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“The harm that [tea] causes is especially visible in the [Tunisian] countryside, where it weakens the race, which is literally intoxicated and morally and physically diminished.”

In 1941, the French doctor Edmond Sergent described in several scientific articles how Tunisians, instead of adding fresh tea leaves to already boiling water, added used leaves to the water as it boiled, creating a harmful, tar-like drink. Sergent also argued that Tunisians’ black tea was more dangerous than Moroccan green tea, which explained why cases of teaism were rare in Morocco, despite Morocco’s tea consumption being much higher.

According to Dinguizli, teaism was an addiction comparable to alcoholism, a form of chronic poisoning with nervous tremors, amnesia, palpitations, blurred vision, serious disturbances of the nervous and circulatory system, a general weakening of the body, and even a marked decrease in birth rates. Later authors delineated additional mental consequences, such as hallucinations, delusions, and even psychoses.

The perceived social consequences of teaism were founded in the belief that tea addicts would do almost anything to satisfy their habit. According to Sergent, the whole salary of many Tunisian workers went “to the buying of tea and sugar.” When their money ran out, Tunisian teaists sold their last possessions, stole from employers, friends, and family, and, in Dinguizli’s words, lost their “usually docile character.”

By the 1940s, a variety of publications had ceased to view teaism as an exclusively Tunisian problem, as diagnoses cropped up elsewhere in the Maghreb, such as, in 1948, the psychiatrist Charles Bardenat offhandedly ascribing an act of conjugal manslaughter committed in Algeria to the overconsumption of coffee and tea.

not a single case of a French settler in Tunisia being diagnosed with teaism can be found in the French publications.

French administrators tried banning illegal coffeehouses, which served tea, and increasing customs duties on tea. There were also calls for posters and educational films on the dangers of tea and how to prepare it correctly, for creating a state monopoly on tea, and even a law restricting tea sales to pharmacies upon presentation of a prescription

Tea neither produced hallucinations nor induced crime, and it did not “corrupt” Tunisians. They simply enjoyed a new drink that French authors objected to.

When tea first reached England in the 17th and 18th centuries, writers described it as un-British, “unmanly,” and altogether dangerous

chocolate, once the drink of choice at rowdy British clubs, inspired similar concern

The French viewed coffee, which was produced in their colonies of Martinique and La Réunion, as the drink of the Enlightenment and reason

The sight of Tunisians sitting and chatting over tea fueled settler prejudices about Tunisians as lazy and immoderate—nearly all descriptions of teaism focused on the economic consequences

feared attacks, revolt, and any sign of the population losing their supposed “docility.”

The irony of teaism is that the only real epidemic was the diagnosis of teaism itself. Today, tea is practically Tunisia’s national drink

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.

The late historian David J Weber and other Borderlands scholars have shown the relative weakness of the Spanish compared with the Indigenous people of the southwest. In 1680, for example, after a century of missions, settlement and violence, the Pueblo drove thousands of settlers out of the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México and killed hundreds more. These were peoples who had lived in their lands for centuries, even after the arrival of Europeans in the Western hemisphere, and only in the 19th century did ‘Mexico’ and ‘the United States’ take shape around them.

a crucial piece of research infrastructure for early American history, as well as the related histories of South America, Africa and the Caribbean

there are also new ways to see subjects and people that had always been understood as inherently Atlantic, particularly the slave trade, slavery and enslaved people. Scholars engaging these vitally important subjects involving violence inflicted on millions of people have innovated both new methods and new resources. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, for example, began to be shared with libraries and scholars all over the world in the late 1990s as a CD-ROM. Now Slave Voyages, a website containing information from that database, holds information on more than 36,000 individual slaving expeditions conducted between the early 1500s and the mid-1800s, as well as in addition thousands of trips in the intra-American slave trade.

The persistence of Indian power from the vantage of Indian country has now captured the attention of a new generation of historians. This is a change from scholarship looking to understand how colonial officials and settlers had wrested control of North American spaces – or perhaps shared control

Research is also showing just how deeply embedded slavery was in early New England. Households from Puritan Boston to Connecticut River Valley towns to the Patriot strongholds enslaved African-descended people. The Atlantic slave trade was massive in scale: many millions of African-descended people were enslaved, and so many people were directly involved in the trade as buyers and sellers of human beings that it is hard to overstate the extent to which slavery pervaded the political economy of early America. What people ate, what they wore, where they lived and how they worked were, in most cases, all touched by the effects of the slave trade and the labour of enslaved people.

The slave trade reshaped Native warfare and captive-taking, such that Native Americans were enslaved and traded away out of North America, just as Africans were brought on to the continent. In the aftermath of King Philip’s war, for example, hundreds of Native Americans who surrendered to the English colonists were sold to the Caribbean as slaves. In the upper Midwest and French Canada in the same period, Native warfare ended up providing captives to the Europeans eager to buy, trade and sell Native people into slavery. In short, the enslavement of Native Americans was responding to the plantation economy fuelled by the enslavement of Africans.

how were Native Americans counted in that first census? It’s hard to say. Some of the regions where the census was incomplete were places with more Native people. Some argued that the sovereignty of Native Americans placed them outside the census. And in places where we know there were Native Americans, such as New England, where a rhetoric as well as a policy of erasing their existence was well underway, they might have been counted in the category of ‘other free persons’ or in some cases, ‘slaves’.

Historians do not typically think of their research in this way; our research reveals the world as it was, before we knew what it would become. Perhaps this also means that historians often seem to be working at odds to the needs of the nation. Certainly in the US, research historians have been delivering a very different picture of the American past than official commemoration, monuments and the appetite for popular history suggest that the American public wants. What is on the shelves or bestseller lists is decidedly not what scholars are producing, and the longstanding claim is that this divergence is indicative of a public desire for patriotic and straightforward history. But is it? The success of the 1619 Project, even if measured solely in sales and readership, suggests otherwise. And still the most shocking feature of this project is neither the assertion that slavery and race are central, even foundational, to American history, nor the reaction to decentring liberty, but that this would be controversial at all, given the weight of decades of historical research documenting it.

In addition to being good history from a historian’s vantage, based on fresh research, new methods and new perspectives, that deeper, richer, fuller past is better suited to explaining our complex present

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

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”.

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.

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

Throughout the five-hundred-year history of Western empires, the security of European colonizers has trumped the security and independence of the colonized.

The historical record shows that, however terrible, violent anticolonial uprisings were invariably smashed with far greater violence than they unleashed. The violence of the “civilized” is far more effective than the violence of the “barbarians” and “savages.”

civilian destruction tends to be greatest when security retaliation reaches the level of what I have called “permanent security”—extreme responses by states to security threats, enacted in the name of self-defense. Permanent security actions target entire civilian populations under the logic of ensuring that terrorists and insurgents can never again represent a threat. It is a project, in other words, that seeks to avert future threats by anticipating them today.

Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” argument from 1923, in which the Revisionist Zionist leader argued that Palestinian resistance was understandable, inevitable—and anticolonial. Speaking of Palestinians, Jabotinsky wrote that “they feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.” Because Palestinians could not be bought off with material promises, Jabotinsky wanted the British Mandate authorities to enable Zionist colonization until Jews, then a tiny minority of Palestine, reached a majority. “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population,” he concluded. “Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

to ensure that Palestinian militants can never again attack Israel, its armed forces are subjecting two million Palestinians to serial war crimes and mass expulsion

If Western states support this solution for Israeli permanent security—as the United States appears to be with its budgeting of refugee support in neighboring countries under the guise of a “humanitarian” gesture—they will be continuing a venerable tradition. During, between, and after both twentieth-century world wars, large-scale population transfers and exchanges took place across the Eurasian continent to radically homogenize empires and nations. Millions of people fled or were expelled or transferred from Turkey, Greece, Austria, Italy, India, Palestine, Central and Eastern Europe. Progressive Europeans reasoned then that long-term peace would be secured if troublesome minorities were removed. This ideology—which the governments of Russia, China, Turkey, India, and Sri Lanka share today—maintains that indigenous and minority populations must submit to their subordination and, if they resist, face subjugation, deportation, or destruction. Antiterrorism operations that kill thousands of civilians are taken to be acceptable responses to terrorist operations that kill far fewer civilians

Hamas thus reasons that Palestinians have nothing to gain by conforming to a U.S.-led “rules-based international order” that has forgotten about them.

When state parties to the UNGC negotiated in 1947 and 1948, they distinguished genocidal intent from military necessity, so that states could wage the kind of wars that Russia and Israel are conducting today and avoid prosecution for genocide. The high legal standard stems from the restrictive UNGC definition of genocide, which was modeled on the Holocaust and requires that a perpetrator intend to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (the dolus specialis) in at least one of five prescribed ways (the actus reus). The words “as such” are widely regarded as imposing a stringent intent requirement: an act counts as genocide only if individuals are targeted solely by virtue of their group membership—like Jews during World War II—and not for strategic reasons like suppressing an insurgency.

Together, the United States and Russia have killed many millions of civilians in their respective imperial wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Chechnya; so have postcolonial states like Nigeria and Pakistan in fighting secessions. Genocide allegations were leveled in some of these cases in global campaigns like the one we see now, but none stuck, and they are largely forgotten in the annals of mass violence against civilian

Adding to the difficulty of establishing genocidal intent is the uncertainty in international humanitarian law about the legality of civilians killed “incidentally” in the course of attacking legitimate military targets. While the majority of international lawyers agree that civilian deaths are acceptable so long as they are not disproportionate in relation to the military advantage sought, others argue that bombing crowded marketplaces and hospitals regardless of military objective is necessarily indiscriminate and thus illegal.

They go far in excusing all Israeli conduct in the name of its legitimate self-defense; the US even seems to have demurred on whether the Geneva Conventions are applicable to Palestinian territories. It is thus unsurprising that they have not pressed the Israeli government to explain how cutting off water, food, and power to Gaza—a “war of starvation” as the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor put it—is a legitimate military tactic, one not covered by the UNGC, which declares one genocidal predicate act to be “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” But if so-called humanitarian pauses are occurring to allow in a little, if grossly inadequate, aid, and the “total siege” is lifted after the military defeat of Hamas (should it happen), it will be difficult to argue in a legal context that Israel’s strangling of Gaza was a genocidal act.

the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which, they argue, dictates “disproportionate attacks, including against *civilian* structures and infrastructure.” This is clearly illegal.

Excessive reprisals, we should recall, are a staple of colonial warfare and state consolidation

Since genocide is a synonym for the destruction of peoples, whether the killing and suppression of their culture is motivated by destruction “as such” or by deterrence, the experience is the same: a destructive attack on a people, and not just random civilians. But the UNGC does not reflect the victim’s perspective. It protects the perpetrators: states that seek permanent security.

Unless the conditions of permanent insecurity are confronted, permanent security aspirations and practices will haunt Palestinians and Israelis.

starting at least around the time of Christ, the Bandas acted as a vital entrepot for trade in bird of paradise plumes and other luxuries from Papua to China and ports in between. The Bandanese were master navigators, whose knowledge of the paths to, and ties with locals in, the nodes at the ends of this network made them wealthy. By the time the Europeans arrived, they lived in autonomous villages, each run by by Orang Kaya, a Malay word meaning “rich men,” which competed with each other, often in federations, for trade power.

they quickly became the key port for the nutmeg trade, frequented by Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and (by the 15th century) Arabo-Persian merchants, whose accounts inspired European dreams of the spice islands

Bandanese-European conflict finally boiled over in 1621, after the Dutch forced the English to functionally abandoned their claims in the islands. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the man in charge of Dutch East India Company operations in the region, decided to test out his theory that the nutmeg trade would be easier to control if the Dutch could clear out the Bandanese and replace them with Company-linked settlers. He found a pretext to attack Banda Besar, the largest island and a hotbed of resistance, with 1,600 Dutch troops, 80 Japanese mercenaries, and some regional slaves, the largest force (to our historical sources’ knowledge) ever seen in the region. Despite fierce resistance, they swarmed the island, cut deals with local defenders-turned-defectors, and took it within days. In response to subsequent guerilla strikes, Coen’s Japanese mercenaries beheaded and quartered 48 Orang Kaya who came to his stronghold to surrender, and displayed their body parts on bamboo sticks. His troops then scourged the islands, burning villages and enslaving almost 800 people, who were mostly sent to Batavia, a trade center on Java. Many Bandanese reportedly jumped off cliffs rather than surrender.

By the end of this Banda Besar campaign, Dutch records indicate that—out of a pre-conflict population of about 15,000 in the year 1500—only 1,000 to 2,000 Bandanese remained across all 11 islands.

Even after the Dutch took total control in the region, Bandanese trade networks remained vital to their local economies well into the 20th century. To this day, some people who claim Bandanese descent are still reportedly accorded a high social status in the region thanks to their historical role as high-powered, economically vital traders.

On Kei Besar, though, the biggest island in the Kei chain, just under 5,000 people in two villages, Elat and Eli, some of the best ports in the region, still speak the Bandanese Turwandan language, practice Bandanese Islam, make Bandanese pottery (a unique, valued trade good until well into the 1990s), trade along Bandanese networks, sing Bandanese songs, and sail regularly to the Bandas to affirm their heritage and perform rites. “When the Bandanese speak of colonial events” today, says Kaartinen, “they refuse to be cast as victims or refugees.”

Research by the Australian anthropologist Phillip Winn shows that most of the more than 18,000 people in the Bandas today acknowledge that they come from many different lands, but still believe that they are legitimately Bandanese. They perform rituals that they believe have roots in ancient Bandanese practices to affirm that identity, and speak of pre-colonial Bandanese history as their own.

In 1982, locals in the Bandas also took over the state-owned nutmeg growing enterprise, which still made up a major part of the local economy. They split the groves equally among local families, building collectives that buy from harvesters, then sell nutmeg on to external interests. This, speculates American anthropologist Amy Jordan, seems like a return to pre-colonial cultivation. If so, it is a compelling coda to an incredible history of ingenuity and resistance.

The ruling was predictable, said Germany's legal representative Ruprecht Polenz, a jurist, veteran Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician and former Bundestag foreign affairs committee chairman, who since 2015 has led negotiations with Namibia's government over the colonial past. .column.main div.ad-container.center-ad { width: auto; height: auto; } #div-gpt-async-ad-center-b-label { display: none; } "That's why we've always said that it's not a legal but a political-moral issue," Polenz told the German news agency dpa.

During World War One, then-imperial Germany lost colonial territories in what is now Namibia as well as in what are now Tanzania, Samoa and Papua New Guinea. In South West Africa -- held since 1884 -- German colonial troops surrendered to British forces in July 1915. At the time the colony had 14,000 European settlers of which 12,000 were German.

In early January, Hermann Parzinger, a leading German museum curator, said a memorial space for crimes committed by Germany in colonial times should be included in Berlin's new Humboldt Forum complex.

how can you ensure compliance and loyalty when agents are far removed and have sanctuaries beyond your control?

the British regime carefully managed the social reproduction of European officers and soldiers. This was done to prevent the formation a dangerous Creole settler class. The Company had long sought to limit the numbers and control the conduct of private Europeans in India in order to maintain its commercial monopoly against “private trade.”  Under Cornwallis, political prudence provided another rationale.

the Company assiduously sought to limit the development a local power elite with any genealogical depth. This was intended to preempt any consequent claim to the “rights of Englishmen” that had just been forcefully raised in North America. The children of mixed European and Indian parentage were therefore turned into a socially inferior class of Eurasians, excluded from power. As early as 1786, the Company forbade the children of “native women” from traveling to England, after discovering that the Indian-born John Turing, “dark as his mother,” had done so and secured a cadet’s appointment in the Army. Two decades later, a “mulatto” candidate secured an appointment only by paying a young Englishman to impersonate him at the interview

If efforts at social integration had succeeded despite such attitudes, British India might have developed into a casta-ranked society like the Spanish Americas. But the need to win the support of the indigenous clerical classes, as well as the fear of promoting a Creole elite like the treacherous Americans, led the East India Company onto a different track. In the last few decades of its rule, before the revolt of 1857, Eurasian clerks were gradually displaced in state service by Indians from the traditional clerical classes, both Hindu and Muslim and, around Bombay, also Parsi and Goan Catholic. A greater regard by the British for their own “blood” returned after 1857, when Anglo-Indians were extensively recruited into the developing railway system in order to ensure imperial control of this strategic asset.  Eurasians, however, could not compete with the indigenous clerical classes in subordinate employment, that is to say, clerical work.

The psychic isolation of young men well indoctrinated in this system and left among Indians without their families was described to Emily Eden in 1837 as a “horrible solitude” that produced depression. One such officer told her of “the horror of being three months without seeing an European, or hearing an English word …”    Indirectly, therefore, we may see patterns of marriage and family formation being managed by the British imperial regime to bolster the loyalty of key elements of its governing apparatus. The political and military efficacy of that apparatus thus depended on constant policing of the boundaries of ethnicity

Licit sex and open conjugality were now limited to English-born women

the still prevalent climatic theories of “racial qualities” suggested that children raised in hot climates deteriorated from the parental stock

From the mid-nineteenth century therefore, young children were usually sent back to Britain while in India fathers worked and mothers sought to monopolize all legitimate conjugality. The result was that generations of children were torn away from their parents and if boys, certainly introduced to that staple of Victorian education, the rattan cane. Two of these children were initially too young (six and three) for school, so Rudyard Kipling and his sister were left in Lorne Lodge, Southampton

More than a colony, Algeria had been made an integral part of France. For more than a century, hundreds of thousands of settlers left France for a new life across the Mediterranean. After the war, their descendants returned to a country many had never known, and they never quite accepted their loss. More than 1.5 million French conscripts fought in the war; 23,000 died, and those who came back traumatized kept silent. France’s booming economy made the 1960s a time for optimism, not tales of failure. Amnesty laws ensured that army officers would not be held accountable for war crimes.

Mr. Macron’s words about torture were cautious, and the Élysée, France’s presidential palace, noted that he was extending “recognition,” not “repentance.” A week later, the French president awarded the Légion d’Honneur to a group of Harkis, the 150,000 Algerians who chose to side with the French during the war and paid a heavy price for it. This is his point: the injustice to be repaired is on both sides.

Ms. Beaugé opened the floodgates of memory in 2000 with an interview of Louisette Ighilahriz, an activist for Algerian independence who recounted being raped and tortured by French soldiers in 1957 while generals looked on. She spoke out after all those years to thank the army doctor who found her after an interrogation session and saved her life. The publication of the interview, on Le Monde’s front page, was such a shock that shortly afterward, two retired generals agreed to speak out. They admitted overseeing the use of torture, giving new impetus to a debate that refused to go away. “It was not so much remorse as a need to talk,” Ms. Beaugé says. “They had to unload their dark past before leaving this world.”

As the official truth finally moves ahead, soul-searching can be expected about the political responsibilities of both Socialists and Gaullists, and of the highest echelons of the French armed forces. Light will have to be shed on the extent to which rape was used as a weapon, along with torture. The present Algerian leadership, heir to the independence war, will also have to finally confront the dark side of the insurgency’s struggle.

a project of modern coexistence that not only had to be imagined and designed, but also built

to trace how an extraordinary idea of Muslim and Christian and Jewish civic and political community rooted in secular equality went from unimaginability to ubiquity in the course of a single century, and nowhere more so than in the Arab East after 1860

subject to conflicting interpretations that valorized “real” religion and demonized sectarianism, often in contradictory and conservative modes, but also in more liberal and even radical ways

Tribalism, communalism and sectarianism all refer to parallel formations in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East respectively that assume an unchanging essence that separates members of a single sovereignty or putative sovereignty. They are all static ideological interpretations of pluralism, and have all, to a greater or lesser degree, been massively influenced and even in many ways formally classified and invented by Western colonial powers

the Orientalists idealize the West in order to Orientalize the East. Second, as you suggest, this view transforms religious pluralism in the Middle East into a structure of age-old monolithic antagonistic communities so that one can speak of medieval and modern Maronites, Jews, Muslims and so on as if these have been unchanging communities and as if all ideological diversity in the Middle East ultimately is reducible to religion and religious community

The religious sect is conflated with the political sect; the secular is understood to be a thin veneer that conceals the allegedly “real” and unchanging religious essence of the Middle East. This view is dangerous, misleading and tendentious.

both race and sect urgently need to be historicized and contextualized—race belongs to US (and Western) political vocabulary; sect to Arab political vocabulary. Both the notion of age-old sects and that of immutable races are ideological fictions that have been manipulated to serve power

US scholars Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields have suggested we think of “racecraft” rather than “race relations” to underscore the ideological fundament of racist thinking that appears totally natural to its proponents. As I allude to in my book, so too might we think of “sectcraft” rather than sectarian or communal relations, both to underscore the ideological aspect of sectarianism and to emphasize the amount of work that goes into making sectarianism appear to be inherent, inevitable and unchangeable

The Orientalist view of sectarianism frequently analogizes sect as “like race” and, furthermore, it assumes that sectarian differences are inherent cultural and political differences similar to race. What do you think is the relationship of sect to race?  How should race figure in the story of coexistence you relate?

many scholars gravitate toward using categories and experiences that emerge in the US context and apply them, sometimes indiscriminately and often very problematically, to other parts of the world. I think it is important at some level to respect the fact that in the modern Middle East, progressive scholars and laypeople, men and women belonging to different religious communities, have throughout the twentieth century typically described and conceptualized their struggles against injustice and tyranny as struggles against sectarianism and colonialism, but not necessarily as a struggle against racism.

the national polities of the post-Ottoman period in the Arab East were established by European colonial powers. These European powers massively distorted the ecumenical trajectory evident in the late Ottoman Arab East. First, they broke up the region into dependent and weak states, and second, they divided the region along explicitly sectarian lines

the colonial dimension is crucial, and it clearly separates the US and the European period of nationalization from that of the colonized Middle East

why the investment in and privileging of certain epistemic categories of domination as opposed to others? The question of migrant labor illustrates how race and class and geography and history are intertwined in very specific ways—the Middle Eastern cases (whether the Gulf or in Lebanon) are indeed different from that of the history of migrant labor in the United States, which has always been implicated in settler colonialism.

One key difference, of course, between modern Western colonialism and early modern Islamic empires is that the latter, like their early modern Christian counterparts, did not pretend to uphold liberal representation, political equality or self-determination. So, temporality is one essential difference: ethnic, racist or sectarian discrimination in the Islamic empires was not justified or imagined as a benevolent burden to uplift others into an ostensibly equal level of civilization. There was no pretense of a colonial tutelage to help natives achieve independence in the fullness of time

In the Ottoman Islamic empire, there were indeed professions of Islamic superiority, notions of ethnic, tribal and religious discrimination, forms of bondage and slavery, and myriad chauvinisms and prejudices tied to kinship, geography, language, culture and ethnicity and so on, but not a notion of biological racism or the obsession with racial segregation and miscegenation that has been the hallmark of modern Western colonialism

a new and distinctive defensiveness among leading Muslim Arab intellectuals—that is, their need to defend Islam and Islamic society from missionary and colonial assault whilst also embracing or reconciling themselves to compatriotship with Arab Christians and Jews. This defensiveness persists

the great problem of scholars and governments in the West who have long instrumentalized and Orientalized discrimination against non-Muslims to suggest that there is some peculiar problem with Islam and Muslims

I think that scholars of gender and women’s history have a lot to teach us in this regard: that is Arab, Turkish, Iranian and other scholars who have explored the long history of gender discrimination—who have defied the fundamentalists—without succumbing to racist Orientalism or self-loathing

really historicize! It really is an effective antidote in the face of those who peddle in chauvinism, racism, sectarianism, tribalism and communalism

Anti-Black racism has only increased in Algeria with the arrival of tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Black, largely clandestine, migrants over the last two decades, who enter Algeria for educational or economic opportunities, or more often, to travel through the country en route to Europe.

20-25% of Algerians are native Amazigh speakers (Tamazight), and many more are Arabized Amazighs. The indigenous Amazighs have been struggling for equality since independence against a state determined to impose an Arab Muslim identity on the country’s entire population

Amazigh activists have challenged the state’s assertion of Arab-Muslim homogeneity. Amazigh activism, in the form of mass protests and the undertakings of Amazigh-dominated political parties and civil society organizations, has pressured the state to constitutionally accept Amazigh identity as one of the components of Algerian identity, integrate the Amazigh language in secondary education, and recognize the Amazigh language as a national and later an official language of the state, in addition to Arabic

Black people, who were present in southern Algeria even before the 13- century-long  trans-Saharan slave trade, can be considered to be as indigenous to Algeria as the Amazigh population.

following a regional trend to repress diversity issues, the Algerian government has never taken a census to ascertain the total number of Algerian black citizens in the country, most of whom remain concentrated in the Saharan south. Ninety-one percent of the Algerian population lives along the Mediterranean coast on 12% of the country's total land mass.

Because most black Algerians are scattered in the vast southern Sahara, an area of the country about which many Algerians are not familiar, white Algerians may be only dimly aware, if aware at all, that they have black compatriots.25Ouzani, op.cit. Certainly, many black Algerians have reported that they face incredulity when claiming their national identity in northern Algeria at police roadblocks, airports, and even in doing everyday ordinary things like responding to a request for the time, “When I walk in the street and someone wants to ask me the time, he does it in French, convinced that he is dealing with a Nigerien or a Chadian, a way of indicating that an Algerian cannot be black.”

When Algerians think of “racial” discrimination, it is likely that they first think of the treatment Algerian Arabs and Amazighs received at the hands of the French during the colonial period (1830-1962), and afterwards in France.27Kamel Daoud, “Black in Algeria? Then You’d Better be Muslim” The New York Times, May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/kamel-daoud-black-in-algeria-then-youd-better-be-muslim.html . See also Seloua Luste Boulbina, “Si tu desires te Moquer du Noir: Habille-le en rouge”, Middle East Eye, 24 November 2018. https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinion-fr/si-tu-desires-te-moquer-du-noir-habille-le-en-rouge-0 The debate over Algeria as a post-colonial society has been fully engaged. However, in another sign of the invisibility of Algeria’s black citizens, consideration of Algeria as a post-slave society – and what that means for black Algerians today – has not

elites were also leaders of Third Worldism, and officially believed in pan-Africanism. Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first post-independence president, declared in Accra, Ghana, in 1963: “It was the imperialists who tried to distinguish between the so-called white and black Africans.”

in Saharan areas, the slave trade continued throughout the period of French settler colonialism (1830-1962)

Arab-Berber whites constructed an economy that relied on black slave labour from their Haratins (enslaved or recently freed Islamicized and Arabized Blacks, who are still susceptible to forced labour practices).31These ambiguously freed black slaves in Saharan areas of Algeria are also called Bella or Ikelan if they were enslaved by Amazighs, including Tuaregs. Today Haratins, mostly sharecroppers, work under harsh labour conditions that some have described as a modern form of slavery, they “dig and tend wells, excavate and maintain the underground channels of foggara, irrigate gardens, tend to flocks, and cultivate dates”.32Benjamine Claude Brower, “Rethinking Abolition in Algeria,” Cahier D’etudes Africaines 49, 2009 Some argue that without the labour of enslaved Black people, the Sahara would never have been habitable at all.33Ibid. The arduous and relentless work to irrigate in a desert includes digging channels tens of feet into the sand with the risk of being drowned under it.

The French accommodated slavery in the Algerian Sahara more than anywhere else. Slave masters and merchants were given permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned well into the twentieth century.35Ibid. In exchange, slavers and merchants provided intelligence on far-off regions to colonial authorities

there is reason to believe that enslaved black people continue to be exploited for agricultural work in the southern oases of Ouargla and Ghardaia provinces to this day (among wealthy families, owners of large palm trees, fields, and farms) and in some instances among semi-nomadic Tuareg

The Algerian state has never adopted any policies, including any affirmative action policies, to help their black community emerge from the impact of generations of servitude and brutalization.40Brower, op.cit. Instead, it has sought to legitimize the country’s white Arab-Muslim identity only

descendants of freed Black slaves (Haratins) in Saharan regions of Algeria often remain dependent upon former “masters.” Most work as sharecroppers in conditions similar to slavery

Black Algerians also face discrimination in urban areas of the country. They encounter the same racist attitudes and racial insults as any other person with dark skin within Algerian borders.

Either by their colour, k’hal, which is twisted into kahlouche (blackie), mer ouba (charcoal), guerba kahla (a black gourd to hold water made out of goatskin), nigro batata (big nose that resembles a potato), haba zeitouna (black olive), babay (nigger), akli (Black slave in some Berber areas), rougi  (redhead or Swedish to imply that the black person is culturally and socially white, as everyone must want to be), saligani (from Senegal) 46Khiat, op.cit., Calling black Algerians Saligani (from Senegal) has a different history. It refers back to the early decades of the 20th century when the French utilized black West-African soldiers in their colonial army to do the dirty work of colonialization, including brutalizing members of the population that resisted French rule, taking food from farmers, and rape. or by direct references to past servile status: hartani (dark black slave or ex-slave forced to work outside the master’s house), khadim (servant), ouacif (domestic slave), ‘abd (slave), ‘abd m’cana (stinky black slave).47Ibid. Using these terms against a black Algerian passerby establishes difference, contempt, strangeness, rejection, distance, and exclusion

In addition to racial insults, a black Algerian academic has noted, “Our community continues to symbolize bad luck. Worse: in the stories of grandmothers, we play the bad roles, kidnappers of children, looters, or vagrants. [While Arabs and Berbers can both point to a proclaimed noble history in Algeria] there is no place for a black hero in the collective memory of my people.”

In addition to rejection of interracial marriages, an Algerian intellectual has reported cases of “white” Algerians refusing to room with Blacks or study with them at university

A step forward in reducing Negrophobia, the selection of Khadija Benhamou, a black woman from the Algerian Sahara, as Miss Algeria in 2019 has been marred by the subsequent deluge of posts on social media virulently claiming that she did not represent the beauty of the country, with many direct attacks against the colour of her skin.

Partly due to pressure on Algeria to control its borders from the European Union, Black sub-Saharan African migrants have been vilified by the Algerian government and some of the press;59https://insidearabia.com/algeria-desert-deportations-eu-migration/ accused – usually falsely – of violence, selling drugs, promiscuity, spreading venereal diseases, perpetuating anarchy, and raping Algerian women.

Without irony, some graffiti and social media posts called on the migrants to “Go back to Africa.”

Three generations after independence, the Algerian state is still resisting the open public debate and civil society engagement needed to reflect the country’s pluralism and to begin to reckon with slave legacies and racial discrimination

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.

Just as the “induced demand” principle shows why building more lanes on highways actually increases traffic, United States of War makes the argument that military bases themselves incentivize and perpetuate military aggression, coups, and meddling.

While giving the illusion of increased safety, these bases actually made foreign wars more likely, argues Vine, because they made it easier to wage such wars. In turn, conflict increased construction of US bases.

a “permanent war system,” as Vine puts it, was established. During the post–World War II era of decolonization, the United States used its military base network and economic influence, buttressed by new institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to protect its preeminence.

Organized labor, immigrants, recently freed slaves, indigenous peoples at home and abroad: They were all subdued by the same military and police forces making way for white settlement and capital expansion.

“To this day,” Vine notes, “Chagossians and many others among the displaced are struggling to return home, to win some justice and recompense for what they have suffered.” This is where Vine’s book is at its best: showing the moral stakes of US empire. Shrouded in the sanitized and sterile think tank–ese of “forward positions,” “kinetic action,” and “open door policy,” the average media consumer would be hard-pressed to know the human costs of these bases. Vine documents the stakes from the vantage point of the displaced and disenfranchised.

While the Bush-Cheney administration closed some bases in Europe, overall spending on bases “reached record highs” during their time in office

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has also expanded its presence in Africa, building “lily pads” across the continent — smaller profile, somewhat secretive installations, suggesting “a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad toward its prey,” writes Vine. US bases have been central  to waging the 2011 NATO war in Libya, drone strikes in Yemen, military intervention in Somalia and Cameroon. “The military has been conducting a variety of operations regularly in at least 49 African countries,” writes Vine. “It may be operating in every single one.”

The War on Terror ethos, in which the whole world is considered a US battlefield and the United States grants itself broad latitude to wage preemptive war, has come to define US foreign policy.

Engaging Vine’s book is less like reading a tidy cause-and-effect theory of the relationship between US military bases and wars, and more an exploration of the symbiotic relationship between capital, US empire and racism, and their primary mode of interaction: the military base.

he entered the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a French philanthropic and educational association, where he spent the next seven years absorbing the fundamentals of French language and culture through lessons specially designed to bring Jewish youth of the “Orient” into the modern world

he received a full scholarship to the state-run Lycée Carnot, where for the first time he encountered the steep ladder that organized colonial society: the sons of European settlers at the top, followed by the offspring of the Muslim bourgeoisie, and at the lower rungs,  boys from the “better” Jewish classes. Here Memmi suffered a thousand cuts—from anti-Semitic barbs, to shame about his poverty and lack of social graces.

always the outsider

The stringent adoption of anti-Jewish race laws in Algeria soon followed, and Memmi, along with other Tunisian Jewish students, was dismissed from the university and sent home

When the first American edition appeared in 1965, Memmi dedicated it to “the American Negro,” underscoring Sartre’s point that the colonial oppression described in The Colonizer could easily be mapped onto other situations where one group of people brutally subjugated another.

Memmi continued his studies in sociology and psychology at the Sorbonne, with the aim of acquiring a teaching degree. Certificate in hand, he returned to Tunis, where in addition to his teaching duties, he began to write for newspapers and literary magazines and became a founding contributor to Jeune Afrique

The Pillar of Salt was a sensation because of its emotional intensity and its scenes of native life from the perspective of an oppressed minority. The book had a special éclat among Tunisian Jews, who were experiencing a period of acute existential crisis, caught between remaining in a country where they no longer felt “at home” and migrating elsewhere

Tunisia became a battleground between German and Allied forces, and for six months, Tunisian Jews lived under Nazi rule. Young men were rounded up and sent to forced labor camps where they worked under extremely harsh conditions; others were deported to Eastern Europe and never returned. The German army was finally driven out of Tunisia in May 1943. In the intervening months, Memmi made critical transitions. At first, he sat behind a desk keeping track of supplies, but soon he was struck by a bad conscience and volunteered to go to a labor camp, where he found comradeship, purpose, and a renewed attachment to his Jewish roots. The ardently secular Memmi led prayer groups and gave lectures on Zionism, an ideology to which he himself was only vaguely attached. His wartime experiences grounded him, solidified his views on his Jewishness, and confirmed his suspicions about the infidelity of France. It also gave him greater clarity about the dynamics of oppression that he later used to construct his brilliant analysis of the colonial system.

moving to France in the autumn of 1956 with his French wife Germaine, the other half of a “mixed marriage” that lasted more than sixty years. His union with a non-Jew was simultaneously unsettling as well as liberating

The Colonizer and the Colonized appeared during the height of the Battle of Algiers, the bloodiest episode in the eight-year-long Algerian war for independence. The book not only created a literary sensation, but it also presented a war-weary French public a framework for understanding the violence of the conflict, as well as foreshadowing its outcome

Memmi was also helping to define a new genre of “Francophone” literature consisting of works written in French by authors outside of France

I have lost my notes from the interview, but the substance of our conversation comes out in The Colonizer's afterward. Memmi was most concerned that in the thirty-five years since its first publication, some of the ideas in the book had become obsolete. He was especially troubled by his deprecating comments about European women, whom he had described in the book as ardent colonials, “less concerned [than a man] about humanity in the abstract sense.” Other unflattering references disturbed him as well, and he wished they could be excised, but alas, I had to give him the bad news that the publisher was reproducing the texte intégrale and no changes could be made. I reassured him that times had changed, and history would be kind to him (though I was not completely convinced of that myself). It would have been difficult in 1957 to predict the feminist revolution of the intervening years.

Memmi had made his choice: he was now more French than anything else;  though his Jewishness was indelible, and his Arabness was much less so. Unlike Iraqi Jewish writers such as Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael, and Sasson Somekh, Memmi had never mastered literary Arabic; he confessed that with his Arab and Arabic-speaking counterparts, he had “nothing in common.”

unlike other scholars of Jews of the Islamic world, he refused to romanticize a golden past of “convivencia.” Instead, Memmi moved with the literary currents of the day, enjoying increasing amounts of attention as one of the godparents of Francophonie, along with Mouloud Mammeri, Driss Chraibi, Mouloud Feraoun, Assia Djebar, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, and more recently, with a whole new cohort of Maghrebi-related writers led by Leila Slimani, Fouad Laraoui, and Kemal Daoud, among others

he was frequently called on to adopt a public position on the Palestinian-Israel conflict. He viewed it as a chronic affliction immobilizing both sides, but for the Palestinians, even more. “The Palestinians are dominated by the Israelis,” he wrote in 2004 in Decolonization and the Decolonized; “No people has the right to dominate another, and cannot succeed in doing so forever.” He urged Jewish nationalists to “give up their dream of creating a Jewish state throughout Palestine.”

his position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict did not endear him to either side, and in this domain, he was unloved by all

“…it is true,” he said, “that you could read my books from the perspective of rupture and conflict, but you could also read them from the  perspective of an effort to resolve these ruptures and conflicts.”  

The relative weakness of African media outlets means that the complexities and nuances of what is happening away from power is rarely described, let alone analyzed

Al Jazeera English has carved a global niche for deepening reporting from places outside centers of power, and Africa Is a Country publishes critical takes on key issues. But digital archives are notoriously transient and even the most visible websites can disappear with the flick of a switch.

When the official record of a community’s history tells them that their ancestors did nothing when faced with near certain death, they tend to believe it and act like its true

A 2019 article estimated that at the Kenyan Coast—the most urbanized and settled region of the fledgling country—the Spanish flu killed 25.3 of every 1,000 people, less than the international average but one of the most deadly recorded outbreaks in the territory.

Accurate information about the 1918 flu is difficult enough to come by in most countries, but in colonies like Kenya, the archival record is especially complicated. Much of what exists is the perspective of colonial officers constructing a racist political state. So the archives talk about how black people resisted many of the efforts at quarantine, portraying them as irrational when in fact barring movement was one way the British created pools of forced labor.

Ethnic cantonment was the cornerstone of colonial oppression in Kenya, and severe punishments for leaving designated ethnic areas were a crucial part of turning free black men and women into prison labor.

European colonizers brought with them rinderpest, commonly known as cattle plague, which destroyed much of the indigenous cattle population, and jiggers, a small flea-like pest that burrows into feet, crippling the infected person and sometimes leading to gangrene. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, two historians specializing in Kenya’s colonial era, estimate that the Maasai community, one of the most militant groups resisting the British in East Africa, may have lost up to 40 percent of its population. The pandemics and outbreaks in that first decade of the 20th century decimated populations and made it impossible to mount any coordinated military resistance.

the record describes ignorant Africans disregarding the interventions of noble Europeans. Resistance to quarantine and enforced cantonment is framed as a rejection of public health initiatives, not part of a broader resistance to the restrictions on freedom of movement placed on the African population

The consequences of these incomplete archives still reverberate anywhere governments are drawing lessons from colonial public health practices. The violence in countries like India, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and other settler colonies echoes the violence of the colonial state in part because the successor independence governments read the violent colonial interventions as logical and necessary. The archive presents violent policing response as a natural and necessary part of a public health crisis response, and the successor governments don’t question that.

The illusion that some violence is necessary to achieve public health goals because the “native” is inherently resistant to logic is inherited from colonizers and sustained because the archive is rarely critically interrogated.

variolation, a precursor to modern-day vaccination in which healthy people were exposed to the blood of infected people to develop resistance to it, was recorded in Kenya, South Sudan, Nigeria, and other parts of the continent. Community health systems existed and were often strong, but the colonizing forces had no interest in them, as they were keen to promote the idea of superior European health systems

This is the task for journalists covering Africa and Covid-19: Hold space for communities that those in power would rather not hear. It is a tremendous challenge. Very few African countries have media markets that can pay for quality, independent investigative and documentary journalism. Many are dependent on Western donor governments to sustain their public health coverage, and this tips the scale in favor of stories that make those organizations look good. Other outlets operate as PR vehicles for their home governments and by extension for the countries that are their strong allies. Few foreign outlets are interested in true partnership with African journalists, and for the few critical journalists the erosion of press freedom across the continent is devouring whatever space they have to work.

Today, the asylum’s graveyard sits on a city-owned golf course between the fourth and fifth holes’ fairways. It’s sectioned off with a split-rail fence, and maintained by the city and the Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story group. 

At least 53 different tribal nations are represented in the cemetery. 

there were 27 investigations of the asylum over its 31-year operation.  But it would take another nearly three decades for those complaints--some from staff themselves, alleging patient mistreatment in the form of insufficient clothing, bedding, and improper medical treatment—-to shut down the facility.

In 1929, psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Silk of St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal mental hospital in Washington, described the Canton asylum as “a place of padlocks and chamber pots,” where reservations sent patients they weren’t able to care for. He noted a lack of real medical facilities, and that “several patients exhibited no symptoms of mental illness,”

City officials in Canton, which technically owns the cemetery, told Native News Online that they would “respect and honor the decision of each tribal nation” regarding their ancestors buried there. "Whether those decisions be repatriation or leaving them where they were laid to rest, we will honor and remember their lives through continued care and upkeep of the grounds and cemetery,” representatives from Canton, the Hiawatha Golf Club, Sanford Canton-Inwood Medical Center, and Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story wrote in a joint statement.

In June, the Department of the Interior announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, prompted by the discovery of 215 Indigenous childrens’ remains at the site of a former Indian residential school, to examine its own dark history. The initiative directs the department to identify boarding-school facilities and examine potential burial sites near them, as well as the identities and tribal affiliations of the students who were taken to those schools. 

The Department of the Interior had not responded by press time to Native News Online’s request for comment on whether the asylum would be included in the scope of the federal investigation, or whether they’d pay for repatriations.