safe.


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

On the other hand, it made some seafaring sense for the boats to sail from England on an annual or seasonal basis. This was partly due to the weather, shoal migration and spawning. On deeper examination, here was an illustration of the limitations of industry. To set up exclusive rights and to maintain some colonial rule over them in the Newfoundland ports would stretch the resources of the fishing managers and their funds. If they put too much effort into establishing themselves in Newfoundland then they could end up having less control over the management of the returning catches and the supply services and distribution in English ports.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

A high of 4.32% in 2010 was an exception due to the recovery from the world’s greatest post-WWII downturn, and the post-2011 rates stayed below 3%. Examinations of the importance of historical events for long-term economic development are surprisingly recent, with the most important contributions focusing on the impact of colonial rule (the difference between former Spanish and British colonies providing the most obvious contrasts) and on the origins of current institutions, above all the legal arrangements that affect financial affairs (Engerman and Sokoloff 1994; Acemoglu et al. 2002). Nunn’s (2009) summary of these studies emphasized the contrast between an undeniable conclusion that history matters and a continued inability to describe exact channels of causality through which it matters, leaving us with black boxes that still wait to be unpacked.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

< Back to Kids’ New York Contexts History Books New York on film History To Europe she was America, to America she was the gateway of the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world. H.G. Wells Early days and colonial rule Long before the arrival of European settlers, several Native American tribes inhabited New York; the Lenni Lenape tribe – part of the Algonquin nation – was the largest and most populous in the area that is now New York City. Although descendants of the Algonquins and other tribes still live on Long Island’s Shinnecock reservation, the appearance of Europeans in the sixteenth century essentially destroyed their settled existence.


pages: 972 words: 259,764

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

The man who would become Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890, three years before the birth of Mao Zedong, as Nguyen Sinh Cung in the central Tonkin province of Nghe An, long known for its stubborn and rebellious people—“the buffaloes of Nghe An,” they were called.7 When he reached age ten, his name was changed, in conformity with Vietnamese custom, to Nguyen Tat Thanh (He Who Will Succeed). The son of a Confucian scholar and part-time farmer, Nguyen Tat Thanh attended a prestigious French school in Hue. He was, however, expelled in 1908 for joining demonstrations by peasants upset at their high tax burden—a sign of the growing opposition to France’s colonial rule, which had begun in the 1850s. In 1911, he shipped out of Saigon aboard a merchant vessel bound for Marseille. He would not see Vietnam again for three decades. In the intervening years, he visited Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America while working as a gardener, cook, pastry chef, and snow sweeper, among other occupations.


pages: 1,002 words: 276,865

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

Italian emigration was dominated by southerners, for the inhabitants of the southern villages saw none of the improvement in the standard of living that was beginning to transform Milan and other northern centres. For the French, on the other hand, opportunities to create a new life elsewhere could be found within the Mediterranean: Algeria became the focus of French emigration, for the ideal was to create a new France on the shores of North Africa, while keeping the wilder interior under colonial rule. Two manifestations of this policy were the rebuilding of large areas of Algiers as a European city, and the collective extension of French citizenship to 35,000 Algerian Jews, in 1870. The Algerian Jews were seen as évolué, ‘civilized’, for they had embraced the opportunities provided by French rule, opening modern schools under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded to promote Jewish education on the European model, and transforming themselves into a new professional class.1 From the 1880s onwards, after it fell under French control, Tunisia also attracted French colonists, though more slowly; around 1900 it was a more popular target for Italian settlers than for French ones.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Now, places that were ‘Westernizing’, however superficially, became even more alien than they had been to the tribal inhabitants of the surrounding, and often unchanging, country. An extreme case in every way, but one which points to other disunities created by imperial rule, was that of Aden, down at the far end of the peninsula. ‘British colonial rule,’ admitted one of its last dispensers there, High Commissioner Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, ‘had converted Aden into an island which might have been separated by a hundred miles of ocean from the South Arabian mainland.’ Aden, itself a miniature peninsula with ancient cosmopolitan connections, had never been more than loosely moored to Yemen and the peninsula as a whole.


A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

What impression would it make upon the Radjah of Perlak, if, for instance, he saw a flourishing settlement rise up at Lho Seumawé for the development of petroleum wells in Tjunda, while in his own land there was nothing but a dead pipeline?302 The government decided in favour of Royal Dutch, however, and the pipeline finally became operational over the entire distance in January 1901.303 The Dutch now became more determined to extend their colonial rule into the neighbouring sultanate of Jambi. In May, following a number of applications for oil-exploration licences in the region from companies, including Royal Dutch and Moeara Enim, the Resident of Jambi, I.A. Van Rijn van Alkemade, proposed that it should be opened up for mineral extraction as soon as possible; and in December, Snouck Hurgronje wrote that mineral extraction there should urgently be pursued ‘as one of the main peaceful means of firmly establishing our influence in that region’.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Others went to Caribbean plantations, where they formed a new indentured agricultural workforce, and some later traveled, as we’ll see, to the mines of South Africa. Most, however, ventured to colonial territories in Southeast Asia: the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, and French Indochina. “While many of these immigrants remained poor,” writes Sebastian Strangio, “a significant number flourished under colonial rule, slotting into roles as tax collectors and economic middlemen between the European authorities and native populations.” Sebastian Strangio, In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century (Yale University Press, 2022), 26. iv Arson attacks failed due to the unusual durability of Chinatown relative to the rest of the city.


pages: 961 words: 302,613

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

When the two brothers took their differences to their father, the old man sided with his younger son—because “I was either generally in the right, or else a better pleader.” This made James all the angrier; in his anger he frequently beat Ben, who took this physical form of insult “extremely amiss.” (He added, parenthetically, from amid the American challenge to British colonial rule during the early 1770s: “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.”) Ben had little doubt he could manage on his own by now. Better than most apprentices, he knew how much it cost to support himself.


pages: 964 words: 296,182

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fixed income, invention of the sewing machine, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, means of production, New Journalism, New Urbanism, night-watchman state, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, unemployed young men, wage slave

In Asia, indigenous movements of national liberation, formed in resistance to imperialism and colonialism, carried out communist revolutions in China and Vietnam, also in the name of ‘Marxism’. By the 1960s, movements inspired by communism or revolutionary socialism had also spread across Latin America and succeeded in Cuba. In South Africa, communism helped inspire the first sustained resistance to Apartheid, and movements to end white colonial rule throughout the rest of Africa. In the aftermath of 1917 and the global spread of Soviet-style communism, Marx was celebrated as communism’s epic founder and lawgiver in an increasingly monumental mythology. He was venerated as the founder of the science of history – ‘historical materialism’ – and together with his friend Engels as the architect of the scientific philosophy to accompany it – ‘dialectical materialism’.


Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Updated Edition) (South End Press Classics Series) by Noam Chomsky

active measures, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, centre right, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, information security, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, public intellectual, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman

The propaganda campaign about “Islamic fundamentalism” has its farcical elements—even putting aside the fact that U.S. culture compares with Iran in its religious fundamentalism. The most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world is the loyal U.S. ally Saudi Arabia—or, to be more precise, the family dictatorship that serves as the “Arab facade” behind which the U.S. effectively controls the Arabian peninsula, to borrow the terms of British colonial rule. The West has no problems with Islamic fundamentalism there. Probably one of the most fanatic Islamic fundamentalist groups in the world in recent years was led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the terrorist extremist who had been a CIA favorite and prime recipient of the $3.3 billion in (official) U.S. aid given Classics in Politics: The Fateful Triangle Noam Chomsky Preface 19 to the Afghan rebels (with roughly the same amount reported from Saudi Arabia), the man who shelled Kabul with thousands killed, driving hundreds of thousands of people out of the city (including all Western embassies), in an effort to shoot his way into power; not quite the same as Pol Pot emptying Phnom Penh, since the U.S. client was far more bloody in that particular operation.


pages: 879 words: 309,222

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

In other words, a movie that preaches the need for self-respect is openly turned on by the prospect of humiliation, by a sneaky belief that violence is a pretty sight. Heaven and Earth is intended to make us muse afresh on the plight of the Vietnamese, and, in an unlikely way, it succeeds. First, they had colonial rule, then the Vietcong, then napalm, and now Oliver Stone trying to be nice to them. Haven’t these poor people suffered enough? JANUARY 17, 1994 THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was born in 1932, read music before he could read words, gave his first public recital at the age of twelve and his last at the age of thirty-one, and died in 1982.


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

In the space of just a few years during the late 1960s and early 1970s, what little there was of the center in Afghan politics melted away in Kabul under the friction of these confrontational, imported ideologies.4 The Egyptian texts carried to Kabul’s universities were sharply focused on politics. The tracts sprang from the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the transnational spiritual and political network founded during the 1920s by an Egyptian schoolteacher, Hassan al-Banna, as a protest movement against British colonial rule in Egypt. (Jamaat-e-Islami was, in effect, the Pakistani branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.) Muslim Brotherhood members believed that the only way to return the Islamic world to its rightful place of economic and political power was through a rigid adherence to core Islamic principles. Initiated brothers pledged to work secretly to create a pure Islamic society modeled on what they saw as the lost and triumphant Islamic civilizations founded in the seventh century.


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

Afghan forces who accompanied McRaven offered to sacrifice a sheep to ask for forgiveness for the deaths caused by the night raid. Mohamed Afrah Qanyare was one of the first Somali warlords contracted by the CIA after 9/11 to hunt down people on the US kill list. “America knows war,” he said. “They are war masters.” The Mogadishu Cathedral, built in 1928 when Somalia was under Italian colonial rule, now lies in ruins. Since 2002, US-backed warlords have battled Islamic militias for control of Somalia. Somali warlord Yusuf Mohammed Siad, known as “Indha Adde” (White Eyes), controls large sections of Mogadishu. Once an ally of al Qaeda, he now fights on the US side against al Shabab. “If we capture a foreigner, we execute them so that others will see we have no mercy,” he said.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

In fact, there were more indentured servants than ever, and the Revolution “did nothing to end and little to ameliorate white bondage.” Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): “No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.” George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. And so on. On the other hand, town mechanics, laborers, and seamen, as well as small farmers, were swept into “the people” by the rhetoric of the Revolution, by the camaraderie of military service, by the distribution of some land.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Nigeria has gone through five constitutions and seven military coups. The country’s experience demonstrates the Dutch disease in many ways. The once-vibrant agricultural-export sector has collapsed, and the country is a net importer of food. An effective and dedicated civil service, one of the legacies of colonial rule, was weakened, contributing to the poor governance. Oil revenues were stolen and squandered on a massive scale. The huge Ajaokouta steel complex is the poster child for revenues wasted. Built in the 1970s, it has yet to produce commercial steel. Between 1970 and 2000, Nigeria’s population more than doubled; over the same period, on a per capita basis, income actually declined .7 Through all this, the country’s oil industry has been caught up in the struggle among regions, ethnic groups, national and local politicians, and violent groups—militias, gangs, and cults—for power and primacy, for identity—and for the money.


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

A moment which, like that action, finally opened up the possibility of reconciliation and justice – though, of course, these processes take many, many years. Some in the crowd, still wary of their old colonial adversary, shouted that they wanted a clear apology – Wieczorek-Zeul replied, ‘Everything I have said in my speech was an apology for crimes committed under German colonial rule.’ However (and it was a big however), she explained there would be no financial compensation from the German government, though economic aid would increase. Also, bizarrely, although this speech had seemed to accept German responsibility in uncompromising terms, according to the German government afterwards it did not constitute either an official German apology nor a formal recognition of genocide; her speech would not be adopted as government policy.


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Midan Orabi and Midan Tahrir Emerging from Sharia Sa’ad Zaghloul onto Midan Orabi you’ll see a Neoclassical Monument of the Unknown Soldier facing the seafront, where a naval guard of honour is changed every hour on the hour. The square is named after the leader of the 1882 Orabi Revolt, Egypt’s first attempt to cast off European colonial rule, punished by a naval bombardment of the city. Midan Tahrir Midan Orabi forms a T-shape with an even larger square, whose equestrian statue of Mohammed Ali rears outside the former Mixed Courts, where foreigners were once tried under their own jurisprudence rather than Egyptian law.


pages: 1,208 words: 364,966

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, friendly fire, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, open economy, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, the long tail, Yom Kippur War

They called the Maronites fascists and demanded that Lebanon join the struggle against the Camp David ‘surrender’. The enmity between Chamoun and Assad was in any case now a personal one, exacerbated by Chamoun’s decision to publicise a damaging 40-year-old letter written by Syrian Alawites to Léon Blum, informing the prewar French prime minister that Syria was ‘not yet ready’ for freedom from colonial rule. One of the signatories was allegedly a Latakia peasant named Assad, the father of the man who now claimed to be the author of real Syrian independence. The Phalange cared nothing for the Beit Eddine accord. The Christian militiamen went out of their way to mock it. They gleefully spray-painted the Star of David on the walls of the damaged apartment blocks in Ashrafieh, inking the word ‘Israel’ in Biro onto their khaki shirts and green dungarees.


pages: 1,222 words: 385,226

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Burning Man, clean water, colonial rule, financial independence, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

When the light on that long night became the dawn, and the ferry docked at the Goan capital of Panjim, I was the first to board a bus to Mapusa. The fifteen-kilometre journey from Panjim to Mapusa, pronounced as Muppsa, wound through lush, leafy groves, past mansions built to the styles and tastes of four hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule. Mapusa was a transportation and communication centre for the northern region of Goa. I arrived on a Friday, market day, and the morning crowds were already busy with business and bargains. I made my way to the taxi and motorcycle stands. After a bout of bartering that invoked an august assembly of deities from at least three religions, and incorporated spirited, carnal references to the sisters of our respective friends and acquantainces, a dealer agreed to hire out an Enfield Bullet motorcycle for a reasonable rental.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

Study of the Arthashastra, in Menon’s view, is necessary to remind Indians that strategic thinking in India long predated the colonial era: We are afflicted with neglect of our pre-modern histories, and many of us believe [Western] orientalist caricatures of India. India’s supposedly incoherent strategic approach is actually a colonial construct, as is the idea of Indians somehow forgetting their own history and needing to be taught it by Westerners who retrieved it. The version that they ‘retrieved’ was a construct that was useful to perpetuate colonial rule and, after independence, to induce self-doubt and a willingness to follow. . . . To be honest among ourselves, much of what passes for strategic thinking in India today is derivative, using concepts, doctrines and a vocabulary derived from other cultures, times, places and conditions. This is why, with a few honourable exceptions like the home-grown nuclear doctrine, it fails to serve our needs, impact policy, or to find a place in domestic and international discourse.40 To regard the Arthashastra as ‘a realist description of the running of a state’, however, requires a rather selective reading.


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

., Natural disasters in the Ottoman empire (Rehtymnon, 1999), 251–63 Faroqhi, S., ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey, III: The later Ottoman empire, 1603–1839 (Cambridge, 2006) Faroqhi, S. with L. Erder, ‘Population rise and fall in Anatolia, 1550–1620’, Middle Eastern Studies, XV (1979), 322–45 Farris, N., Maya society under colonial rule: The collective enterprise of survival (Princeton, 1984) Farris, W. W., Japan's medieval population: Famine, fertility and warfare in a transformative age (Honolulu, 2006) Faruqui, M. D., ‘Princes and power in the Mughal empire, 1569–1657’ (Duke University, PhD thesis, 2002) Fei Si-yen, Negotiating urban space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing (Cambridge, MA, 2009) Felix, A., ed., The Chinese in the Philippines, 2 vols (Manila, 1966–9) Felloni, G., ‘Per la storia della populazione di Genova nei secoli XVI e XVII’, Archivio Storico Italiano, CX (1952), 236–53 Ferrarino, L., La guerra e la peste nella Milano dei ‘Promessi sposi’.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Car Car rental companies will deliver cars to the ferry dock in Kingstown or the airport. Avis ( 456-4389; www.avis.com) and Lewis Auto World ( 456-2244; www.lewisautoworld.com) have airport offices. Kingstown POP 32,000 Rough cobblestone streets, arched stone doorways and covered walkways conjure up a Caribbean of banana boats and colonial rule. The city of Kingstown heaves and swells with a pulsing local community that bustles through its narrow streets and alleyways. Steep hills surround the town, amplifying the sounds of car horns, street vendors and the music filtering through the crowd. For nearly all visitors to SVG, Kingstown is the gateway to exploring the outer islands of the Grenadines.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Perhaps the greatest domestic writer of the interwar period is DH Lawrence, who charted changing Britain in novels including Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and the controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for which the publishers were prosecuted in 1960 under the recently introduced Obscene Publications Act (they were found not guilty by showing the work was of ‘literary merit’). Other writers ploughed a similar course: EM Forster’s A Passage to India depicted the downfall of British colonial rule, while Evelyn Waugh explored moral, social and political disintegration in A Handful of Dust, Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited. The interwar period also spawned a generation of gifted poets – WH Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Robert Graves – who collectively documented the crumbling pillars of British (and European) society


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

They went to work with unstoppable zeal. Shrimps found their way on to the list of banned goods, because it was not clear that they had originated in the colony; maybe they had lived their lives in the Chinese-controlled waters of the Pearl River.3 The other trading base of the British, Singapore, was not expected to stay under colonial rule for very long. There was plenty of sympathy in London for the independence movement in Malaya, but the emergence of guerrilla forces within Malaya, among whom were many ethnic Chinese who were also Communist, complicated the picture greatly. Moreover, the population of Singapore shot up, soon reaching a million (double the pre-war figure), for this colony, like Hong Kong, acted as a magnet to poverty-striken mainlanders.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Then came words almost universally judged a calamitous mistake: “It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.” He explained this with an analysis that once upon a time had been embraced by virtually all Americans, back when Marines were landing in Da Nang: “A small country newly freed from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest.” The VFW audience gave this an enthusiastic ovation—an even more enthusiastic one when he continued, “We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to guilt as if we were doing something shameful.”


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

Around Dalian Lushun With its excellent port and strategic location on the northeast coast, Lushun (formerly Port Arthur) was the focal point of both Russian and Japanese expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The bloody Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) finally saw the area fall under Japanese colonial rule, which would continue for the next 40 years. Lushun is worth a visit during any trip to Dalian. While developers are piling on the high-rise apartments, Lushun is still a relaxed town built on the hills. Most sites are related to military history, but there’s an excellent museum on Liaoning, as well as a number of scenic lookouts and parks.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

In 1928 Lawrence further pushed his explorations of sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, initially banned as pornographic. Torrid affairs are no big deal today, but the quality of the writing still shines. Other highlights of the interwar years included EM Forster’s A Passage to India, about the hopelessness of British colonial rule, and Daphne du Maurier’s romantic suspense novel Rebecca, set on the Cornish coast. Evelyn Waugh gave us Brideshead Revisited and Richard Llewellyn wrote the Welsh classic How Green Was My Valley. In a different world entirely, JRR Tolkien published The Hobbit, trumping it some 20 years later with his awesome trilogy The Lord of the Rings.