History

Colonised nations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Oceania suffered harms including genocide, loss of ancestral lands, cultural destruction, the impoverishment and dispossession of populations, and ongoing racial, economic and ecological disparities within and between nations, including the neocolonial order that followed postwar independence movements.

Every single damn nation, everywhere, has suffered those things. And?

Now bugger off.

Or are we supposed to ensure that the Bantu are driven back to the Cameroon Highlands and everywhere south of that returned to hte Khoi San?

As the resolution went ahead in New York, the British MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy presented a petition to the House of Commons, pushing for a state apology by the UK for its key role in slavery and colonialism of Africans.

“So many of the intersecting global challenges we now face are rooted in the legacies of enslavement and empire: from geopolitical instability to racism, inequality, underdevelopment and climate breakdown,” the petition read. “To truly confront these issues, we must acknowledge where they come from.”

This simply is not true. Just isn’t. Issa good grift, but other than that….

For four centuries, seven European nations including the UK enslaved and trafficked more than 15 million Africans across the Atlantic. The scale of the chattel slavery was such that 18th and 19th-century abolitionists coined the term “crime against humanity” to describe it. Historians have also linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation in the west.

“When it’s framed as a trade, it distorts the reality,” said Jasmine Mickens, a postgraduate student of history and government at Harvard University. “It was not a consensual joint business enterprise.”

But there’s the thing. Between those selling the slaves and those buying them it was indeed consensual. So even if ew accept eve a part of the claim it’s both sides that are guilty….

Ghana, which has been at the forefront of an effort

And that is rich in irony. The Ashanti – in Ghana – were the first buyers of slaves off the Portuguese. There was a wild price difference in gold between West Africa and Europe. Straight Ricardo – things will be the same price minus transport costs across geography. The costs of those camel trains across the Sahara were high. Therefore the price of gold in Ghana was low. Thus, if you sail around to collect it you profit.

But the Ashanti didn’t want to buy much the Portuguese had for sale. So, the Ps went a bit further along the coast – Lagos sort of area – and bought slaves, brought them back and sold them to the Ashanti as mining slaves. For gold. This all pre-Columbus.

If anyone’s guilty it includes Ghana…..

At the heart of this effort is a commitment to partnership. The process we envision is one of engagement, bringing together states, institutions, scholars and communities to explore constructive and forward-looking approaches to reparatory justice. These may include investments in education, health, cultural restoration and economic opportunity, designed to close enduring gaps and build shared prosperity.

Gimmie Money.

It’s time for the UN to formally recognise the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity

Fuck off.

The human point of view is presented mostly on an aural level, through the use of voiceover. Laid over Ascension’s unique landscape, conversations with geological experts muse on the relationship between humans and nature. Unfortunately, many of these discussions lean towards the philosophical and speculative, offering little historical and practical insight into the pitfalls of terraforming. None of the interviewees are from the global south, which is also problematic, considering the primarily imperialist impulse behind the desire to reshape and conquer this so-called uncharted territory.

Ascension Island was terra nullius when Europeans discovered it. So what the Global South has to do with it?

Last month, the African Union adopted a motion put forward by Ghana to label slavery and colonialism as crimes against humanity.

Issa mystery, eh?

This month, the motion will be tabled at the United Nations, with demands made for redress.

Oh, that’s why. Ho Hum.

The Crown’s Silence, a book by the historian Brooke Newman, follows the Guardian’s 2023 Cost of the crown report, which explored the British monarchy’s hidden ties to transatlantic slavery.

The book reveals that by 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its empire, the British crown had become the world’s largest buyer of enslaved people, buying 13,000 men for the army for £900,000.

Of course, we’ve the obvious difference between “The Crown” and “The Monarchy” to deal with here which an American doesn’t seem to get.

But there’s also this:

Prior to the abolition of the slave trade within the British Empire in 1807, there was much debate about the legal status of the West India Regiments’ soldiers, and whether they were subject to slave laws or not. But on discharge from the regiments the men were free and in some cases awarded pensions and other support.

In 1807, all serving black soldiers who had been recruited as slaves were freed under the Mutiny Act of that year. The act established that the black soldiers were freemen and should be treated like any other soldiers.

It’s probably more accurate to say they were “bought out of slavery” than that they were bought as slaves. Wonder if our American lassie has made that distinction…..

Still, we know what’s going to happen here. “Crown” “Monarch” slavery, soldiers, so pay reparations REEEEEE!

But today, they are facing a modern threat and a spectre of future Christmases that Mr Kuhmunen fears could spell the end of their cherished traditions: a new mine on their grazing lands.

The Swedish government and LKAB, the state-owned mining company, have announced plans for a rare earth minerals mine named Per Geijer which is set to cut off reindeer migration routes in the region.

I’ve had chats with people about that mine. It’s a real thing, a proper deposit.

But it’s this which interests:

The Sami, who are the only indigenous community in Europe

That seems an odd definition of indigenous. Presumably what is meant is the only people following a truly peasant, even pre-peasant, lifestyle. For there’s no other definition that really works that doesn’t also include, say, the Celts. Or the Faroese, Icelandics, both of whom are clearly the inhabitants of what was terra nullius before them. The Celts being the iron age folk who took over from the hunter-gatherers.

Anyone any ideas? What is this definition of indigenous that applies to Sami and not to others?

but also by a wider public in Germany, where interpretations of the GDR often differ.

Possibly even an understatement.

But Gill’s conviction raises questions about the ease with which western democracies can be infiltrated and influenced by hostile states. The prosecution estimates that Gill received around £40,000 over the period in question.

Duncan Hames, director of policy at Transparency International, said: “That Gill is the first UK politician to be charged under the Bribery Act marks a significant moment in our understanding of foreign interference threats. This prosecution underscores the very real danger that hostile states and their proxies pose to our democratic processes, and the relatively small amounts of money it took to gain influence within our political system.”

Tom Driberg? The Morning Star subsidies? How far do we go?

But here’s my warning to Silicon Valley: you’re awakening a dragon. Public anger is stirring, and I believe it could grow into a movement as fierce and unstoppable as the temperance crusade a century ago. The movement to ban phones in schools is just the beginning. Poll after poll finds that people across the west think that AI will worsen almost everything they care about, from our health and relationships to our jobs and democracies. By a three-to-one margin, people want more regulation.

History shows how this movement could be ignited by a small group of citizens, and how powerful it could become. Just as we had mass protests against the nuclear arms race, we may soon see mass resistance to the AI arms race. A century ago, temperance activists even managed to push a constitutional amendment through the US Congress to ban alcohol altogether.

Would work about as well as Prohibition did too.

‘S’ lovely when historians refuse to take lessons from history, ain’t it?

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Absolutely none of them are going to realise that this condemns every insurrection, every revolution, that leds to a civil war, to the execution of the losers. Mao, Castro, Lenin, they all fail this test, no?

A revanchist Catholic conservatism doesn’t appeal to me either but it does seem pretty weak tea as compared to varied of those communist revolutions, no?

This is significant, because openly and publicly telling the history of Francoism has been missing in Spain for far too long. More important than removing symbols is explaining them. Spain does not even have a museum of national history, and it lags behind Germany, Italy, Portugal and even younger democracies such as Slovenia, in confronting its past and putting it on display.

Politicians on the right are now resisting many of these efforts, with historical memory becoming yet another partisan issue. Even Spain’s transition to democracy, once idealised and long a source of pride, has come under question as political consensus has fractured.

Let’s remember by all means. But let’s remember it all.

The executions and the massacres were not, after all, just by the right now, were they?

Except, while there was an airlift of supplies, there was no Berlin blockade.

In the National Archives at Kew, I found documents from 1948 showing, in the Foreign Office’s words, “the blockade of Berlin is NOT a siege” and that “movement in and out of Germans is possible all the time”, for example to obtain food. A press campaign, however, pushed for “a massive and sensational story of air power applied to humanitarian ends”. The US secretary of state, George C Marshall, argued via telegram to “utilize to the utmost present propaganda advantage our position”, “stressing [Soviet] responsibility for … threatened starvation of civilian population”. The story was so effective, it became a cold war myth that stuck. In the UK, teenagers still learn for their GCSEs that Berlin was blockaded by Stalin and risked starvation.

Blockades and sieges are different things. As is allowing the movement of population but not of coal/food.

Yes, yes, I know he’s a noted historian and I’m not. But I’d suggest that his findings are a little less revisionist than he’s saying they are.

In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, it stands out: a huge, collective endeavour based on voluntarism and cooperation, with an underlying vision that’s unapologetically utopian – to build “a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. It has weathered teething troubles (such as a “joke” edit that suggested a loyal aide to Robert F Kennedy was in fact involved in his and his brother’s assassinations) to become a place in which civility and neutrality are the guiding stars, and levels of accuracy match those of academic textbooks.

Wales’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is an attempt to distil the secrets of its success. They include things such as having a strong, clear, positive purpose (the slogan “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” is a surprisingly powerful reminder that keeps editors honest); assuming good faith and being courteous; refraining from taking sides and being radically transparent.

These past few years – since 2017 according to some – has seen a determined attepmpt to take over Wikipedia and trun it into an ideologically biased place.

Not because the particular left that are doing this are uniquely awful people but because any centre of power – and whoo, boy, isn’t a definer of the truth a centre of power – will be taken over by those who desire power. It’s inescapable. That’s why don’t have centres of power.

“There’s this misconception that there weren’t any Black soldiers at Waterloo,” said the museum’s art curator, Anna Lavelle. “That’s not the fault of the public – it’s not been in the historical discourse. And yet Thomas James is one of many.”

James’s story deserves to be celebrated and he should be better known, she said. “He was willing to get hurt and put his life at risk for other people in his regiment.”

James, an illiterate percussionist in the 18th Light Dragoons, was likely to have been born enslaved in Montserrat, the West Indies, in 1789. Little is known about his early life. By the time he enlisted in 1809, he had made his way to Sussex, where slavery had been abolished, and was describing himself as “a servant”.

Slavery was abolished in England in 1104. Well, mebbe 1138. Normans at least.

By the time of the transatlantic trade slavery simply did not exist in England. Not eve, really, because of the Nomran abolishment, but because there was no law that allowed a human to be considered property. Nothing in either statute or common law. So the ability for someone to be a slave simply wasn’t there.

When the Virginians started the real slavery down the generations thing – 1640s – given that they were starting from that same common law point they had to invent the concept and then enact it.

Today’s Ireland is experiencing significant ethnic and racial diversity for the first time in its history, and the country’s new look has undoubtedly made some Irish feel uncomfortable.

There have been a couple of attempts – the Normans, the Plantation – and it’s not wholly certain that either of them worked out wholly all that well.

In 1955, the American columnist William F Buckley Jr declared that a conservative is someone “who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’.” But today’s conservatives are not only trying to resist the advance of history, they are attempting to pull the train of history backwards and reopen the case on what constitutes a democratic society.

If we think that it went wrong somewhere then yes, we might well want to go back and repair the error. And?

Civil rights in the US and decolonisation in the UK weren’t just about race. Read the work of Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney or Fred Hampton and it is clear that these movements were driven by concerns for housing, healthcare, dignified work. If we want to defend the wins of the 20th century, we can’t let history be rewritten in the 21st.

Descsribing that drooling moron, Nkrumah, as a win doesn’t really work.

Dr Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire.

Apparently British universities are teaching Nkrumah positively, not as an exemplar to avoid. Sigh.

The Pope and the Like a Prayer star share a common ancestor who was born about six generations ago, making the pair ninth cousins.

OK, well, at ninth cousins we’re all related to much of an entire continent. But this:

The head of the Catholic Church had 17 African-American ancestors, according to the research, which revealed complex family connections to American slavery.

Eight of the Pope’s identified ancestors were slaveholders, with most of them being black.

Fun eh?

Police force accused of anti-white bias teaches officers about slavery

Given that everyone will already have spent 12 years in state schooling we’d hope they already know about slaverybut still. Teaching them seems fine.

Well, subject to that little test of what is it that they teach them?

An officer who participated in the course said in a promotional video that “one of the most surprising” parts of the training was “learning about Britain’s history, particularly with the slave trade and with western Africa”.

He said: “It was something that I have not learnt about through my education and now having some exposure to it, I’m really keen to learn more about it. But I do find it really surprising that we haven’t been taught about that, as it’s such a big part of the history of the UK.

“That in itself really highlights some of the issues that now exist between institutions like the police and lots of other institutions within the UK and our communities that we police, for instance, the black communities.”

Erm, are we recruiting our police from the spectacularly ill educated then?

Still, no doubt the West Africa Squadron makes an appearance. Right?

Inside the Texas supermax prison that could be coming to Britain

Will this be a business visit or it’s coming on holiday?