take a moment to remember U.S. history (or even a few seconds to do an internet search) and it’s easy to find many examples of far deadlier shootings. It’s a sad reality that most victims of the worst massacres that don’t rate a mention were people of color: Native Americans and African-Americans
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'Lone wolf' or 'terrorist'? How bias can shape news coverage | Poynter - 0 views
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media history terrorism terror journalism US USA violence crime analysis ethics empire
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there have been much worse atrocities and mass shootings committed against Native peoples going back to the beginnings of our country’s history
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The unwelcome title of largest massacre might belong to Bear River, Utah, where at least 250 Native Americans were slaughtered in 1863; Native American historical accounts put the number at more than 450. In 1890, Native American men, women and children were massacred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 150 to 300.
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Just 100 years ago this June, armed whites rampaged through East St. Louis, slaughtering more than 100 African-Americans. In Tulsa in 1921, white mobs attacked a wealthy black neighborhood, killing as many as 300 people and leaving 8,000 homeless in what was wrongly labeled a “race riot” and left out of history texts until recently.
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after mass attacks perpetrated by brown Muslim assailants, such as the Orlando Pulse massacre or the San Bernardino, California, killings, the media, authorities and politicians were quick to label them “terrorism” even before we had full information
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Just because someone’s angry or even mentally ill doesn’t mean their actions aren’t those of a domestic terrorist (see U.S. Code definition above). As Joshua Keating points out in Slate, being distraught and a terrorist are “not mutually exclusive.” A 2013 study of violence by far-right extremists in America in Criminology and Public Policy found 40 percent of “lone wolf” domestic terrorists had a history of mental illness
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Fox News dubiously described the shooter’s father’s life as “colorful,” as if it were entertaining that the man’s father robbed a string of banks, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and busted out of a federal penitentiary. Can you imagine a black, Muslim or Latino’s long criminal record being described in the same way?
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Underlying this bias is the implication that Muslims or brown immigrants are more dangerous to Americans’ safety than white attackers. That is provably false, based on government statistics – yet it was the central narrative of President Trump’s campaign
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according to an analysis by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh of fatal terrorism on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2015 – including the staggeringly high toll of the 9/11 attacks – the chances of an American being killed in a terror attack on U.S. soil by a foreigner was a miniscule 1 in 3.6 million per year. The chances of being killed by an illegal immigrant in the same 41-year period was an infinitesimal 1 in 10.9 billion per year.
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Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives | UK news | The G... - 0 views
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UK Britain history empire documents censorship FCO military intelligence
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Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.
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Other files the National Archives has listed as “misplaced while on loan to government department” include one concerning the activities of the Communist party of Great Britain at the height of the cold war; another detailing the way in which the British government took possession of Russian government funds held in British banks after the 1917 revolution; an assessment for government ministers on the security situation in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s; and three files about defence agreements between the UK and newly independent Malaya in the late 1950s, shortly before the two countries went to war with Indonesia.
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Some historians have been particularly distrustful of the Foreign Office since 2013, when the Guardian disclosed that the department had been unlawfully hoarding 1.2m historical files at a high-security compound near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. The hoard came to light during high court proceedings brought by a group of elderly Kenyans who were detained and abused during the Mau Mau insurgency in 1950s Kenya, when the Foreign Office admitted it had withheld thousands of colonial-era files.
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Talking Africa-#108: Niger's 'African Apocalypse' - 0 views
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America's War Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet | naked capitalism - 0 views
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War, in other words, is our new normal, America’s default position on global affairs, and peace, some ancient, long-faded dream. And when your default position is war, whether against the Taliban, ISIS, “terror” more generally, or possibly even Iran or Russia or China, is it any surprise that war is what you get? When you garrison the world with an unprecedented 800 or so military bases, when you configure your armed forces for what’s called power projection, when you divide the globe — the total planet — into areas of dominance (with acronyms like CENTCOM, AFRICOM, and SOUTHCOM) commanded by four-star generals and admirals, when you spend more on your military than the next seven countries combined, when you insist on modernizing a nuclear arsenal (to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion) already quite capable of ending all life on this and several other planets, what can you expect but a reality of endless war?
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A partial list of war’s many uses might go something like this: war is profitable, most notably for America’s vast military-industrial complex; war is sold as being necessary for America’s safety, especially to prevent terrorist attacks; and for many Americans, war is seen as a measure of national fitness and worthiness, a reminder that “freedom isn’t free.” In our politics today, it’s far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right.
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never-ending war weakens democracy while strengthening authoritarian tendencies in politics and society. In an age of gaping inequality, using up the country’s resources in such profligate and destructive ways offers a striking exercise in consumption that profits the few at the expense of the many.
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war is anti-democratic, anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-human. Yet, as we know, history makes heroes out of its participants and celebrates mass murderers like Napoleon as “great captains.”
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The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable:
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Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.
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even the Pentagon knows that our most serious enemy is climate change, not China or Russia or terror
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The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only wants to grow more so, but what’s welfare for the military brass isn’t wellness for the planet.
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Spaceship Earth should not be allowed to remain Warship Earth as well, not when the existence of significant parts of humanity is already becoming ever more precarious. Think of us as suffering from a coolant leak, causing cabin temperatures to rise even as food and other resources dwindle. Under the circumstances, what’s the best strategy for survival: killing each other while ignoring the leak or banding together to fix an increasingly compromised ship?
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Every war makes us less human as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium. Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life.
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war is a bloody, murderous mess and those practitioners, when not killed or wounded, are marred for life because war functionally makes everyone involved into a murderer
When We Were Arabs: 'I am not an Oriental' | Middle East Eye - 0 views
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Why the history of the vast early America matters today | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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A more capacious geography for early America, and deeper research in both slavery studies and Native American history, are showing not only a more complex era but much more connection among seemingly remote people, places and phenomena.
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In recent decades, historians have revealed a much more complex, Atlantic and globally connected, fully continental and foundationally Native, multi-imperial history. Not only is what we know about this period fuller and richer, but the way that research insights are coming together now informs a very different picture of early America – and thus of the nation’s foundations and development.
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A turn to Atlantic history produced a wealth of studies on the dynamic economic, political and religious developments that revealed the ocean to have been an early modern commercial highway, powered by the Atlantic slave trade.
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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.
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a crucial piece of research infrastructure for early American history, as well as the related histories of South America, Africa and the Caribbean
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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
Can a New Think Tank Put a Stop to Endless War? - 0 views
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The Great Patriotic War on Education - Systematic Organization - 0 views
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For anyone who keeps abreast of politics in places like Japan, South Korea, or Turkey, the spectacle of a nationalist movement attacking textbooks and curricula for being insufficiently patriotic is a familiar one. The current strife gives experts in, say, Japanese history curricula a chance for their own “what would you say if you saw this in another country” moment.
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unlike those countries the United States doesn’t have a national educational curriculum, since we’ve decided in our infinite wisdom to allow states and localities to decide what our children in public schools will learn. This is an oddity, given that educational curricula in most countries have been founded specifically to help nationalize disparate communities—to turn peasants into Frenchmen, or serfs into the new Soviet man, for instance
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even before the dreaded Texas school textbook adoption committee used its market power to enforce a degree of uniformity in historiography that we basically had a form of national consensus about what should be taught: a blandly consensual, Whiggish, sunnily white-apologist curriculum in which all good things (like democracy, capitalism, and the interests of big business) went together and all bad things (like labor unions, radical activists, and political divisions) could be ignored
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In the scope of global academia, American academics are about as staid and bourgeois as you can. The fact that my discipline, political science, constantly seeks ways to make itself more of service to the state would be perplexing to not a few other cultures’ social scientists, for example. And American historians, too, have long been a fairly conservative lot by this global metric—the dominance of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, the nearest thing we’ve got to Royal Academies around here, ensures that the language of instruction has always been in a plummy accent
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We talk about issues like slavery, or racial discrimination, and the deficits of class mobility in the United States. We raise questions like whether bombing Hiroshima was worth it and point out that there’s no way that bombing Nagasaki was a good idea. We remind people that the United States can be hypocritical about human rights. We constantly challenge authority—from within the rules of the game, to be sure, but we do it—and we on the tenure-track enjoy some of the greatest speech protections known in American labor markets. And so we mild-mannered members of the middle classes come to stick out to college freshmen, raised on the pabulum of propagandistic textbooks, like a jalapeno in a frog-eye salad.
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Conservative nationalism at this fever pitch is like a play on H.L. Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: the fear that someone, somewhere, is criticizing the American catechism. And it’s even more bizarre to see the National Archives rotunda appropriated for a “conference” of “historians” in this context—not just the context of rightist ascendancy, or of a pandemic and new Great Recession, but of all-but-total control of the curriculum itself.
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It’s only rarely that I have students come into my classes knowing anything in particular about U.S. relations with Native communities, or about the role of slavery in nineteenth-century American foreign policy, or about the Mexican War, U.S. imperialism, or civil rights and the Cold War. U.S. history courses—in the main—remain what they were when I took them as a high school student [blank] years ago: dull recitations of the ever-improving progress of a country that was born perfect. (In fact, the narrative of this implicit national curriculum is so boring precisely because there’s no more drama or tension left in it—all of the conflict has been airbrushed away, or stomped into oblivion, by textbook writers seeking what plays in Peoria.)
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It will collect, certify, and propagate a model for the anti-public school movement, and will provide the institutional basis for the reproduction of a separate schooling project that will fight a long war against the capture of the schools and colleges by the elites. The thing about culture wars, after all, is that they will not be over by (the war on) Christmas. They are generational wars—the sorts of struggles that get named Thirty or Hundred Years’ Wars.
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Law, history, slavery - The Law and Policy Blog - 0 views
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Slavery was managed from afar: few slave merchants and very few domestic owners of slaves ever saw the enslaved face-to-face. Slavery was thereby dealt with by correspondence: with crews, agents and estate managers. And so, because it was about property and transactions and done from afar, there are lots of records. Lots and lots of records. And so like that modern horror, the Holocaust, you can see the dealings with slavery in record after record. For those involved, it was mundane. Slaves bought and sold, and managed, by ink and paper, by everyday people on an everyday basis. Great Britain’s very own banality of evil.
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Slave ownership was like owning a time-share in Spain or a special savings account. The import of all this should be to correct the skewed cod-history of British nostalgic exceptionalism and to remind us of the extent to which Britain was involved in (and benefitted from) slavery and the slave trade.
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shared by Ed Webb on 11 Jul 20
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(1857) Frederick Douglass, "If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress" * - 0 views
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empire colonialism Britain US USA history slavery Caribbean
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If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
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Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
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Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
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This, then, is the truth concerning the inauguration of freedom in the British West Indies. Abolition was the act of the British government. The motive which led the government to act no doubt was mainly a philanthropic one, entitled to our highest admiration and gratitude. The national religion, the justice and humanity cried out in thunderous indignation against the foul abomination, and the government yielded to the storm. Nevertheless a share of the credit of the result falls justly to the slaves themselves. “Though slaves, they were rebellious slaves.” They bore themselves well. They did not hug their chains, but according to their opportunities, swelled the general protest against oppression. What Wilberforce was endeavoring to win from the British senate by his magic eloquence the slaves themselves were endeavoring to gain by outbreaks and violence.
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I am aware that the insurrectionary movements of the slaves were held by many to be prejudicial to their cause
The McGirt Case Is a Historic Win for Tribes - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Jadaliyya - 0 views
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empire colonialism Tunisia France literature politics culture francophonie israelpalestine minorities
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Albert Memmi, author, essayist, philosopher, and public intellectual, born in Tunis on 15 December 1920 and self-exiled to France upon Tunisia’s independence, died in Paris on 22 May 2020
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Though he ceased living in North Africa after 1956, Memmi remained a Maghrebi at heart, maintaining an intimate connection to his place of birth, its people, politics, and literary culture
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The second of twelve children, Memmi was surrounded by a large extended family surviving on the fringes of poverty. Memmi’s mother tongue was the language of the medina, the Tunisian dialect of Arabic.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Memmi was also helping to define a new genre of “Francophone” literature consisting of works written in French by authors outside of France
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.”
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his position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict did not endear him to either side, and in this domain, he was unloved by all
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“…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.”
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Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern wor... - 0 views
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By miscasting the role of Africa, generations have been taught a profoundly misleading story about the origins of modernity.
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Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the west African coastline. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough that he would later reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home.
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European expeditions to west Africa in the mid-15th century were bound up in a search for gold. It was the trade in this precious metal, discovered in what is now Ghana by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund Vasco da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia. This robust new supply of gold helped make it possible for Lisbon, until then the seat of a small and impecunious European crown, to steal a march on its neighbours and radically alter the course of world history.
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It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.
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It is not that the basic facts are unknown; it is that they have been siloed, overlooked or swept into dark corners. It is essential to restore key chapters such as these to their proper place of prominence in our common narrative of modernity.
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The rise of Europe was not founded on any innate or permanent characteristics that produced superiority. To a degree that remains unrecognised, it was built on Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in enslaved people who were put to work growing sugar, tobacco, cotton and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World.
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The long thread that leads us to the present began in those three decades at the end of the 15th century, when commerce blossomed between Portugal and Africa, sending a newfound prosperity washing over what had previously been a marginal European country. It drove urbanisation in Portugal on an unprecedented scale, and created new identities that gradually freed many people from feudal ties to the land. One of these novel identities was nationhood, whose origins were bound up in questing for wealth in faraway lands, and soon thereafter in emigration and colonisation in the tropics.
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understanding that the world was infinite in its social complexity, and this required a broadening of consciousness, even amid the colossal violence and horror that accompanied this process, and an ever more systematic unmooring from provincialism
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Portugal overwhelmingly dominated Europe’s trade in Africans, and slavery was beginning to rival gold as Portugal’s most lucrative source of African bounty. By then, it was already on its way to becoming the foundation of a new economic system based on plantation agriculture. Over time, that system would generate far more wealth for Europe than African gold or Asian silks and spices.
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Malachy Postlethwayt, a leading 18th-century British expert on commerce, called the rents and revenues of plantation slave labour “the fundamental prop and support” of his country’s prosperity. He described the British empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power [built] on an African foundation”. Around the same time, an equally prominent French thinker, Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, described Europe’s plantations worked by African enslaved people as “the principal cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe”. Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer and spy, bested both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes [sic] etc; no sugar etc, no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade.”
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Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the west. African labour, in the form of enslaved people, was what made the very development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World are unimaginable.
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Through the development of plantation agriculture and a succession of history-altering commercial crops – tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice and, above all, sugar – Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy
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In sugar’s wake, cotton grown by enslaved people in the American south helped launch formal industrialisation, along with a second wave of consumerism. Abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history
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Spain and Portugal waged fierce naval battles in west Africa over access to gold. Holland and Portugal, then unified with Spain, fought something little short of a world war in the 17th century in present-day Congo and Angola, vying for control of trade in the richest sources of enslaved people in Africa. On the far side of the Atlantic, Brazil – the biggest producer of slave-grown sugar in the early 17th century – was caught up in this same struggle, and repeatedly changed hands. Later in that same century, England fought Spain over control of the Caribbean.
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By the mid-1660s, just three decades or so after England initiated an African slave-labour model for its plantations there – one that was first implemented in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé little more than a century earlier – sugar from Barbados was worth more than the metal exports of all of Spanish America.
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Nowadays, the consensus estimate on the numbers of Africans brought to the Americas hovers about 12 million. Lost in this atrocious but far too neat accounting is the likelihood that another 6 million Africans were killed in or near their homelands during the hunt for slaves, before they could be placed in chains. Estimates vary, but between 5% and 40% perished during brutal overland treks to the coast, or while being held, often for months, in barracoons, or holding pens, as they awaited embarkation on slave ships. And another 10% of those who were taken aboard died at sea during an Atlantic transit that constituted an extreme physical and psychological test for all those who were subjected to it. When one considers that Africa’s total population in the mid-19th century was probably about 100 million, one begins to gauge the enormity of the demographic assault that the slave trade represented.
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It is often remarked that Africans themselves sold enslaved people to Europeans. What is less well known is that in many parts of Africa, such as the Kingdom of Kongo and Benin, Africans fought to end the trade in human beings once they understood its full impact on their own societies
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Specialists aside, few imagine that islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States. The nation now known as Haiti most of all. In the 18th century it became the richest colony in history, and in the 19th, by dint of its slave population’s successful revolution, Haiti rivalled the US in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfil the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all: ending slavery.
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My biggest surprise came in Barbados, whose slave-produced sugar, arguably more than any other place on earth, helped seal England’s ascension in the 17th century. I visited the island not long ago, determined to find as many traces of this legacy as possible, only to discover how thoroughly they had been hidden or effaced. Among my top priorities was to visit one of the largest slave cemeteries anywhere in the hemisphere, which included the excavated remains of nearly 600 people. It took me several attempts just to find the cemetery, which had no signage from any public road. Few local residents seemed aware of its historical importance, or even of its existence.
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Nearly a century ago, WEB Du Bois had already affirmed much of what we needed to know on this topic. “It was black labour that established the modern world commerce, which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves,” he wrote. Now is the time to finally acknowledge this.
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Figuring out what to do with monuments requires careful thought about what they mean and who they harm. Statues honouring egregious people tell airbrushed tales to the world; their toppling provides marginal notes on less rosy truths. Removing them is not an expurgation of history, it’s the insertion of other voices into the record, voices that have long been ignored. The more of that we can encourage, the richer the history we will leave to those who follow us.
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Those who wish to defend statues of dead white men on free speech grounds invariably undermine their case by failing to support that right for living people, especially those with marginal identities who say things they don’t like. Free speech isn’t just about who can speak, or whose statue stands or falls; it’s about who chooses not to speak because the consequences aren’t worth it, and who disappears from history without being heard at all.
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After a summer of returning nine ancestors who died while attending boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is zeroing in on another location for return: The cemetery of a former government-run insane asylum in Canton, a town of about 3,000 people in southeast South Dakota.
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From 1903 to 1934, the BIA operated the Hiawatha Indian Insane Asylum (also known as the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians) for nearly 400 Native Americans, overlapping with the same period that U.S. policy aimed to assimilate Natives into the dominant settler culture and erase their own. Native Americans from across Indian Country were admitted to the asylum at a time where Indigenous peoples were not recognized as citizens of the United States, and therefore would not be admitted to state institutions.
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“Many of the people that were there... might have simply been ‘trouble’ or created trouble for the Indian agent,” Lothrop told Native News Online. “Some of [the elders] were medicine men. It was a time when we weren't allowed to practice our spiritual ways, and this was one way to… as my mom said, ‘try to get the Indian out of the Indian.’”
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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.
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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.
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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,”
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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.
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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.
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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.