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lands are being stolen and mismanaged by colonists who believe that their environmental and clean energy projects – eco-tourism, national parks, and hydroelectric dams  – will be more effective than millennia of land stewardship by Indigenous Peoples

The idea that we could build a truly fair and sustainable society using those foundational European institutions and environmental relations must be thrown out entirely. This makes many people, even the most anti-racist leftists, deeply uncomfortable, because it means we have to reorganize all aspects of life as we know it.

When coupled with the cattle’s overgrazing, invasive Eurasian plants began beating out native grasses and plants while retaining less water and carbon in the soil. Concentrations of cattle increased throughout the 20th century, and instead of letting them graze, farmers began fattening them up in crowded pens called feedlots, which in turn increased the need to cultivate wheat, corn, and soy to feed the cows. Ancient, well-managed prairie was aggressively tilled for the first time, exposing the soil to the air. Some experts have argued that it resulted in a period of severe and destructive dust storms on the Prairies in the 1930s. Today, farmers help prevent this erosion and increase their crop yields with intensive irrigation from underground aquifers that are nearly bled dry – a practice that some studies estimate will leave millions on the Great Plains without water for crops, livestock, or human settlements within a century.

Before colonization, an estimated 30 million bison roamed Turtle Island, but by the end of the 19th century their numbers dwindled to fewer than 1,000 thanks to colonial policies and hunting by settlers. “The majority of Indigenous people have forgotten their connection to our ancestral animal,” Joely says. “Most have never eaten buffalo, seen a buffalo up close, smelled one. Almost all have never scraped the fat and meat off one to tan it.” In 2015, she co-founded the Buffalo People Arts Institute (BPAI), a non-profit whose mission is to “bring back the buffalo emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically,” including by running workshops on bison hide tanning.  

Like oil and gas, commercial wheat, beef, and salmon farming on Turtle Island are unsustainable extractive industries with product prices that do not match the real human and ecological cost

“We’re willing to wield science as a tool in our work because truly, our people were scientists,” Jess tells me. “We had systems for organizing and transmitting knowledge. We developed practices, teachings, and laws based on our careful experimentation and observation, our code of ethics, our rigour, our intelligence, our drive to understand the world around us. We don’t differentiate between ‘our knowledge’ and ‘science.’ We differentiate between frameworks: ‘Haíɫzaqv science’ and ‘western science.’” There is no confusion in the community about which methods are most appropriate for Haíɫzaqv people or their territory. “We’ve seen decades of academics coming into our territory to earn degrees studying obscure things that have no practical application here. That doesn’t happen anymore. We now have relationships with academic institutions that allow us to be an early point of contact for researchers in all fields who want to come into the territory. They’re expected to develop projects that will advance our territorial governance and stewardship.”

fish farms are disease accelerators,  making both wild populations of fish and humans more vulnerable to a host of pathogens while the industry focuses solely on streamlined production

“The way the western world talks about Indigenous knowledge by and large does it a disservice,” Jess says. “It’s treated like a new-age novelty or a tokenistic box to check on a referral or consultation strategy. It’s deeper than that. It’s sacred, nuanced, organized, and rooted in deep relationships with the world around us. It’s careful. It’s observant. It’s adaptive. It’s not fodder for some generic inspirational Indian proverb meme. It’s a living system by which many of us still organize our lives and map our identities.”

Weirs have long been used by Indigenous fishers to track salmon populations and help make sure they weren’t overfishing – until the late 1800s, when the Dominion of Canada banned Indigenous fishing technologies, under pressure from industrial fisheries which wanted to exploit salmon stocks without competition.  Today, the revival of the weir allows scientists to monitor the salmon’s movement through their tags and study the impact that variables like water temperature have on their populations. They’ve found that high water temperatures are associated with higher rates of death in migrating adult sockeye salmon – a crucial insight into how climate change will affect biodiversity and food security.  A Haíɫzaqv-led non-profit, Qqs Projects Society, is a key partner on the project, and brings children to visit the weir, teaching them about their relationship with the salmon, the logic of traditional technologies, and the respect for life that is crucial to the continuation of their subsistence systems.

The legacy of colonialism and its style of private land management is still an obstacle in reintroducing bison to their ancestral habitats. Cattle ranchers vehemently oppose expanding bison ranches, arguing that bison may pass diseases to cattle herds.  But both Indigenous and settler sciences affirm the benefits of bison for both habitat restoration and human health.  “When the buffalo return, new species return, ecosystems return that were dormant. They can survive on their own with little intervention, in comparison to cattle,”

“Part of our work is feeding people buffalo at community feasts and getting them used to eating it again. Our diets, historically, were changed from buffalo, vegetables, and fruit from the land to pork, salt, sugar, and flour. There is no wonder why diabetes consumes our communities.”

“Looking back does not mean we need to stop our Indigenous cultures from growing,” she adds. “I support solar and wind power. I support modern technologies. There has to be a way to come together as Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures to join methodologies and practices for the health and well-being of future generations.”

In contrast to stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples as hunter-gatherers, oral histories and research prove that Indigenous Peoples in the Pacific Northwest have been farming clams for over 1,000 years – constructing stone terraces and stacking sediments in the tidal column to perfect clam-growing conditions and harvesting selectively to feed large numbers of people without decimating the clam population.  Even so, the myth that Indigenous Peoples were solely foragers, not farmers, was leveraged by colonial governments to justify stripping Indigenous nations of their land base.

The destruction wrought by colonization cannot be undone, but we can recover from it. Tiffany explains that one must “be strong enough to let the land govern you.” In this sense, “Land Back” is not just the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of First Nations, but a reminder that “the land is sovereign and the land is what you should obey,” she says. It is a call for us all to take responsibility in maintaining a meaningful relationship of reciprocity with the land. 

Our current problems are the result of a number of historical conditions being realized, and are not a fundamental manifestation of our nature, evolutionary trajectory, or destiny. Designing a society that makes happy humans with healthy bodies and minds in resilient ecosystems does not involve “going back” to any ideal period of history, but it does require us recognizing that Indigenous knowledge and ecological stewardship are and will continue to be successful; that ecosystems have regulating functions that are better at preventing pandemics and responding to climate change than present human technology; and that the legacy of industrial agriculture, capitalism, and its exploitation of people and the planet should no longer be the standard that shapes our vision of progress.

I listened to the pilots, to their voices, and I trust them much more than I would trust myself. And they’re clearly seeing something extraordinary. Now, whether it’s alien life, who knows? It’s a plausible explanation. My point is that we should be agnostic about this and simply study it scientifically. Let’s do the science and then we can talk about what we found. Until we’ve done that, it’s all bullshit.

no one has bothered to actually look for UFOs. We’re looking for ETs around distant stars, we’re looking for comets, we’re looking at all kinds of other things in the atmosphere. No one, as far as I know, is seriously looking for UFOs.

The puzzle is that we’re not doing the science. To me, that’s the essential phenomenon that’s of interest.

if ETs were discovered, it would be the most important event in human history.

I’m a strong disbeliever in any kind of conspiracy argument. I don’t think there has ever been a conspiracy to cover up the truth that we know that aliens are here. At most, we’ve covered up the fact that we have no idea what’s going on.

My feeling is that if they’re here, they’re almost certainly peaceful, because if they were not peaceful they would have wiped us out a long time ago. They can probably do it very quickly. So my assumption is they don’t mean any harm. But it’s still the case that society could implode or destabilize as a result of colliding with ETs.

I worry less about poking around and getting conquered and more about the potential realization that these things are here and then an internal implosion of our society. So I worry about my fellow human beings more than I worry about the aliens. So I guess in that sense, I disagree with Hawking’s premise that they’re out to get us. But sure, it’s possible they’re on a surveillance mission. But people have been reporting UFOs for at least 80 years, and that’s a really, really long surveillance mission. And also, why would they want to conquer us? That’s like us conquering ants.

people have speculated that any civilization that’s able to travel between the stars would have to become nonviolent, because they would never survive long enough if they’re violent among themselves to actually reach a point where their technology was that sophisticated. And human beings don’t seem to be as violent as we used to be, so there’s that.

For governments, there’s no real upside to talking about this. They can’t control this. If there are ETs, they don’t have the power to do anything about it. They’re helpless in the face of ETs. And there’s a big downside risk of social chaos, loss of authority, loss of control and all that. So I think governments have lots of reasons to let a sleeping dog lie, which is why the Navy’s thing is so surprising in a way.

it could be a very dangerous event in the sense that we might see a collapse of state authority. We might see chaos. The possibility of contact with a civilization that has vastly more knowledge than we do is exciting and terrifying and unpredictable.

I only write articles where I don’t know the answer ahead of time

Montezuma could’ve prepared a lot better for Cortes than he did, had he only known Cortes was coming.

Many emerging diseases, like those listed above, are zoönoses – diseases transferred from other vertebrates. Their origins can usually be traced to wildlife. They may have stayed on, unnoticed, in the wild and never made the species jump to infect us if a stable ecosystem had been left undisturbed

The urban push into the forest forces bat populations to colonise human spaces and increases their vulnerability – and ours.

Urbanisation provides new roosts, new sources of food and new company. Bats are sociable creatures. They form lasting relationships with home, and their urban circle of friends may embrace species that won’t roost together in the wild. And this commingling means a richer, more diversified stew of bat-borne viruses.

bats don’t get sick. Not as often as they should, considering the range of viruses they harbour

When a bat flies, its metabolic rate rises to meet the exorbitant energy demand of flight, and its body temperature spikes to a high fever. In all mammals, fever upticks the immune process and slows viral replication. As the only mammal capable of sustained flight, the bat has evolved this pattern of spiking body temperature. The benefit is a more efficient immune system.

Bats also spend a great deal of time in torpor – a state of suspended animation, when the body’s temperature drops. Was it this that encouraged viruses to co-evolve the ability to flourish across a wide range of temperatures?

Coronaviruses are 30 per cent of the healthy bat’s virome. They cause diseases in other species – diarrhoeas and dysenteries; respiratory infections in cattle, dogs and swine; even peritonitis in cats. But before 2002, the worst illness they gave us humans was the common cold. Then, in 2002, SARS emerged. It had a death rate of 10 per cent. What had changed?

Words like “coincidental” and “fortuitous” have no place in the narrative of an emerging disease. Instead, we must look for the motive force, the driver that brought about disease. Southeast Asia has lost 30 per cent of its forests in recent years. The deforested land is intensively cultivated. Urban growth is invasive. This abrupt proximity between humans and bats allows greater exposure to the viruses shed in bat saliva and guano, and provides an environment conducive to a rapidly diversifying spectrum of viruses. And since bat coronaviruses cause infections in domesticated species, intermediate hosts are aplenty.

when there is a spillover, humans are immunologically naïve to the virus. This results in a virulent infection, and the virus quickly adapts to rapid spread between humans.

At present, there are thousands of coronaviruses circulating in bats. Just seven of them have declared themselves in humans. As crowding increases, more may emerge. Can we predict what the next one will be like?

The West has long jeered at Asia and Africa as “virus machines”. Such a label is deeply offensive to more than half the people on this planet, besides being scientifically untrue. Viruses are everywhere. Asia and Africa have been historically impoverished by European nations, either through genocide or colonisation. Disease was driven by conquest in the past, and racism in science is rooted in that memory. The language of science often echoes that inequality of power, and, thankfully, we’re growing more sensitive to it.

Disease is driven by capitalism today: the forests of Asia, Africa, Central and South Americas are enslaved to richer nations to produce goods that serve few and bankrupt millions.

war is anti-democratic, anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-human. Yet, as we know, history makes heroes out of its participants and celebrates mass murderers like Napoleon as “great captains.”

The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable:

American society’s almost complete isolation from war’s deadly effects:

Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy

An unrepresentative government

America’s persistent empathy gap

Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.

even the Pentagon knows that our most serious enemy is climate change, not China or Russia or terror

The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only wants to grow more so, but what’s welfare for the military brass isn’t wellness for the planet.

Spaceship Earth should not be allowed to remain Warship Earth as well, not when the existence of significant parts of humanity is already becoming ever more precarious. Think of us as suffering from a coolant leak, causing cabin temperatures to rise even as food and other resources dwindle. Under the circumstances, what’s the best strategy for survival: killing each other while ignoring the leak or banding together to fix an increasingly compromised ship?

Every war makes us less human as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium. Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life.

war is a bloody, murderous mess and those practitioners, when not killed or wounded, are marred for life because war functionally makes everyone involved into a murderer

We need to stop idealizing war and idolizing its so-called warriors

after the Pick-Sloan plan dammed the Upper Missouri River with a series of five earthen-rolled dams in the mid-twentieth century for hydroelectricity and irrigation, 75 percent of wildlife and native plants on the area’s reservations disappeared, and hundreds of thousands of acres of Indigenous farms were destroyed

What was once a subsistence economy based on wild harvesting and small-scale agriculture was transformed almost overnight into dependency on USDA commodities. White flour, milk, white sugar, and canned foods replaced formerly protein- and nutrient-rich diets. Diabetes rates skyrocketed, and its spread can be contact-traced to a single public works project.

The government has once again made clear that the lives of the poor—especially the Black and Indigenous poor—are less sacred than private property

The Navajo Nation, whose lands helped make the United States the world’s largest oil producer, now faces some of the worst rates of infection and death—not only compared to other states, but to entire countries. About 30 percent of its reservation population lives without running water, and about 10 percent without electricity, while coal from its lands fuels power plants, and the water from its rivers soaks golf courses in Phoenix. The United States created the first nuclear bomb on a sacred Tewa mesa with uranium mined from Navajo lands, poisoning generations. For the Navajo people, the real pandemic is—and has always been—resource colonization.

On May 20, five tribal organizations signed a letter to David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior (and a former oil lobbyist), calling for the resignation of assistant secretary of Indian affairs Tara Sweeney, an Inupiaq Alaskan Native (also a former oil lobbyist) for what she had set into motion during the pandemic. In late February, as coronavirus swept through the country, a federal court denied the Mashpee Wampanoag the right to restore their homeland in Massachusetts, a process set into motion by Sweeney in 2018 that was overturned by a federal judge in June. Her office also failed to protect the Tohono O’odham Nation’s burial and sacred sites from being destroyed with explosives to build Trump’s border wall, the construction of which continued unabated as large sectors of the economy were shut down. Meanwhile, the Interior Department allowed for-profit Alaskan Native corporations, many of which have investments in the oil and gas industry, to seek payouts from the Covid-19 relief money reserved for tribal governments.

American Indian men are incarcerated at four times the rate of white men, and American Indian women are incarcerated at six times the rate of white women

On April 28, three weeks after giving birth while in custody, Andrea Circle Bear, a thirty-year-old citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, became the first woman to die of coronavirus in federal prison. She was five months pregnant when sentenced to twenty-six months for a minor drug charge

Last month was the three-year anniversary of the killing of Zachary Bearheels, a twenty-nine-year-old citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. After suffering a mental breakdown and being kicked off a bus in Omaha while on his way back to Oklahoma City, police were filmed tasing Bearheels twelve times and punching him thirteen times in the head. “I can’t fucking breathe,” he told officers as he sat in the back of the cruiser. A coroner later found his cause of death to be “excited delirium,” a condition that supposedly leads to aggressiveness, incoherence, and “superhuman strength,” often after taking cocaine or methamphetamines. (Bearheels, however, had no drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of his death.) This diagnosis is controversial; it is frequently cited when people die in police custody. Three of the officers involved in Bearheels’s death were reinstated in April.

The United States has a long history of sacrificing or killing off groups of people—through war or disease or both—in the name of its self-proclaimed destiny. This belief in the country’s violent superiority was already evident among the early Puritans, who attributed the mass die-off of Indigenous peoples to divine intervention.

To blind themselves to the destruction they wrought, colonizers wove cultural fictions about the “vastness” of a continent devoid of human civilization—terra nullius—and thus open for white European settlement. (This was an early ideological ancestor of the Zionist phrase, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” that has come to justify the expulsion and colonization of Palestinians.)

Most historians have failed to draw what are obvious connections between heightened rates of infection and conditions of war, invasion, and colonialism. We need only look at the cholera outbreak in Yemen to see the relationship of disease to U.S. foreign policy. No one is disputing the fact that the infection of millions and the deaths of thousands there at the hands of this preventable disease are the result of a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war, which has destroyed Yemen’s health care infrastructure. It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that one in four surgical amputations conducted at Red Cross centers in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen are the result of diabetes. These three countries have been the staging ground for U.S.-backed military interventions and invasions that have disrupted critical food and medical supply chains.

Economic sanctions, frequently hailed by politicians of all stripes as a “humane” alternative to war, are simply war by another means. U.S. sanctions currently hit hard in thirty-nine countries—one-third of humanity—causing currency inflation and devaluation and upsetting the distribution of medicine, food, power, water treatment, and other human needs

the United States only knows violence. It convinces through force. It is numb to suffering and indifferent to the welfare of people

Trump has elevated U.S. belligerence to the cosmos.

Yet a new world is coming into existence, even as fires burn in the Amazon or on the streets of Minneapolis. It has always been here. It was present at Standing Rock, in the chants of “water is life”; it could be heard among the Wet’suwet’en calls to “heal the people, heal the land”; and it resounded once again as hundreds of thousands took to the street to demand that “Black lives matter.”

colonialism is not only a contest over territory, but over the meaning of life itself.

Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call “the ecology of freedom”: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.

The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that “land of kings,” urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.

the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”

What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”

does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?

The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom.

making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

The freer global capital becomes, the harder national borders become. Colonialism needed to move large populations of people—slaves and indentured labor—to work in mines and on plantations. Now the new dispensation needs to keep people in place and move the money—so the new formula is free capital, caged labor. How else are you going to drive down wages and increase profit margins? Profit is the only constant.

The assertion of ethnicity, race, caste, nationalism, sub-nationalism, patriarchy, and all kinds of identity, by exploiters as well as the exploited, has a lot—but of course not everything—to do with laying collective claim to resources (water, land, jobs, money) that are fast disappearing

So many kinds of entrenched and unrecognized colonialisms still exist. Aren’t we letting them off the hook? Even “Indian English fiction” is, on the face of it, a pretty obvious category. But what does it really mean? The boundaries of the country we call India were arbitrarily drawn by the British. What is “Indian English”? Is it different from Pakistani English or Bangladeshi English? Kashmiri English? There are 780 languages in India, 22 of them formally “recognized.” Most of our Englishes are informed by our familiarity with one or more of those languages. Hindi, Telugu, and Malayalam speakers, for example, speak English differently.

In the Obama years, you had to ferret out information and piece it together to figure out how many bombs were being dropped and how many people were being killed, even as the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was being eloquently delivered. However differently their domestic politics plays out on home turf, it is a truism that the Democrats’ foreign policy has tended to be as aggressive as that of the Republicans. But since 9/11, between Bush and Obama, how many countries have been virtually laid to waste?

I don’t think in some of the categories in which your question is posed to me. For example, I don’t understand what a “global” novel is. I think of both my novels as so very, very local. I am surprised by how easily they have traveled across cultures and languages. Both have been translated into more than forty languages—but does that make them “global” or just universal?

I wonder about the term postcolonial. I have often used it, too, but is colonialism really post-?

You once wrote that George W. Bush “achieved what writers, scholars, and activists have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.” What did you mean by this, and ten years and two presidents later, is the American empire’s apocalyptic nature still so transparent?

In India today, storytelling is being policed not only by the state, but also by religious fanatics, caste groups, vigilantes, and mobs that enjoy political protection, who burn cinema halls, who force writers to withdraw their novels, who assassinate journalists. This violent form of censorship is becoming an accepted mode of political mobilization and constituency building. Literature, cinema, and art are being treated as though they are policy statements or bills waiting to be passed in Parliament that must live up to every self-appointed stakeholders’ idea of how they, their community, their history, or their country must be represented.

I recently saw a Malayalam film in the progressive state of Kerala called Abrahaminde Santhathikal (The Sons of Abraham). The vicious, idiot-criminal villains were all black Africans. Given that there is no community of Africans in Kerala, they had to be imported into a piece of fiction in order for this racism to be played out! We can’t pin the blame for this kind of thing on the state. This is society. This is people. Artists, filmmakers, actors, writers—South Indians who are mocked by North Indians for their dark skins in turn humiliating Africans for the very same reason. Mind-bending.

we are buying more weapons from Europe and the United States than almost anyone else. So, India, which has the largest population of malnutritioned children in the world, where hundreds of thousands of debt-ridden farmers and farm laborers have committed suicide, where it is safer to be a cow than it is to be a woman, is still being celebrated as one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

The word “empire” has often been invoked as a uniquely European and U.S. problem. Do you see India and other postcolonial nations as adapting older forms of empire in new geopolitical clothing?

How can we think of empire now in the Global South, especially at a time when postcolonial nations are emulating the moral calculus of their old colonial masters?

India transformed from colony to imperial power virtually overnight. There has not been a day since the British left India in August 1947 that the Indian army and paramilitary have not been deployed within the country’s borders against its “own people”: Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir, Jammu, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand. The dead number in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands. Who are these dangerous citizens who need to be held down with military might? They are indigenous people, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, communists. The pattern that emerges is telling. What it shows quite clearly is an “upper”-caste Hindu state that views everyone else as an enemy. There are many who see Hinduism itself as a form of colonialism—the rule of Aryans over Dravidians and other indigenous peoples whose histories have been erased and whose deposed rulers have been turned into the vanquished demons and asuras of Hindu mythology. The stories of these battles continue to live on in hundreds of folktales and local village festivals in which Hinduism’s “demons” are other peoples’ deities. That is why I am uncomfortable with the word postcolonialism.

When you think about the grandeur of the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti–Vietnam War protests, it makes you wonder whether real protest is even possible any more. It is. It surely is. I was in Gothenburg, Sweden, recently, when the largest Nazi march since World War II took place. The Nazis were outnumbered by anti-Nazi demonstrators, including the ferocious Antifa, by more than ten to one. In Kashmir, unarmed villagers face down army bullets. In Bastar, in Central India, the armed struggle by the poorest people in the world has stopped some of the richest corporations in their tracks. It is important to salute people’s victories, even if they don’t always get reported on TV. At least the ones we know about. Making people feel helpless, powerless, and hopeless is part of the propaganda.

I think we all need to become seriously mutinous

We fool ourselves into believing that the change we want will come with fresh elections and a new president or prime minister at the helm of the same old system. Of course, it is important to bounce the old bastards out of office and bounce new ones in, but that can’t be the only bucket into which we pour our passion

as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing.

In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the “human rights” discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.

How might we challenge dominant voices, such as Niall Ferguson, who put so much faith in thinking with the grain of empire? On the flipside, how might we speak to liberals who put their faith in American empire’s militarism in a post–9/11 era? Do you see any way out of the current grip of imperial thinking?

The “managed populations” don’t necessarily think from Ferguson’s managerial perspective. What the managers see as stability, the managed see as violence upon themselves. It is not stability that underpins empire. It is violence. And I don’t just mean wars in which humans fight humans. I also mean the psychotic violence against our dying planet.

I don’t believe that the current supporters of empire are supporters of empire in general. They support the American empire. In truth, captalism is the new empire. Capitalism run by white capitalists. Perhaps a Chinese empire or an Iranian empire or an African empire would not inspire the same warm feelings? “Imperial thinking,” as you call it, arises in the hearts of those who are happy to benefit from it. It is resisted by those who are not. And those who do not wish to be.

Empire is not just an idea. It is a kind of momentum. An impetus to dominate that contains within its circuitry the inevitability of overreach and self-destruction. When the tide changes, and a new empire rises, the managers will change, too. As will the rhetoric of the old managers. And then we will have new managers, with new rhetoric. And there will be new populations who rise up and refuse to be managed.

officials in the region have often boasted of the large number of nongovernmental organizations (even as they were cracking down on them) as a way to both deflect criticism from abroad and embed in the minds of their citizens the idea that reform was underway. It has hardly been believable and has not worked, which is why the default for Middle Eastern governments is to repress such groups.

It is a mistake to conclude that only narrowly self-serving authoritarianism explains the thuggish approach to NGOs around the Middle East. After all, the hounding of these groups (including in Israel) seems to be out of proportion to any evidence that they can create significant political change in the region. No doubt many NGOs have helped people in need throughout the Middle East, but those dedicated to governance and human rights, for example, have hardly had an impact. But then why do the Middle East’s commanders of tanks, planes, and missiles treat the Arab hippies who want to defend the freedom of association as such a problem? The threat isn’t about loosening the authoritarians’ grip on power, but something more abstract: the Middle East’s fragile sense of identity and sovereignty.

Arab leaders essentially regard nongovernmental organizations, especially those with foreign funding, as agents of a neocolonial project. The hypocrisy of this position for governments that either receive copious amounts of foreign assistance or that rely on the West for their security is self-evident, but that does not necessarily diminish its effectiveness

Western-funded human rights campaigners and good-governance activists as the most recent manifestation of the civilizing mission that originally brought European colonialists to North Africa and the Levant

The related problem of sovereignty brings the matter into sharp relief. The European penetration of the Middle East in the late 18th and early 19th centuries began a long-term process of intellectual ferment and discovery among Middle Easterners about how best to confront this challenge. Islamic reformism, Arab nationalism, and Islamism, which emphasized identity, were the most politically effective (and enduring) regional responses

“AFRICOM says it conducted 110 air strikes that killed 800 terrorists,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA. “It’s just not plausible that all of the people killed were actually enemy armed forces, and that none were civilians.”

In March 2017, President Donald Trump reportedly designated parts of Somalia as “areas of active hostilities,” meaning the lifting of Obama-era rules requiring that there be near certainty that noncombatants will not be injured or killed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” said retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa, or SOCAFRICA, from April 2015 to June 2017. Bolduc added that the change led AFRICOM to conduct airstrikes that previously would not have been carried out

“As far as we can tell, AFRICOM doesn’t do any on the ground investigations, and none of the 150 people we interviewed had ever spoken to a government official, Somali or American, about these attacks,” Brian Castner, Amnesty International’s senior crisis adviser on arms and military operations, previously told The Intercept

the number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia have risen markedly under the Trump administration, jumping from 14 under President Barack Obama in 2016 to 47 last year. The U.S. is on track to conduct at least 140 airstrikes in Somalia in 2019 if it maintains its current pace, according to Amnesty International.

“You just can’t go in there and kill everything that moves,” said the former SOCAFRICA commander. “I don’t have anything against HVT [high-value target] hunting, but we can’t continue to destroy everything in our path in the process of trying to secure U.S. national objectives. Because, at the end of the day, we’ve done nothing to change the fundamental security and stability of the environment.”

“That’s just not how war works, especially not air wars,” counters Eviatar. “We know that al Shabaab members are integrated into communities in Somalia, they don’t just occupy isolated military bases, so it strains credulity to suggest that US drones and manned aircraft dropping bombs in areas where civilians live and farm and congregate only killed al Shabaab fighters.”

“They’re just saying ‘trust us,’ and we can’t trust them because they’ve already made outlandish claims, like ‘Of the 800 people who were killed in 110 air strikes, none were civilians,’” she said. “There’s just no reason for human rights groups or anyone else to believe them. They don’t have to demonstrate that what they’re doing is lawful, and yet they can go out and kill people. It’s infuriating because what they’re really saying, effectively, is that they’re above the law.”

Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

What Grant’s work lacked in scientific rigor, it made up for in canny packaging. He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe. Americans’ gauzy idealism blinded them, he argued, to the reality that newcomers from the Mediterranean and eastern Europe—to say nothing of anyone from Asia or Africa—could never hope to possess the genetic potential innate in the nation’s original Nordic inhabitants, which was the source of the nation’s greatness

Reconstruction struggles; U.S. expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration—each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people. On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers

much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants

historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name. In the conflict between the Trump administration and its opponents, those rival American principles of exclusion and pluralism confront each other more starkly than they have since Grant’s own time. And the ideology that has gained ground under Trump may well not disappear when Trump does. Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government

Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who sponsored the 1924 bill in the Senate. A Princeton-educated lawyer, he feared that America was going the way of Rome, where the “inpouring of captives and alien slaves” had caused the empire to sink “into an impotency which made her the prey of every barbarian invader.” This was almost verbatim Grant, whose portrait of Rome’s fall culminated in the lowly immigrants “gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters.” (His plotline helped him preserve the notion that fair-haired and -skinned people are responsible for all the world’s great achievements: Rome’s original inhabitants were Nordic, but contemporary Italians were descendants of Roman slave races and therefore inferior.)

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is

Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other northern-European immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East. We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.”

Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”

The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.”

the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science

That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity. But to recognize the homegrown historical antecedents of today’s rhetoric is to call attention to certain disturbing assumptions that have come to define the current immigration debate in America—in particular, that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States. The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.

External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy. When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows.

Human Rights Watch reported in 2015 that over half of the 80 countries worldwide where homosexuality is illegal were once British colonies

In Césaire’s view, colonialism operates through extreme violence against colonised peoples. When this violence was justified and normalised by European beneficiaries of colonial rule, Césaire thought, “a poison [was] distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceed[ed] towards savagery.”

The laws, economic structures and cultural basis for European colonialism didn’t disappear when nations gained independence in the mid-20th century.

Examples such as the Windrush scandal aside, when connections between colonial history and present crises are explicitly made in daily news reporting, these links are often mentioned only in passing. Reports typically include few concrete details of the context, because what counts as “relevant” is often limited to events of, at most, the last few years.

Those of us who come from coloniser societies have been failed not only by our education systems – which have tended to celebrate or simply ignore colonial histories – but also by dominant cultural narratives that claim to explain our colonial entanglements and connections without ever really taking them seriously.

Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development (Sachs, 2005, Collier, 2007, Rostow, 1990, Moyo, 2010, Calderisi, 2007, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), and is reinforced by the rhetoric, common among neoclassical economists, that free-trade globalization has created an “even playing field”.

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South (e.g., Naoroji, 1902, Pomeranz, 2000, Beckert, 2015, Moore, 2015, Bhambra, 2017, Patnaik, 2018, Davis, 2002).

for every unit of embodied resources and labour that the South imports from the North they have to export many more units to pay for it, enabling the North to achieve a net appropriation through trade. This dynamic was theorized by Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1978) as a process of “unequal exchange”.Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Following Dorninger et al. (2021), we use a “footprint” analysis of input–output data to quantify the physical scale of raw materials, land, energy and labour embodied in trade between the North and South, looking not only at traded goods themselves but also the upstream resources and labour that go into producing and transporting those goods, including the machines, factories, infrastructure, etc.

Grounding our analysis in the physical dimensions of unequal exchange is important for several reasons. First, these resources – raw materials, land, labour and energy – embody the productive potential that is required for meeting human needs (use-value) and for generating economic growth (exchange-value). Physical drain is therefore ultimately what drives global inequalities in terms of access to provisions, as well as in terms of GDP or income (see Hornborg, 2020). Second, this approach allows us to maintain sight of the ecological impacts of unequal exchange. We know that excess energy and material consumption in high-income nations, facilitated by appropriation from the rest of the world, is causing ecological breakdown on a global scale. Tracing flows of resources embodied in trade allows us to determine the extent to which Northern appropriation is responsible for ecological impacts in the South; i.e., ecological debt (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al., 2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016).

Due to the growing fragmentation of international commodity chains, monetary databases on bilateral gross trade flows have been criticised for not accurately depicting the monetary interdependencies between national economies (Johnson and Noguera, 2012), i.e., the amount of a countries’ value added that is induced by foreign final demand and international trade relations. Trade in Value Added (TiVA) indicators Johnson and Noguera, 2012, Timmer et al., 2014 are designed to take into account the complexity of the global economy. The TiVA concept is motivated by the fact that, in monetary terms, trade in intermediates accounts for approximately two-thirds of international trade. Imports (of intermediates) are used to produce exports and hence bilateral gross exports may include inputs (i.e., value added) from third party countries (Stehrer, 2012). TiVA reveals where (e.g., in which country or industry) and how (e.g. by capital or labour) value is added or captured in global commodity chains (Timmer et al., 2014).

TiVA, which is sometimes referred to as the “value footprint”, is the monetary counterpart of the MRIO-based environmental footprint because both indicators follow the same system boundaries, i.e., all supply chains between production and final consumption of two countries including all direct and indirect interlinkages. Moreover, in contrast to global bilateral monetary trade flows, TiVA is globally balanced, meaning that national exports and imports globally sum up to zero. This is an important feature of the TiVA indicator that facilitates more consistent and unambiguous assessments.

for every unit of embodied raw material equivalent that the South imports from the North, they have to export on average five units to “pay” for it

For land the average ratio is also 5:1, for energy it is 3:1, and for labour it is 13:1

Table 1. Resource drain from the South.ResourceNorth → South flows 2015South → North flows 2015Drain from South in 2015Cumulative drain from South 1990–2015Raw material equivalents [Gt]3.3715.3912.02254.40Embodied land [mn ha]527.421,349.01821.5932,987.23Embodied energy [EJ]21.5543.5121.06650.34Embodied labour [mn py-eq]31.11219.22188.125,956.62

in the year 2015 the North’s net appropriation from the South totalled 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy (equivalent to 3.4 billion barrels of oil), and 188 million person-years equivalents of labour (equivalent to 392 billion hours of work). By net appropriation we mean that these resources are not compensated in equivalent terms through trade; they are effectively transferred gratis. And this appropriation is not insignificant in scale; on the contrary, it comprises a large share (on average about a quarter) of the North’s total consumption.

significant consequences for the global South, in terms of lost use-value. This quantity of Southern raw materials, land, energy and labour could be used to provision for human needs and develop sovereign industrial capacity in the South, but instead it is mobilized around servicing consumption in the global North.

Eight hundred and twenty-two million hectares of land, which is twice the size of India, would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet composition

material use is tightly linked to environmental pressures. It accounts for more than 90% of variation in environmental damage indicators (Steinmann et al., 2017), and more than 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress (International Resource Panel, 2019). Moreover, as Van der Voet et al. (2004) demonstrate, while impacts vary by material, and vary as technologies change, there is a coupling between aggregate mass flows and ecological impact. Net flows of material resources from South to North mean that much of the impact of material consumption in the North (43% of it, net of trade) is suffered in the South. The damage is offshored.

Industrial ecologists hold that global extraction and use of materials should not exceed 50 billion tons per year (Bringezu, 2015). In 2015, the global economy was using 87 billion tons per year, overshooting the boundary by 74% and driving ecological breakdown. This overshoot is due almost entirely to excess resource consumption in global North countries. The North consumed 26.71 tons of materials per capita in 2015, which is roughly four times over the sustainable threshold (6.80 tons per capita in 2015). Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2) (Hickel, 2020), while the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change (DARA, 2012)

Net appropriation of land means soil depletion, water depletion, and chemical runoff are offshored; net appropriation of energy means that the health impacts of particulate pollution are offshored; net appropriation of labour means that the negative social impacts of exploitation are offshored, etc (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). In the case of non-renewable resources there is also a problem of depletion: resources appropriated from the South are no longer available for future generations to use (Costanza and Daly, 1992, World Bank, 2018), which is particularly problematic given that under conditions of net appropriation economic losses are not offset by investments in capital stock (cf. Hartwick, 1977). Finally, the extractivism that underpins resource appropriation generates social dislocations and conflicts at resource frontiers (Martinez-Alier, 2021).

the value of resources and labour cannot be quantified in dollars, and there is no such thing as a “correct” price.

Prices under capitalism do not reflect value or utility in any objective way. Rather, they reflect, among other things, the (im)balance of power between market agents (capital and labour, core and periphery, lead firms and their suppliers, etc); in other words, they are a political artefact

While prices by definition do not reflect value, they do allow us to compare the scale of drain to prevailing monetary representations of production and income in the world economy.

Fig. 2 shows that drain from the South in 2015 amounted to $14.1 trillion when measured in terms of raw material equivalents, $5.1 trillion when measured in terms of land, $3.6 trillion when measured in terms of energy and $20.3 trillion when measured in terms of labour.

Over the period 1990–2015, the drain sums to $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This represents a significant “windfall” for the North, similar to the windfall that was derived from colonial forms of appropriation; i.e., goods that did not have to be produced on the domestic landmass or with domestic labour, and did not have to be bought on the domestic market, or paid for with exports (see Pomeranz, 2000, Patnaik, 2018). While previous studies have shown that the price distortion factor increased dramatically during the structural adjustment period in the 1980’s (Hickel et al., 2021), our data confirms that since the early- to mid-1990’s it has tended to decline slightly. This means that the increase in drain during the period 1990–2007, prior to the global financial crisis, was driven primarily by an increase in the volume of international trade rather than by an increase in price distortion.

Table 3 shows that, over the 1990–2015 period, resources appropriated from the South have been worth on average roughly a quarter of Northern GDP.

the North’s reliance on appropriation from the South has generally increased over the period (despite a significant drop after the global financial crisis), whereas the South’s losses as a share of total economic activity have generally decreased, particularly since 2003, due to an increase in South-South trading and higher domestic GDP creation or capture within the South, both driven largely by China

Aid flows create the powerful impression that rich countries give benevolently to poorer countries. But the data on drain through unequal exchange raises significant questions about this narrative.

net appropriation by DAC countries through unequal exchange from 1990 to 2015 outstripped their aid disbursements over the same period by a factor of almost 80

for every dollar of aid that donors give, they appropriate resources worth 80 dollars through unequal exchange. From the perspective of aid recipients, for every dollar they receive in aid they lose resources worth 30 dollars through drain

The dominant narrative of international development holds that poor countries are poor because of their own internal failings and are therefore in need of assistance. But the empirical evidence on unequal exchange demonstrates that poor countries are poor in large part because they are exploited within the global economy and are therefore in need of justice. These results indicate that combating the deleterious effects of unequal exchange by making the global economy fairer and more equitable would be much more effective, in terms of development, than charity.

In an equitable world, the resource trade deficit that the North sustains in relation to the South would be financed with a parallel monetary trade deficit. But in reality, the monetary trade deficit is very small, equivalent to only about 1% of global trade revenues, and fluctuates between North and South. In effect, this means that the North achieves its large net appropriation of resources and labour from the South gratis.

The question of sectoral disparities has been moot since the 1980s, however, as industrial production has shifted overwhelmingly to the South. The majority of Southern exports (70%) consist of manufactured goods (data from UNCTAD; see Smith, 2016). Of all the manufactured goods that the USA imports, 60% are produced in developing countries. For Japan it is 70%. We can see this pattern reflected also in the industrial workforce. As of 2010, at least 79% of the world’s industrial workers live in the South (data from the ILO; see Smith, 2016). This shift is due in large part to the rise of global commodity chains, which now constitute 70% of international trade. Between 1995 and 2013, there has been an increase of 157 million jobs related to global commodity chains, and an estimated 116 million of them are concentrated in the South, predominantly in the export manufacturing sector (ILO, 2015). In other words, during the period we analyse in this paper (1990–2015), the South has contributed the majority of the world’s industrial production, including high-technology production such as computers and cars. And yet price inequalities remain entrenched.

if Northern states or firms leverage monopoly power within global commodity chains to depress the prices of imports and increase the prices of final products, their labour “productivity” appears to improve, and that of their counterparts declines, even if the underlying production process remains unchanged. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that real productivity differences between workers are minimal, and cannot explain wage inequalities (Hunter et al., 1990).

wage inequalities exist not because Southern workers are less productive but because they are more intensively exploited, and often subject to rigid systems of labour control and discipline designed to maximize extraction (Suwandi et al., 2019). Indeed, this is a major reason why Northern firms offshore production to the South in the first place: because labour is cheaper per unit of physical output (Goldman, 2012).

the terminology of “value-added” is a misnomer. In international trade, TiVA does not tell us who adds more value but rather who has more power to command prices. And in the case of global commodity chains, TiVA does not indicate where value is produced but rather where it is captured (Smith, 2016).

our analysis reveals that value in global commodity chains is disproportionately produced by the South, but disproportionately captured by the North (as GDP). Value captured in this manner is misleadingly attributed to Northern economic activities

rich countries are able to maintain price inequalities simply by virtue of being rich. This finding supports longstanding claims by political economists that, all else being equal, price inequalities are an artefact of power. Just as in a national economy wage rates are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of labour vis-à-vis capital, so too in international trade prices are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of national economies and corporate actors vis-à-vis their trading partners and suppliers. Countries that grew rich during the colonial period are now able to leverage their economic dominance to depress the costs of labour and resources extracted from the South. In other words, the North “finances” net appropriation from the South not with money, but rather by maintaining the prices of Southern resources and labour below the global average level.

Patents play a key role here: 97% of all patents are held by corporations in high-income countries (Chang, 2008:141)

In some cases, patents involve forcing people in the South to pay for access to resources they might otherwise have obtained much more affordably, or even for free (Shiva, 2001, Shiva, 2016).

In the World Bank and the IMF, Northern states hold a majority of votes (and the US holds a veto), thus giving them control over key economic policy decisions. In the World Trade Organization (which controls tariffs, subsidies, and patents), bargaining power is determined by market size, enabling high-income nations to set trade rules in their own interests.

ubsidized agricultural exports from the North undermine subsistence economies in the South and contribute to dispossession and unemployment, placing downward pressure on wages. Militarized borders preclude easy migration from South to North, thus preventing wage convergence. Moreover, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and IMF since the 1980s have cut public sector salaries and employment, rolled back labour rights, curtailed unions, and gutted environmental regulations (Khor, 1995, Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002).

SAPs, bilateral free trade agreements, and the World Trade Organization have forced global South governments to remove tariffs, subsidies and other protections for infant industries. This prevents governments from attempting import substitution, which would improve their export prices and drive Northern prices down. Tax evasion and illicit financial flows out of the South (which total more than $1 trillion per year) drain resources that might otherwise be reinvested domestically, or which governments might otherwise use to build national industries. This problem is compounded by external debt service obligations, which drain government revenue and require obeisance to economic policies dictated by creditors (Hickel, 2017). In addition, structural dependence on foreign investors and access to Northern markets forces Southern governments and firms to compete with one another by cutting wages and resource prices in a race to the bottom.

structural power imbalances in the world economy ensure that labour and resources in the South remain cheap and accessible to international capital, while Northern exports enjoy comparatively higher prices

Cheap labour and raw materials in the global South are not “naturally” cheap, as if their cheapness was written in the stars. They are actively cheapened

the analysis obscures class and geographic inequalities within countries and regions, which are significant when it comes to labour prices as well as resource consumption. The high levels of resource consumption that characterize Northern economies are driven disproportionately by rich individuals and affluent areas, as well as by corporations that control supply chains, and enabled by internal patterns of exploitation and unequal exchange in addition to drain through trade (Harvey, 2005). For example, there are marginalized regions of the United States that serve as an “internal periphery” (Wishart, 2014). It would also be useful to explore the gender dynamics of unequal exchange within countries. These questions cannot be answered with our data, however.

This research confirms that the “advanced economies” of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.

support contemporary demands for reparations for ecological debt, as articulated by environmental justice movements and by the G77

True repair requires permanently ending the unequal distribution of environmental goods and burdens between the global North and global South, restoring damaged ecosystems, and shifting to a regenerative economic system.

It is clear that official development assistance is not a meaningful solution to global poverty and inequality; nor is the claim that global South countries need more economic liberalisation and export-oriented market integration. The core problem is that low- and middle-income countries are integrated into the global economy on fundamentally unequal terms. Rectifying this problem is critical to ensuring that global South countries have the financial, physical and human resources they need to improve social outcomes.

democratize the institutions of global economic governance, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, so that global South countries have more control over trade and finance policy.

end the North’s use of unfair subsidies for agricultural exports, and remove structural adjustment conditions on international finance, which would help mitigate downward pressure on wages and resource prices in the South while at the same time enabling Southern countries to build sovereign industrial capacity

a global living wage system, and a global system of environmental regulations, would effectively put a floor on labour and resource prices

Reducing North-South price differentials would in turn reduce the scale of the North’s net resource appropriation from the South (in other words, it would reduce ecologically unequal exchange), thus reducing excess consumption in the North and the ecological impacts that it inflicts on the South.

Structural transformation will only be achieved through political struggle from below, including by the anti-colonial and environmental justice movements that continue to fight against imperialism today

He may be a character from history’s funhouse, sent to remind us that contingency’s reign is great, but his origins are to be found in the conjoined histories of the West and the rest. More recently, Gaddafi’s border police and coast guard, trained and assisted by the EU, have been greatly valued by the ‘good Europeans’ for helping keep out the Africans. Liberal war’s last service is to locate the source of violence in the natives, on the backward peoples of the non-European world, not on the Westerners who exploit, invade, occupy and bomb. If we go by official rhetoric, the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently has to do with religious and ethnic prejudice among the peoples there, who irrationally keep killing one another as well as Western soldiers kindly sent to modernise them. The great cost of liberal war is clarity.

War is not a morality tale, but a violent mutual embrace. Serious thinking begins with acceptance that we in the West are now combatants, and ethical responsibility requires seeing beyond the seductions of liberalism.

The fortunes made from metals, slave trading, and plantation commodities, served as direct stimuli to colonial economies, helping to bankroll the Industrial Revolution

Colonialism reconfigured the world economy. India’s share of the global economy shrank from 27 per cent to 3 per cent. China’s share shrank from 35 per cent to 7 per cent. Europe’s share exploded from 20 per cent to 60 per cent

Colonialism’s ledger of lavish of destruction – its wholesale removal of ecosystems, and the subjugation of those communities that had nourished them – unleashed major rises in emissions. Between 1835 and 1885, deforestation in the territories of the United States was the largest global contributor to emissions

Political ecologist Jason Moore argues that ‘the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization’, marked ‘a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities’

Its legacies endure today in colonial complexes that underlie our visions of nature, and other humans. Economically, its inheritance was the naturalization of a model of intense cost-shifting, which allowed for states to offload resource-consuming industries, and the costs of ecological damage

Once the industries had been externalized, resources could be extracted with scant attention paid to the environmental consequences.

Colonialism also firmly shaped the ways we view conservation and ecology. Colonial efforts to protect nature, particularly popular at the end of the nineteenth century, became further opportunities for colonial control. Inhabitants were removed from areas of ‘pristine nature’ that then became national parks, while lands outside these were devoted to intensive extraction

although imperial states were forced to relinquish their hold, their legacies prevailed. Centuries of enslavement, despotism, crushed sovereignty, and ecological demolition, had guaranteed a long afterlife to imperial haunting, and its logics of conquest and predation. Many of the new nation states carried on down tracks laid for them by the colonial powers and continued the process of ecological destruction. Under the banners of development, thousands of communities were evicted and displaced in development programmes

Deforestation took hold across former colonies

Today’s world is a landscape scarred by environmental violence: the monocultural soybean fields of Brazil’s Mato Grosso; the modern gold rushes of Madre de Dios and Zamfara; the vast tar-sands ponds of Canada; the forest-consuming coal mines of Kalimantan; the megadams of the Mekong Delta; the rivers dredged to yield sand; the phosphate mines of Western Sahara; the palm plantations of Tela; the bauxite mines of Guinea; the mesh of pipelines across the Niger Delta; the sugarcane fields of Uttar Pradesh.

The end result of norms of dehumanization and domination was a that a tiny elite of genuinely terrible people came to oppress even the people who’d been yesterday’s oppressors

It became perfectly OK, for example, to raid pensions, to work people 80 hours a week, to never pay them more, to prey on white women, too, to abuse and hurt people, to treat even that once relatively affluent white person like just another disposable commodity in the machine — not as a human being. It’s true that minorities always suffered most, of course — but it’s truer to say that such norms made it impossible for a society to really mature or develop at all, because now they were being used by a tiny elite to oppress more or less everyone else.

the very norms of domination and dehumanization that had once been used to oppress blacks and natives and dirt poor whites, then, had come to be used as weapons of self-destruction even against the very people who they’d once existed to serve — middle class and even rich whites

Norms of domination and dehumanization had created a society which was one great arena in which everyone competed to slaughter everyone else — a mechanism for sorting and winnowing the most domineering and inhuman. Over time, those people became even more savage, shameless, and selfish. Until, at last, America was led by the champions of such norms: people like Trump, Miller, and the rest. Everyday obscenity triumphed.

So here America is. Dehumanization and domination are the things it has invested in, cherished, cultivated, tended, and prized most. That is how a society ends up with crowdfunded healthcare, school shootings, a head of state who uses slurs, neo Nazis in office — and nobody, seemingly, with the power to do much, if anything, about it.

The complex and its buildings vaguely recall a Southwest landmark frequently mistaken for the city of the future: Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s 1970 “urban laboratory” nestled in the mountains north of Phoenix. It’s oddly fitting: Soleri imagined a sustainable desert utopia, as well as speculative space “arcologies”—self-sustaining architectural ecologies, delicately rendered as hypothetical asteroid-belt cities or prototype ships

The only spacecraft we see on the tour is a model of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, glimpsed from a distance in an otherwise empty hangar. Even the spacecraft isn’t real.

the name Spaceport America suggests theatrics. There are several commercial spaceports throughout the United States, some of which sport more activity and tenants. Most of Virgin Galactic’s testing has happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port; Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport recently signed on the SpaceX competitor Vector as a customer.Others, like Oklahoma’s Air and Space Port, seem to be even more like ghost towns than this one. But New Mexico’s gambit suggests we are at the spaceport of the nation. It doesn’t feel like the frontier of private space travel so much as a movie set.

Many promises for technologies of future urbanism start as desert prototypes

New Mexico examples tend to include slightly more dystopian rehearsals: Much of the state’s existing science and defense industries emerged from bringing Manhattan Project scientists to what, at the time, was the middle of nowhere to test nuclear weapons—essentially, to practice ending the world.

most of my fellow tourists take the premise of ubiquitous space travel to colonies on Mars as a fait accompli. I’m not sure why people in a desert would fantasize about going somewhere even harder to inhabit

Humanity dreams of going to space for many of the same reasons some people went to the desert: because it is there, because they hope to get rich extracting natural resources they find there, and because they suspect mysterious, new terrains can’t be any worse than the irredeemable wreckage of the landscape they’re leaving behind

believing in the inevitability of Mars colonies is maybe no less idealistic than believing in the Southwest itself

The romance and promise of the American West was built, in part, on federal land grants to private corporations that promised to bring boomtowns to places previously otherwise deemed uninhabitable wastelands. Cities rose and fell with the rerouting of railroads

To manifest destiny’s proponents, to doubt the inevitability of technological and social progress via the railroad was tantamount to doubting the will of God. Today, questioning the value of (mostly) privately funded space development likewise feels like doubting human progress

I wonder if the future always feels like rehearsal until it arrives, or if it is always rehearsal, only seeming like it has arrived when the run-through loses its novelty. Maybe all of the impatient skeptics will be proven wrong this year, and the future will finally arrive at Spaceport America. Here in the desert, a better future always seems to be right around the corner

showing and practicing sovereignty over a Hindu or a Muslim in Asia is not very different from showing and exercising sovereignty over a tree or a river in the forests of Peru or Ecuador. I call each instance an epistemological “genetic slice” where the totality of such instances amounts to a unique but structured modern attitude toward the world

To critique Orientalism is to critique secular humanism, liberalism, anthropocentrism, materialism, capitalism -- all of which, and more, Said took for granted. 

Even if we were to concede—however objectionable and repugnant this may be— that modernity’s violent tools were adopted by necessity with a view to improving the human condition, we find ourselves facing the bitter reality of a world in which we have destroyed almost everything around us, from communal and social structures to ecology and environment.

My argument is that modernity’s structure of thought created a novel relationship between man and nature, one that produced a pathological sense of domination over nature, including our own.

Colonialism did not start in the colonies, but in Europe itself, and this is because early modern Europe embarked on a quest in which knowledge was systematically harnessed to subjugate nature, including our own selves. Orientalism is nothing more than a strand of discourse by which this bleak result was achieved, but every branch of knowledge – philosophy, science, law, etc.– is equally involved in the same project

I think that the position which argues that one cannot critique modernity from within modernity—necessarily the only place in which we find ourselves— is a nihilistic one

in modernity, the state, capitalism, bureaucracy, and a particular form of reason have become central domains that govern all other domains. These central domains have formed our subjectivities, and made us who we are. My argument is that we can capitalize on the peripheral domains, through an act of heuristic retrieval, in order to displace the central domains. And ethics is one peripheral domain from which we can begin to rethink who we are.

the urgent call for us to be self-conscious about what we are doing at large and what we are “saying” and writing in learning institutions, higher academia being a main concern. This is so because this academia manufactures much of what we know, and this manufactured knowledge has substantial power in deciding what we should or should not do in our lives. Essential to this self-consciousness is the need for us to understand and develop a deep sense of responsibility and accountability, [and] not in the narrow sense of being “conscientious citizens” or socially responsible individuals. What I mean is that responsibility and accountability must run deep into an awareness of everything we do, from the seemingly innocuous act of buying a soft drink from a convenience store to what we think of what, say, business and public policy mean to less powerful others around the world.

to make the change and to build a sense of ethical responsibility, academia must deploy what I call external critique of everything we teach and write about. External critique is to refuse the established premises and assumptions that have so far foregrounded our thoughts and actions; it is to refuse the very foundations of their logic. The critique must question who and what we are

The great Victorian novelists, who were very much engaged with these developments, sensed that something was not quite right in the story. They noticed that capitalism was producing not just abundance and stability, but inequality, alienation and misery. Yet in criticizing the new system, they tended to accept and even buttress the separation of categories of experience insisted upon by social scientists. Thomas Carlyle’s famous condemnation of the “cash-payment” as “the sole nexus” of capitalism, for example, posited an economic realm as one in which ethical and religious values hold no sway.

in order for capitalism to work harmoniously in London, something of the religious sphere had to be added to the sauce. Dickens casts a woman, Lucie, as the person who takes the stink away from all the selfish business conducted by the men — a Victorian “angel in the house,” an emblem of all the non-utilitarian values that homo economicus supposedly had no use for. Lucie, like many other female characters in Victorian novels, is supremely compassionate and sacrifices for the greater good: she is homo communis

Dickens makes this female homo communis the servant of homo economicus, keeping his house and guiding his better nature. Like Mary’s role in the Catholic Church, she makes the official story of capitalism more palatable and helps conceal its failures

ideas of sacrifice and sacred values also come to play in theories of labor. Adam Smith described labor as “the most sacred and inviolable” form of property a person owned, positing it as a sacred source of the nation’s wealth, the pious foundation of the economic system itself: “We sacrifice ourselves in our labor in order to have the gift of ourselves in return,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations. Labor is sacrificed, sacralized, and regenerated. British political economist David Ricardo, Mill, and Jevons followed him in describing a circular, gift-sacrifice economy embedded within the labor theory of value.

Anthropologists held that the relegation of the “irrational” to the margins was what distinguished advanced societies from the backward places where such activities remained central to life.

Market and non-market values always operate right alongside one another.

Clearly, the official story and what happens on the ground don’t match: Lots of people work hard but get little benefit, while plenty who do not work at all get rich.

if you can show the ethical ideas and the sacred, communal values baked into capitalism’s own paradigms and premises, you can begin to hold it accountable for those ideals in the globalized world economy

The slogan “We are the 99%” was a respite from the oppressive “I” — the painful anomie of individualism that the official story insists upon.

the financial crisis of 2007-8 was not just a failure of markets, but a failure of morality — for what else can you honestly call it when predatory banks escape justice as ordinary people suffer? We can question who is doing the sacrificing, and for whose good the system is working.

In Silicon Valley, executives instill eastern values like mindfulness and meditation into workplaces in a way that covers up the exploitation of employees and consumers that many companies are built around. A firm may spy on people to turn a profit, but the espousal of sacred values (recall Google’s former “Don’t be evil” motto) helps hide the exploitative mission.

The United States Political Violence (USPV) database records numerous riots around elections during the mid-19th century. In April 1855, for example, hundreds of nativists “invaded” a German area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Subsequent fighting led to two deaths. In August of that year, nativist Protestants attacked German and Irish neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 20. In Baltimore, election violence became routine in the 1850s, with 30 dead and 350 wounded in the 1856 election alone

The bloodiest efforts came in the repression of Black people. The USPV lists nearly 70 incidents of political riots and assassinations in the decade after the formal cessation of hostilities, mostly in the South but including riots in Philadelphia and Indianapolis

Widespread political violence around elections only really ended when the federal government conceded that the South would be run by whites. Even then, anti-government violence took place.

Flattering coding rules used to produce datasets make it too easy to dismiss any aberration when a look at the historical record keeps turning up aberration after injustice after atrocity. Historians, scholars of Black history, and political scientists specializing in race and ethnic politics have long been sharply critical of the idea that that concepts like democracy, sovereignty, or the rule of law can be as bluntly coded as standard datasets long did.

A federal union with authoritarian states cannot but be at least partly authoritarian itself

American democracy did not penetrate to state level until the 1960s. Nearly a quarter of the states denied voting rights to Blacks—who made up a majority in some of those states before the Great Migration—from the late 19th until the mid-20th century

Despite the abolition of slavery, the imposition of Jim Crow meant that neither Congress nor the presidency were elected by fully democratic, or even representative, means

Consider Max Weber’s workhorse definition of the state: the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. By that definition, large swathes of the United States approached failed-state status for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries

just as today, there were voices even at elite institutions counseling patience and unity. An 1898 Yale Law Journal article defended lynching as a natural outcome of Reconstruction having given the ballot to former slaves too early, and urged “education,” not federal intervention, as the cure. Woodrow Wilson, a leading historian and political scientist long before he became president of the United States, defended the Ku Klux Klan and white terrorism as “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” Such efforts eventually paid off in helping to efface such atrocities from textbooks even as monuments—and popular culture—embraced Lost Cause nostalgia for the Confederacy.

Revisiting the United States as a partial or flawed democracy means confronting much of the history that celebrants of the liberal world order claim as a series of triumphs for democracy

social scientists have lately become more skeptical of the conventional verities of progress. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden has compiled indices of democracy that are more sensitive to conditions like racial segregation. They show the United States as substantially less democratic than other countries, like the United Kingdom or Sweden, for most of the 20th century. Political scientists investigate topics that once attracted little attention, like the relationship between American political violence and social transformation, how national economic integration led to the decline of lynching, or how the “carceral state” (more than 2 million people are held in U.S. prisons or jails) degrades U.S. democracy today.

In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, reporters and others turned to the British seizure of the Capitol building in 1814 as the closest analogue. Turning to foreign invasion rather than domestic precedents, however, says a lot. It suggests that people do not know the domestic precedents even exist, and it reinforces the notion that American political violence is “unthinkable.” (Even describing the 1814 incident as “foreign” is complex. The burning of Washington in 1814 was carried out by a British force that included marines previously enslaved by Americans—and motivated by hatred of the slavery system.)

it’s time to think more openly—and less defensively—about the totality of U.S. political history and behavior at home and abroad

he thinks the current predicament says more about the continuities with colonial history than it does about some ruptured future. For some people in the world, the catastrophe has already happened. 

"I come from a part of the world where we didn't have very rosy expectations of the world or the future," says Ghosh. "We knew there would be a lot of upheavals, and we witnessed these upheavals at first hand, so in that sense I think Westerners had a belief in stability and the promise of the future that I didn't share."

a massive-scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider: The end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.  "The people who saw the climate crisis first are at the absolute other end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they've already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods," says Ghosh. "And indigenous peoples have already lived through the end of the world and found ways to survive."

Ghosh thinks it's no coincidence that the constraints of the bourgeois novel began to form at the same time as the West began to use fossil fuels to project its power around the world.

"Climate change is absolutely an aspect of empire," he says. "The British Empire was essentially built on fossil fuels: It was the British mastery of coal that gave it a huge military advantage over the rest of the world."

"If renewables really were adopted at scale, it would completely shake up the global political order." He argues that oil and gas have to flow through maritime chokepoints controlled by the US, Australia, Britain and Canada, giving them a complete geopolitical advantage.

in the Eastern hemisphere, the issue of historical injustice is central to the issue of climate change. "If you go to any Indonesian, or Indian, or Chinese, even people who are perfectly well aware of the climate threat, and say to them: 'why don't you immediately cut all your emissions?' What will you hear? The answer is always profoundly political, it's: 'The West made this problem, let them give everything up first. This is the terrible dilemma in which we're caught."

"We're always told that rich countries will adapt better: I don't think that's actually true. I think countries with very complex systems, like the United States and in Europe, are in many ways much more fragile. Just consider food distribution."