Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
Couple of little nuggets I left out because I'm trying to be concise (ha), but they're so interesting:
The BEIC was able to unload tea in the American colonies because the English parliament, rather than let the company fail, bailed it out. Part of the bailout conditions were that they got a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. Same as it ever was, eh?
BEIC agents who wrote letters and contacted the media (such as it was) to spread the word, and the outrage, about the completely unnecessary famine, were possibly the world's first whistleblowers.
Today in Labor History December 10, 1861: Nguyễn Trung Trực, along with his militia, sunk the French lorcha L'Esperance. Nguyễn Trung Trực was a fisherman who organized and led a guerilla rebellion against French colonial forces in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam in the 1860s. They used snipers to assassinate isolated French soldiers and chased French soldiers around the countryside, attacking military installations that were left undefended. Their intimate knowledge of the territory and their skill in hit-and-run tactics allowed them to inflict substantial casualties on the European troops.
"Museums, Heritage, Culture: Into the Conflict Zone" by Kavita Singh (2015).
"But think for a moment of the history of museums. Think of the way their collections have been built, and the purposes they have served. Think of the violent encounters that often lay behind the collecting of curiosities in the age of exploration; or think of the museums built by missionaries to display pagan gods wrenched away from natives. Think of the vast collections built (and the ways these were built) during the age of colonialism, with entire monuments transported across the seas and re-erected in museum galleries. Think of the nations transformed by revolutions, where treasures were violently wrested away from the church and presented as desacralized avatars in museums".
🗣 We have an open call for communications for the workshop "The gains of their sorrow: Slavery, the slave trade, and the rise of capitalism in the other South", which seeks to open a debate on bridges connecting research focused on the Middle Passage and the one focused on mines, plantations, urban jobs, etc.
There are two forms of nuclear colonialism. The extraction of natural resources from traditional indigenous and colonized lands. And the colonialism of treating a place as empty, as "no place" where there is "no one" and there are no consequences for nuclear testing. Nuclear weapon states have always very intentionally "selected the irradiated." Read, Nuclear Bodies: The Global #Hibakusha.
Today in Labor History November 3, 1793: French playwright, journalist and feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists. Her writings on women's rights and abolitionism reached a large audience in many different countries. She was also an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality.
A unique coming-of-age story from the lost world of #ArabJews
Avi Shlaim was born in Baghdad and grew up in Israel. He is a Professor of International Relations at St Antony's College, Oxford. His previous books include the critically acclaimed The Iron Wall and he writes regularly for the Guardian, Middle East Eye and other outlets.
In July 1950, Avi Shlaim, only five, and his family were forced into exile, fleeing from their beloved Iraq into the new state of Israel. Now the rump of a once flourishing community of over 150,000, dating back 2,600 years, has dwindled to single figures.
For many, this tells the story of the timeless clash of the Arab and Jewish civilizations, the heroic mission of Zionism to rescue Eastern Jews from their backwards nations, and unceasing persecution as the fate and history of the Jewish people. Avi Shlaim tears up this script. His mother had many Muslim friends in Baghdad, but no Zionist ones.
The Iraqi Jewish community, once celebrated for its ancient heritage and rich culture, was sprayed with DDT upon arrival in #Israel. As anti-Semitism gathered pace in #Iraq, the Zionist underground may have inflamed it – deliberately.
This memoir celebrates the disappearing heritage of Arab-Jews – caught in the crossfire of secular ideologies.
In this introductory lecture “Memoirs, Memories & Personal Histories” at a #SOAS conference about the Jewish community of #Iraq, the two aspects come together.
He briefly touches on what he calls “cruel Zionism” — that is, Israel’s activities to co-opt and conscript Jews from around the world into a project they never wished to be part of, and the price paid by both Palestinians and Jews as a result.
Colonialism is an essential part of nuclear testing by Nuclear Weapon States (NWS), whether that test site is domestic or in the edges of empires.
Two NWS did not test even one weapon within their own national borders (UK & France). The 3 NATO nuke states tested all of their massive H-Bombs in the Pacific (empire).
Domestic sites are always located near minority ethnic or religious communities. China tested all its weapons in Uyghur territory.
Read my paper, "Nuclear Conquistadors: Military #Colonialism in Nuclear Test Site Selection during the Cold War," (updated version in my recent book, Nuclear Bodies).
@aufsmaulsuppe@historikertag@histodons no, unfortunately. There will be a report on the panel on Hsozkult later this year and we are trying to get our papers published in a historical journal (but that won't happen until late next year).
Mah juxtaposes the petrochemical industry’s destructive corporate worldviews with environmental justice struggles in the US, China, and Europe: multiscalar activism—a form of collective resistance that spans local, regional, national, and planetary sites and scales and addresses the interconnected issues of #EnvironmentalJustice, #climate, #pollution, health, extraction, land rights, workers’ rights, systemic #racism, and toxic #colonialism
I have not read this yet but looks like a LOT of resonance with #OilBeach. "Most large petrochemical facilities are located in coastal regions, near to ports, for access to shipping lines. Tightly enclosed behind security gates, they resemble cities with tall towers and giant cylindrical storage tanks. They flare and steam and crackle.
How do these petrochemical plants relate to the ports? How are they regulated? Who are
the main global corporate players? Who are the biggest polluters?"
If anyone for some reason is looking for a review essay assignment on #petroleum, #shipping, #capitalism, Mah's Petrochemical Planet would go well with Oil Beach and Negative Ecologies by David Bond.
Today in Labor History August 22, 1791: Encouraged by the French and American revolutions, Toussaint Louverture led over 100,000 Haitian slaves in a revolt against the French. They were ultimately successful, making Haiti the first black republic in the world. The US refused recognition of Haiti until 1865, as a result of pressure from Southern slaveholders. The French demanded $21 billion In today’s dollars) in reparations for the losses to the former slaveholders, in exchange for peace and recognition of Haiti as an independent nation. The debt was financed through French banks and the U.S. bank, Citibank. The Haitians finally paid it off in 1947. However, the huge interest payments for their independence debt, and the debt incurred through the corruption of the Duvalier dynasty, have made Haiti one of the poorest nations in the western hemisphere. Prior to independence, Haiti was the richest and most productive of all of Europe’s colonies.
The best book I’ve read on the Haitian Revolution is “The Black Jacobins,” by Trinidadian socialist C.L.R. James. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier explores the revolution in his novel, “The Kingdom of This World” (1949). You can read more about Toussaint Louverture and the slave uprising in Madison Smartt Bell’s trilogy called “All Souls' Rising” (1995) and Isabel Allende’s 2010 novel, “Island Beneath the Sea.”
@MikeDunnAuthor@bookstadon I like how you mention how the American Revolution and the French Revolution helped to drive to Hatian Revolutions, however much the former were weighed down by white supremacy.
Brilliant article by Alka Raman demonstrating that it was 'recognition of British spinners' lack of adequate spinning skills [that] motivated the move to mechanization, in order to match the quality of cotton products created & perfected over centuries by anonymous & highly skilled Indian artisans'
Yeah, exactly. It had nothing to do with skill but material availability. Cotton was a luxury item at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so of course, British home spinners would have no skill with cotton, but they were by no stretch of the imagination unskilled.
@b_sbarta@gkbhambra@histodons@sociology Ah, this probably also answers my question regarding automated fabrics allegedly being worse quality than the ones produced locally with more traditional methods. Thank you!