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Egypt is not collecting tolls on ships’ passage. And ships, including those operated by Evergreen, have begun to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope.

For now, the knock-on effect of the stoppage is the accumulation of insurance claims and late fees, and delays in the delivery of cargo. But in the longer term, much as it did in the mid-twentieth century, the 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal, combined with the effects of the pandemic, may precipitate a reckoning in how maritime transport operates.

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

Syrians who directly opposed the Assad regime, often at great cost, did not do so because of some Western imperialist plot, but because decades of abuse, brutality, and corruption were and remain intolerable. To insist otherwise, and support Assad, is to attempt to strip Syrians of all political agency and endorse the Assads’ longstanding policy of domestic politicide, which has deprived Syrians of any meaningful say in their government and circumstances.

the “anti-imperialism” and “leftism” of the unprincipled, of the lazy, and of fools

reinforces the dysfunctional international gridlock exhibited in the UN Security Council

Among other things, German museums came to an understanding on how they want to proceed with artifacts looted during the colonial times. And a central contact point has been established for former colonies to demand the return of their possessions.

Museums and archives have returned skeletons brought to Germany during the colonial period -- for dubious scientific experiments, among other things. Cities have begun renaming streets honoring colonialists

Since 2015, Germany and Namibia have been negotiating about an official apology for the genocide of the Herero and Nama people, with no results so far.

In February, Tanzania's ambassador to Germany, Abdallah Possi, demanded the German government start negotiating a deal for reparations with Tanzania. This would allow Berlin to show that "Germans have finally accepted responsibility for human rights abuses during the colonial era, and that they take what happened to Tanzanians in the past seriously," the ambassador told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. Possi was referring to the Maji Maji Rebellion, an uprising against German colonial forces from 1905 until 1907, which claimed around 250,000 victims.

The Orientalist eye, it seems, is keen to imbue the landscape with greater enigmatic significance - and Parris concludes his street-corner musings with the melodramatic lines: “Everywhere the concrete was gashed with black mould. But that’s how concrete does stain, in the rain. Visitors to Beirut must learn to love the stains.”

Parris’ foray into the realm of Orientalist lecture would appear to be relatively benign compared to those of contemporaries such as, say, the British travel writer who penned “Boobs, Botox and the Babes of Beirut” - in which we learn that “in Lebanon the women look like Cleopatra” but that plastic surgery fiascos can result in a situation in which “some look as if a drunken Picasso has drawn a face on to a balloon”.

Thomas Friedman’s determinations that Israel’s bombing of Lebanese civilians is “logical”, that Palestinians are “gripped by a collective madness”, or that Iraqis need to “suck on this”.

the West’s ongoing addiction to Orientalism

Nowadays, there are increasing efforts among reductionist Orientalist circles to market Beirut as the resurgent “Paris of the Middle East”, a glamorous hub of hedonism boasting all manner of extravagant money-spending opportunities - yet one that still retains the requisite exotic elements, such as the ever-astounding coexistence of miniskirts and hijabs, Hezbollah and billboard lingerie ads. 

the glorification of elite excess and materialism directly serves the interests of a global neoliberal order predicated on obscene socioeconomic inequality

Like the rest of the United States, the Washington of today sits on land that had long been inhabited by indigenous tribes — particularly a group called the Nacotchtank or Anacostans. Rule's project draws attention to that physical history of the land. The guide's second site is a large island in the Potomac River that once hosted Nacotchtank settlements, while another site marks indigenous artefacts found on the grounds of the White House.

"It's important to acknowledge ... that native communities, leaders and other individuals have continued to come to Washington, D.C. over the years on behalf of their people," said Gokey, a member of the Eastern Shawnee and Fox tribes.

"Colonization did happen, but this is still Indian land,"

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.

There was no other reason for having such a referendum; it was purely an internal Tory party affair

The circumstances of the 2016 referendum, its nature, and its consequences, have multiple causes that jointly led to the stupefying mess in the country and its political and constitutional order that we are now in. The Eurosceptics made good use of these other factors

the policy from 2010 of austerity and the resulting large and rapid increase in inequality, which affected some areas of the country and economy much more drastically than others

a series of bad mistakes and misjudgements by David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the two main parties

the quality of MPs after decades in the EU. Membership of the EU brought a degree of general consistency and equilibrium to the economies and states of the member nations, even taking into account the misguided austerity policies after 2010 in the UK itself. This has lessened the temperature of political debate in the UK, premised as it is (unlike most other EU countries) on a deeply adversarial style of politics. Before joining the EEC the UK was a theatre of intense struggles between left and right, socialism and capitalism, managements and unions, a pervasive 'us and them' mentality infecting every major decision.That moderated, with a more temperate tone entering politics in the period between the end of Thatcher and the post-2010 coalition. But as a result, politics became somewhat less attractive to energetic, clever and ambitious people, with the result that - with some extremely honourable exceptions - the general quality of MPs is not nearly what it was.

Banal careerism, the unchallenged sway of the party whips, unthinking sound-bite ideas as the staple of political discourse, the fact that literally hundreds of MPs in the Tory party can support a profoundly unfit person such as Boris Johnson in the office of prime minister - this is a mark of serious decline in quality of those elected to the legislature.

British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee

no separation of powers between the legislature (parliament) and executive (the government - meaning, the cabinet and prime minister)

Instead of holding the government to account, therefore, parliament is in effect the creature of the government, and does what the government wants.

"elective tyranny"

The clique controls the executive, the executive controls parliament, parliament is absolute in its powers: The clique is the tail that wags the entire dog.

when people of lower quality, less integrity, less intelligence and less honour populate these offices of state, danger looms. And that danger has burst upon us in the form of Brexit.

One of the major scandals of the 2016 referendum is that its outcome has never been debated in parliament. The question, 'Shall we take the advice of 37% of the electorate to take an enormous, uncosted, unplanned and unpredictable step?' has never been debated and voted upon in our sovereign state body.

our hopelessly undemocratic first past the post electoral system lies at the rotten core of these arrangements. It disenfranchises the majority of voters, turning them off politics. It puts majorities into the House of Commons on minorities of the popular vote. It entrenches two-party politics, in which elections produce one-party government by turns - with the foregoing 'elective tyranny' resulting. It is a mess, and reform is urgently needed.

there is a huge clean-up operation required in our political and constitutional order, in addition to addressing the serious inequalities and injustices in our economy and society

We in the UK have skated on very thin political and constitutional ice for a long time; the wealth and prestige of empire, the nostalgic dream it left behind, the self-deceptions and illusions of those who could not see how good a future was developing for us as a leading nation in Europe, made us unaware of the danger. We have fallen through that ice, and the bitterly cold waters we now flounder in must at last wake us up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On both sides of the Atlantic Beowulfwas translated and adapted for children as a text that could instil in the young imperialist values, nationalist pride, racism, and a myth of heroic masculinity.

In Joseph Bernard Davis and John Truman’s Crania Britannicaof 1865, the size and shape of skulls and other skeletal features were used to liken the medieval Britons (especially the Welsh) to contemporary African and ‘Oriental’ peoples, all of whom were lacking in social and technological sophistication. The implication was that the historic colonisation of the Welsh provided just cause for the colonisation of other lands and peoples in the modern world

Given this history, it is impossible to claim, as do some, that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is free of racist meaning in the UK

The term cannot be separated from its racist past and the violence it helped to justify, nor from its racist implications today, nor from the violence committed by those who in their academic defence of the term incite attacks on their colleagues. The petition signed by a group of (largely) UK academics arguing for retention of an (arguably) historically precise and critically aware use of the term is now circulating amongst white supremacists as an academic endorsement of their views.

another proof, as if we needed one, of the toxicity of so much of contemporary academic culture especiallyin the UK

I find hope in the convivial and subversive interventions of those students and scholars who are fighting for a more just, inclusive, and egalitarian medieval studies

Freedom was always contextual – never an absolute. That is the most striking discovery, really, that people defined freedom based on fairly specific local requirements.

For the Pan-African movements of the early 20th century,

the age of empire was not, in fact, all that long ago, despite public perception that it sits in the hoary past. Given that the end of formal colonisation for the most part wasn’t until the 1980s, we do actually live with the empire much closer to our present than we often assume.

I’ve never thought Britain’s radical traditions are anything but remarkable and inspiring, despite some of their occasional myopia around race, gender or sexuality. It also became clear to me while researching this book that while Britain’s liberal traditions are a mixed bag, some liberals were radicalised by witnessing or learning from anti-colonial struggle and became important allies. Learning how to make these alliances without necessarily gliding over differences was a task they had to undertake and that faces us as well today.

There’s this facile idea that “back in the day” people didn’t really have problems with, say, slavery or dispossession or massacres. That is simply untrue. It is an enormous retrospective condescension on our part. People both in and outside Britain challenged what they saw at the very moment as ethically dubious and politically suspect.

Colonialism’s damage was not restricted to the famines or the dispossession. It worked happily with native tyrants and indigenous structures of oppression in order to consolidate itself. When it left, it not only continued to work profitably with post-colonial elites but also left behind strong colonial states with repressive legislation put in place precisely to deal with dissent.

I also understand now that peaceful resistance is going to be very difficult. Because what is being marshalled against dissidents – that’s true in the US and also Britain – is immensely violent. You see that already in terms of how certain sections of Extinction Rebellion have been treated – criminalised, seen as extremists

The point is to start where you are, but build alliances and links internationally. That was the ultimate lesson of anti-colonial struggle.

power concedes nothing without a struggle.

IR scholars ought to do more to study the experiences of indigenous peoples because they can help to better understand international political phenomena

In the U.S., for example, the War Department was home to the Bureau of Indian Affairs until 1849, treaty-making with Native nations persisted until 1871, the “Indian Wars” lasted until at least 1890, and Native peoples as a class did not receive citizenship rights until 1924. Relations such as these surely offer much to explore for IR scholars.

Indigenous experiences are just as varied as those of other groups and can complement or contrast with existing theories related to the concepts and debates that are central to IR.

bringing indigenous experiences into IR means bringing indigenous people into one’s research through, for example, interviews with current tribe members or through more specifically indigenous methods.

From state formation to civil-military relations and from environmental politics to genocide studies, there is much work from outside of IR that could fruitfully inform our teaching just as much as our scholarship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the “dollars obligated,” or funds, the government awards company by company

In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.

Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012

From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars

where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million

From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.

not only are the green energy and education areas vital to the future of the country, they are also genuine job-creating machines. Yet, the government gives more taxpayer dollars to the defense industry than all these other government functions combined.

“the aerospace and defense (A&D) sector scored record revenues and profits in 2018” with an “operating profit of $81 billion, surpassing the previous record set in 2017.” According to the report, Pentagon contractors were at the forefront of these profit gains. For example, Lockheed’s profit improvement was $590 million, followed closely by General Dynamics at $562 million. As employment shrank, CEO salaries at some of these firms only grew. In addition to compensation for Lockheed’s CEO jumping from $4.2 million in 2012 to $5.6 million in 2018, compensation for the CEO of General Dynamics increased from $6.9 million in 2012 to a whopping $20.7 million in 2018.

weapons-making outfits spend more than $100 million on lobbying yearly, donate tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress every election season, and give millions to think tanks annually

research has repeatedly shown that, even with this supposed “multiplier effect,” defense spending produces fewer jobs than just about anything else the government puts our money into. In fact, it’s about 50% less effective at creating jobs than if taxpayers were simply allowed to keep their money and use it as they wished

As Brown University’s Costs of War project has reported, “$1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education, 16,800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in health care.”

In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll

Reports from the industry’s own trade association show that it has been shedding jobs. According to an Aerospace Industries Association analysis, it supported approximately 300,000 fewer jobs in 2018 than it had reported supporting just three years earlier

add to their army of lobbyists, their treasure trove of campaign contributions, and those think tanks on the take, the famed revolving door that sends retired government officials into the world of the weapons makers and those working for them to Washington

since 2008, as the Project On Government Oversight’s Mandy Smithberger found, “at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers shifted into the private sector to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors.”