“All this to say, please please please don’t let Gaza be a one-off in terms of your opposition to the imperial machine. Keep your eyes fiercely trained on its actions after this is over, and help bring as much attention to its crimes as possible. If you’re not sure about a particular conflict that’s in the news there are many great resources available for helping you sort out fact from fiction with regard to the empire and its propaganda spin.
The empire didn’t just start getting crazy and evil with Gaza. It’s always doing things like this. It always lies about them. The mass media always help it lie. Gaza isn’t some aberration in its usual behavior, it’s just more obvious.”
The Making and Unmaking of a Presidency: Envisioning Empire in British Bencoolen, 1685–1825
“The effort to transform Sumatra into a productive constituent of a larger imperial nexus depended on many of the same processes that were to shape modern capitalism. Not only did British officials in Bencoolen deploy coerced and enslaved labor, they did so with the intent of wresting control of the production, consumption, and circulation of valuable commodities such as pepper and sugar. Practices of slavery, transplantation, and agrarian change typically associated with British colonies in the Atlantic world fundamentally shaped Bencoolen.”
Bains, T. (2024) ‘The Making and Unmaking of a Presidency: Envisioning Empire in British Bencoolen, 1685–1825’, Journal of British Studies, pp. 1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.142.
“Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.”
#Video length: eighteen minutes and thrity seconds.
“Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.”
#Video length: eighteen minutes and thrity seconds.
“Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.”
#Video length: eighteen minutes and thrity seconds.
🏆 Applications for the Amílcar Cabral Prize are open until 26 May.
The prize is intended to honour an article of historical research that deals with any topic or issue relating to the history of anti-colonial resistance and colonial empires.
"The ultimate goal, I suggest, was a translatio imperii; the establishment of an imperial monarchy in the west that could rival the Habsburg empire, and which in time, perhaps, might even come to imitate the universal glory of the Roman imperium. Not the American Atlantic seaboard, but rather the continent of Europe, with its arms, its learning, and its treasure, was the goal of Bacon’s early imperial vision."
#Image attribution: Yale Center for British Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_-_Sir_Francis_Bacon,_1st_Viscount_St_Alban_-_B1977.14.9772_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art.jpg