The good ship Brexit's mission of free trade and empire | openDemocracy - 0 views
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As Britain looks to make new trade deals, politicians are promoting a Brexit where multinationals rule over elected governments as well as over the people they are meant to represent. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Theresa May and co. have been clear in their ambitions for the global south. “The thriving economies of south and east Asia and, increasingly, Africa, are, and will become, ever more important,” said Fox in July as he gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. He spoke of the “golden economic opportunities” presented by “the rise of the collective wealth of developing countries.”
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The drive to boost trade links with African countries has been branded “empire 2.0”, reportedly by Whitehall officials themselves. This latest scramble to capitalise on the Commonwealth and other countries in the South is just an extension of what Britain has been doing for generations.
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“A free trade area between Britain, a largely developed country and Africa, a poor continent, was always going to exacerbate inequalities, trade deficits, and the dependency of the latter on the former. ‘Free trade’ is really just the name given to the ideology that justifies this power imbalance,” wrote Africa Kiiza of the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI) last year.
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Forgotten lessons: Palestine and the British empire | openDemocracy - 1 views
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he acknowledged the elephant in the room of Anglo-Muslim relations: Britain’s colonial record in the middle east and south Asia, and its legacies. As part of this rare confession of culpability, he noted ‘the failure – it has to be said not just ours - to establish two states in Palestine’.
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Whilst Arabs and Jews played a fundamental role in the unfolding drama of mandate Palestine, the driving force was imperial Britain. The old myth that Britain was merely ‘holding the ring’ — trying to keep the peace between two irrational, warring parties — is a gross misunderstanding of history.
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the direct outcome of Britain’s drafting, interpretation, and implementation of the league of nations mandate for Palestine
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The Battle of Britain 2010 Edition and Living in the Shadow of Empire | openDemocracy - 0 views
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an Imperial Parliament
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The long story of the last thirty years is the continuation of the Empire mindset long after the Empire itself has disappeared off the face of the globe. Our political classes still see themselves at the heart of an imperial dispensation, the City and its grotesque distortions of the British economy, business and industry have come even more centrestage, and the strange obsession of our governing classes with Atlanticism has been more revealed as a fanaticism. Britain is still living in the shadow of Empire, and strangely enough, this is something more acutely grasped by those doyens of the New Right and neo-conservatism, Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, than anyone on the centre-left.
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we are shorn of illusion that socialism or progressive change can be built in the cradle of the Empire State
British Identity and the Legacy of Empire | openDemocracy - 0 views
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the extent to which the legacy of the British Empire continues to influence contemporary politics and society has also been overlooked by most parties. Only the Conservatives have acknowledged it as a policy aspiration, promising in their manifesto that they will ‘strengthen the Commonwealth as a focus for promoting democratic values and development’. However, their intention to establish annual limits on non-EU migrants suggest that Conservative views towards the former empire continue to be infused with elements of colonialism – a confused message that encourages stronger Commonwealth bonds through the promotion of British values and aid whilst restricting of historic patterns of population exchange.
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The Commonwealth provides stark evidence that imperial withdrawal in some former colonies was not controlled or bloodless and that the post-colonial legacy of the British Empire is far from entirely positive. Sustained efforts to re-evaluate the legacy of empire have proven slight, suggesting a post-empire myopia that can be somewhat attributed to the contentious nature of empire and its inheritance.
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The extent to which the UK can be seen as a post-empire state must be questioned. For some, such as Robert Cooper, British foreign policy continues to be shaped by an ascription to ‘liberal imperialism’. Moreover, transnational constitutional ties endure, with the Monarch continuing as Head of State of sixteen states - of which the UK is but one – and fourteen British Overseas Territories. The Crown is represented in a number of differing ways within the political systems of the Commonwealth realms, providing a key constitutional role with significant—though often theoretical—powers which reflect the enduring legacy of the British parliamentary model of government. The presence of the Monarch on coins and stamps in various Commonwealth realms, and the continued prominence of other ‘banal’ symbols such as the Union Flag on some national flags, suggest the persistence of a more generous transnational Britishness.
Colonialism can't be forgotten - it's still destroying peoples and our planet | openDem... - 0 views
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Colonialism was, and remains, a wholesale destruction of memory. Lands, the sources of identity, stolen. Languages, ripped from mouths. The collective loss to humanity was incalculable, as cultures, ideas, species, habitats, traditions, cosmologies, possibilities, patterns of life, and ways of understanding the world were destroyed. Countless ecological traditions – involving diverse ways of being with nature – were swept away.
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As formal colonialism came to an end, the process of erasing its crimes from public memory and effacing history began
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In the last decades of the 19th century, tens of millions of Indians died of famine, while British colonial policy forced the country to export record levels of food. If their bodies were laid head to foot, the corpses would cover the length of England 85 times over (5). The evisceration of the Congo, designed to extract maximum levels of ivory and rubber, killed at least 10 million people – half the country’s population at the time
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To fix the climate crisis, we must face up to our imperial past | openDemocracy - 0 views
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There are many ways to see colonialism. A breakneck rush for riches and power. A permanent pillage of life. A project to appropriate nature, to render it profitable and subservient to the needs of industry. We can see colonialism as imposition, as the silencing of local knowledges, and erasure of the other. Colonialism as a triple violence: cultural violence through negation; economic violence through exploitation; and political violence through oppression
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The colonial-imperial era is fundamental to an understanding of how we have arrived here. As Eyal Weizman notes: ‘the current acceleration of climate change is not only an unintentional consequence of industrialization. The climate has always been a project for colonial powers, which have continually acted to engineer it’
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What did colonialism seek? Wealth and power are the abstractions. But concretely it was commodities: metals, crops, minerals, and people. Political might, economic growth and industrialization required hinterlands to provide raw materials, food, energy supplies, labour and consumer demand.
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