p. 17 It’s mindboggling to imagine how they caught, kept alive and trasported the sheer numbers of dangerous animals brought to Rome 2,000 years ago. Carl Hagenback, a German animal dealer in the 1880s, gives us an inkling in his memoir, Beasts and Men. His father, a Hamburg fishmonger, ran a menagerie of lions, cheetahs and monkeys as a sideline, so when 14-year-old Carl was asked if he wanted to be a fishmonger or an animal dealer, there was no contest. So began a lifelong career in the trade that coupled his love for big wild animals with their capture.

“Here’s how to catch a giraffe, antelope or ostrich, chase them on horseback until they are out of gas. To catch a zebra, hire up to 2,000 men to surround the herd, drive them to somewhere they cannot escape, like a dry river bed with cliff sides and then (sorry) whip them with long lashes until they are so exhausted they can be fettered and tied. Elephants and young hippos were caught in pitfalls. Baboons were trapped at waterholes, pinned to the ground with forked sticks, muzzled, bound, wrapped in cloth and carrued suspended from a pole by two men, so that each captive looked like “a great smoked sausage!” On one momentous occasion in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) a group of captured baboons brought down a herd of 3,000 silver-grey hamadryas baboons from the hills by the din of their screaming. The radars made short work of the cage, released their clan, and beat off their human captors by the sheer force of their numbers. Hurray! Thei manes erect, they fought baring their teeth, beating the ground with their hands as they came. In this epic battle an injured infant was seen being swept up “by a great male from the very midst of the enemy”. Alas, most captives were less fortunate. Long caravanserais crept across deserts sands in the cool of moonlight, the shadows of giraffes or elephants walking in harness with drivers at their side. Hagenbeck reports wild baboons running beside the cages of their captive breathren, screaming to each other in an “ear-splitting chorus”. Lions and panthers were pulled by camels, other creatures were strapped to palisades and carried aloft. The six-week journey from Athara to Port Sudan required huge entourages of water carriers and shephers driving sheep and goats to provide fresh milk for the young animals or fresh meat for the carnivores. From the Red Sea to Suez, then by train to Alexandria, to catch a ship to Trieste, Genoa or Marseille, for the train to Hamburg. An unimaginable three-month journey. Those who didn’t make it fed those who did.”

p. 41 “On the Greek island of Lesbos, wading in the warm rock pools of the Pyrrha lagoon, a man is transfixed by the different crabs, sea anenomes, tiny fish, starfish and the vast assortment of life. His mind is not constrained by one god rustling up creatures in a matter of days. It’s 350 BCE…. Aristotle is free, robe slung over shoulder, to ponder and to observe. He collects specimens, cuts them open, inspects their anatomy. … Aristotle orders the animal world into a hierarchy, his Scala Naturae, a narrowing ladder that clims, getting warmer (and better) all the way up to Man. (Man indeed, ascribing them as hotter than women, and so the most perfect of all animals.) .. Aristotle belieced that everything in nature had a purpose. That while the perfect structure of each species lent the greatest advantage to itself, nature had made all things to benefit the next rung up the ladder, to lead inexporably (and purposefully) to us. To see the natural world as an ascending progression from the lower to higher orders became known as the Great Chain of Being. It is an outlook that persists deep in the human psyche and directs our attitudes (and language- spineless, bloodless) towards animals.”

p. 51 In 1637, an age beginning to tick-tock with the new mechanical marvels, the renowned French philosopher and scientists Rene Descartes dismissed animal behaviour as no different from the workings of a clock. Animals were complex automata, so if they yeled when you kicked them it was because of a conditioned reflec. Animals had neither language, nor intelligence, nor feelings, nor reason. All mental activity was located in the mind, which was located in the incorporeal soul – which animals did not have. Animals acted purely out of instinct; they could not fully express pain or pleasure or know anything. What a convenience. It was Descartes’ followers who nailed live dogs to t he dissection table and heard their howls as the screeching of gears. In 1674, ardent disciple Nicolas Malebranche … worte ecstatically “They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

p. 59 “Until recently Humboldt (1769-1859) had been ‘the great lost scientist’. The revolutionary idea that shaped his understanding of the natural world was the realisation he reached on his expeditions that everyting seemed somehow connected. And what journeys. In 1800 he and fellow explorer Aime Bonpland arrived at the vast South American tropical grassland plains of the Llanos, south of Caracas. Humboldt was struck by how much life gatehred around the tall, solitary Mauritia palms – birds fed on their fruit and their fanned fronds shaded the wind-blown soil that collcted around their trunks, keeping in moisture to provide perfect conditions for insects and worms. Each tree greated a community of life. Humboldt began to see nature as a dynamic living organism, and with that he was more than 100 years before his time. As they were paddled down the ‘Oroonoko’ hundreds and hundreds of large crocodiles lined their route, so numerous they were never out of view. Grazing along the banks were huge herds of capybaras, enormous guineapig-like rodents… escpaing the crocodiles, were as likely to run headlong into a jaguar’s jaws…. Humboldt rehected the man-centre conception of Nature of his predecessors. What he also observed was that rather than improviong nature, man’s interference most usually upset the natural nalance. The indigenous tribe showed him how Spanish monks took all the turtle eggs they could find from the riverbanks for oil to light their makeshift churchs in their remote missions, and how turtle numbers had fallen in consequence.”

p.62 Darwin 1836 “A book published anonymously that year would jog him along. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation rocked Victorian Britain by suggesting man was descended from the lower orders. The thory went that the Divine Maker had designed nature in his ‘terraqueous theatre” to progress, so that primitive life arose out of a vague electro-chemical process to develop gradually, from fish to repitle to mammal and upwards to man… Couched in pious tone, Vestiges remained respectful to God, if not to Genesis. The mystery author was rumoured to be Prince Albert, while men of the establishment suspected a female hand behind it for the guile and ‘hasty jumping to concluions’. It became an international bestseller. (In 1884, the author was revealed to be Robert Chambers, of the Chambers’ Encyclopedia family, 12 years after his death.) The buzz made its way into Benjamin Dsraeli’s 1847 novel Tracred, when Lady Constance explains how everything is proved by geology: “First there was nothing, then there was something; then – I forget the next- I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came – let me see – did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last .. Ah! that’s it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows”.

p. 64 In 9th-century Baghdad, the prolific Muslim polymath known as Al-Jahiz (CE 776-868) wrote books on many subjects: The Book of Misers about greed; The Art of Keeping One’s Mouth Shut; Against Civil Servants… His Book of Animals ran to seven volumers… his death at his home in Basra at the grand age of 93 was report as the consequence of being crushed by a toppling pile of books in his library. But this is what he wrote: “Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms the develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species, Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring.”

p. 75 “The German biologist Jakob don Uexkull (1894-1944) tried to imagine the world of an eyeless tick. waiying on a stem of grass for the whiff of butyric acid from the mammalian sevaceous follicles of a potential hairy host. A wait that could be as long as 28 years, until she leaps onto a passing meal of warm blood, embeds herself up to her neck (if she had one), gorges, then lays her eggs and dies. Uexkull believed any organism that reacted to sensory data should be judged a living subject and considered in terms of their sensory world. To describe an animal’s unique sensory surrounding world he used the term Umwelt. .. In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel concluded that a human cannot knwo what it is like to be a bat. His point being that a human imaghining being a bat was not a bat being a bat. Without echolocation, wings or fabulous ears, being unable to hang by our feet, without sleeping upsiode down or catching moths, we were on a losing wicket…. as the primatologist Frans de Waal points out, Nagel could not have reflected on what it felt like to be a bat at all had not an American zoologist named Donald Griffin, in 1940, tried to imagine how it was to be a bat, and so made the astonishing discovery of echolocation.

p. 94 In 2012 a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, which stated that all mammals, birds and many other creatures, octopiuses included, are conscious beings with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviour. The extraordinary thing is that it took so long. More extraordinary still, perhaps, is that it needed to be stated at all … the onus has been on providing incontrovertible proof, and until then we had to remain agnostic. Behaviourists also tended to ignore the golden rule of experimental science that absence of proof is not proof of absence. Antonio Damasio argues that reason actually requires emotion and feeling to guide behaviour and decisionmaking. yet we must still run the gauntlet with cautionary science if we want to talk about animal emotions.Pigs can ce stressed, their corticosteroid levels might rise, but they cannot be unhappy.”

p. 69 “Chuang Tzu and Hun Tzu had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed: “See how the minnows are darting about! That is the pleasure of fishes.”

“You not being a fish yourself,” said Hun Tzu, how can you possibly know what comsists the pleasure of fishes?”

“And you not being I,” retorted Chuand Tzu, “how can you know that I do not know?” Chuang Tzu on “The Pleasures of Fishes”

p. 98 Let the animals speak for themselves. “A chimpanzee walks down a track with her two young. The mother chimpanzee stops and looks back at her son lagging behind. Cat Hobaiter, a scientists studying chimpanzee body-language gestures in wild populations in Uganda, stops the video … ‘Right there,” Hobaiter says, pointing to where the mother is showing the heel of her foot and giving it a little widdle. This foot gesture is not very obvious (to us) but once Hobaiter had seen it a few times she worked out what it meant: Hop aboard. Each time the mother stopped and waggled her heel, the infant jumped on board.

Green herons lure fish into their range by dropping berries, twigs, feathers or crumbs of bait.

Archerfish knock insects from overhanding leaves and brancjes by firing jets of water up at them.

Burrowing owls collect mammal dung to attract dung beetles.

Caledonian crowds carry their favourite handy tools with them

p. 99 Kelly the dolphin learnt that whatever the size of the rubbish she collected from her pool at the end of the day she was rewarded… Kelly began to find lots and lots of small pieces of paper, for which she was rewarded with lots of fish. When the pool was drained for maintenance, a stash of paper was found under a rock. Kelly had her future fish supply banked by multiplying her harvest then rationing the humans with torn bits. But Kelly was about to hit the big time. One day a gull flew into her pool; she presented the drowned feathered prize to her trainer, who have her several fish. So Kelly saved some of the fish under her rock and used them to lure other gulls into the pool to ctach and get more fish. This involved planning and delayed gratification. She then taught her calf, who taught other calves, and gull-baiting in Mississippi’s Marine Life aquarium caught on.”

p. 238 Even moth parasites control their populations to protect the habitats they rely on. Dicrocheles mites live in the ears of noctuid moths. Although their occupation means breaking therough the tympanic membrance, which results in defeaning the moth’s ear, they will never migrate to the other ear. That would not do for a moth who needs to detect the echolcation calls of hunting bats … the mites send scouts across to the clear ear to lead any stray wayfarers back home.”

p. 4 On 15 July 1099, after gruelling years of war and marching across Europe and Anatolia, the crusaders took Jerusalem. The result of this success was that, for nearly 200 years, |Western European occupited Outremer. They created Christian states there, built fortresses that still dominate the landscae today, and for 88 years, held Jerusalem itself as a Christian capital. The deeds of men in Outremer in this period are a hyperactive field of study, yet the study of the deeds of the women is comparatively dormant. Women plated a key role in both the crusades themselves and the governance of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. When armies mached east from Europe, women marched with them. Men who could afford to often hrought their families and poorer women also travelled with the army. These women prepared meals, washed clothes, nursed the wounded, collected firewood and were the lovers of the soldiers. On rare occasions they even sallied onto the battlefield either to bring water to the men or to fight themselves. In the established territories of Outremer noblewomen organised the logistics of sieges and negotiated with the enemy and the women of the lower classes toiled with the men to undermine fortifications. They endured unimaginable hardships, died alongside the men and also fell victim to rape, imprisonment and slavery. Thousands of European women found themselves traded in the slave markets of Aleppo and Damascus during the 12th century. When the male rulers of Outremer overplayed their hands and found themselves rotting in enemy dungeons, they were ransomed by their wives.”

p. 52 Given Alice’s position as the mother of the heir of Antioch and the possessor of such important lands, she was too valuable a commodity to be allowed to remain single. According to the laws of the land, she should have been given a choice between three suitors but she would have nad no say in who those options were and would have been forced to marry one of them very quickly..If she was to reject Jerusalem’s suzerainty, then all of a sudden she was the highest status noble in the Principality. With her father and his armies far away in Jerusalem, the chance was Alice’s to seize Antioch and claim control of her own life. Thus, in an act of open rebellion against Jerusalem and her father’s authority, she assumed the regency of Antioch and proclaimed herself in control of the city. While it was not particularly shocking for rulers of one area to reject the suzerainty of another, it was shocking indeed for a daughter to reject the authority of her father, as this challenged the partriarchal fabric of society and transgressed established gender roles and the Christian doctrine of deference to parents”

p. 111 It is unclear how long Melisende’s renovations of the Holy Sepulchre and the surrounding area of the city took, but testimony of the Muslim geographer Muhammed al-Idrisi in 1154 demonstrates that the Holy Sepulchre’s bell tower at least was finished by this point.. This indicates that the bulk of the construction was carried out during the period of Melisende’s primact in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Given her other demonstrated interest in ecclestiastical patronage, it is certain that she plated a large part in arranging and commissioning this renovation, in cooperation with the Patriarch of Jerusalem.. Eminen t crusades historian Hans Eberhard Mayer has suggested further that Melisende’s support of the renovation went further than a display of her personal piety and patronage, but rather was a bid to consolidate her political position by winning the support of the church as her son grew older. The importance of this would be demonstrated in the coming years. A storm was brewing that would fracture the relationship between mother and son.

Melisend had a strained relationship with her eldest son. She favoured her second child Amalhric, who remained her staunch supporter all of his life. Melisende much have always regarded Baldwin III with unease. Given the laws of succession, he was always going to be the one to supplant her, and she much have lived with the fear that he too might try to exclude her from rule, just as Fulk had tried to. .. he was an annoited co-ruler, and queenship was less secure than kingship.”

p. 154 “For all the reams writen about Eleanor of (Aqutaine) she is also one of the most mysterious women of the medival period. Even before her death, she was written into the narrative of medieval romance… The talk of her infidelity proved fertile fodder for the rumour mill, and soon stories were circulating in literature and by word of mouth that, beyond having an affair with her uncle, Eleanor had attempted to elope with Saladdin himself, and that she had been reclaimed by her husband with one foot on a Saracen ship, preparing to sail off into the sunset. It is worth noting that at the time of Eleanor’s journey to the Holy Land, Saladin was not yet 12 years old.”

p. 217 “A compromise was brokered whereby the barons made Sibylla an offer … the trone of the Kingdom of Jerusalem on the condition that she consented to divorce Guy. Sibylla countered this with the conditions that her daughters remained leitimate, that Guy kept his lands as a nobleman of the Kingdom, and that she be allowed to choose her next husband from among the nobility of the region. This was duly agreed, the consensus being that no one else could be as incompetent a king as Guy, and preparations began for Sigylla’s coronation. … perhaps the most dramatically charged episode in the history of the Queens of Jerusalem. T… once the sacred oil had touched Sibylla and the crown had been settled on her brow, she was invincible in her court and had absolute authority… the first time a woman would be crowned in her own right without a husband alongside her. Melisende had been crowned for her blood right, but jointly with two men, her husband and son. Other queens had been crowned as consorts with their husbands, but here Sibylla was setting a precedent with an unmarried female monarch with the power to choose her own consort. Her first deed as monarch was an act of daring brilliance …Sibylla stood. She ‘invoked the Grace of the Holy Spirit’… She declared ‘I, Sibylla, choose for myself as King and as my husband Guy of Lusignan, the man who has been my husband… Sibylla had been very crafty indeed.. she had artfully constructed a loophole and at her coronation darted through it triumphantly.”

p. 44 With the air of one opening an important conversational topic, Halima’s husband asks: ‘Tell us, what are orfinary people in the West saying about our lives?”

At this time, in spring 2001, people are saying nothing whatsoever about Afghanistan. They’ve barely even heard of Kabul… Now sitting here in the gloom, feeling rather than seeing this family’s expectant faces – I cannot bear to tell them any of this. So I take a coward’s way out. I quote them lines of the poet Sa’adi of Shiraz:

The people of the world are limbs from one body, sharing one essence,

When a single limb is oppressed, all the others suffer agony.”

To the family, this concept is so familiar it is self-evident. They wait for me to make my point, because they already assume people in the West believe oppression in the world concerns us all. But they are wrong; they have been abandoned.”

p. 135 “A hawk beloning to a king flew away and landed at the house of an old woman. She had never seen a hawk before, and she decided to look after it. She trimmed the hawk’s curved beak into a straight line, cut off its crest and clipped its claws. “There,” she said, when she had finished. “Now you look much more like a pigeon” Masnavi, Jalaluddin Rumi

p. 153 Rumi’s father and his young son fled their hometown of Balkh in northern Afghanistan and joined the tide of starving civilian refugees being pushed before the invaders. [Mongols]. They took refuge in Nishapur, in present-day Iran. But the Mongols were hot on their heels. Behind them the entire population of the city of Herat was massacred…. Six months earlier people had joked that you could not stretch out your leg in Herat without kicking a poet or a philosopher. … Rumi, who had lost his family, his home, his country, his future – and all hope of peace or stability during his lifetime – refused to be limited by the parameters of his collapsing world. “From the point of view of a man,” he says in his Discourses, “a thing may appear to be good or evil. But from the point of view of God, everything is good. Show me the good wherein no evil is contained, or the evil in which there is no good. Good and evil are indivisible.”… The world of the West was telling me there was a battle going on between good and evil. The Society bloc saw things the same way – it just reversed who was good and who was evil. But here, on the back of a buzkashi horse, was a view gleabed from the sowing and reaping of countless invasions: there are no absolutes in our fragmentary world; the divisions we create and believe in are artificial. Time itself is no straight line of ordered progress, but an endlessly repeayting cycle – throughout our lives and throughout history – from which we are at liberty to learn if we wish. The rest is a swirling mass, a primal force, a dustcloud of thindering feet and shouting voices, the thrill of the chase, the cutting down and the building up.”

p. 154 “Even our beloved national dish, pilau, is said to have originated on those wild rampages, when the troops of Genghis Khan laid out their round shields to catch the dripping from the carcasses they had pillaged, and threw in a little rice – a grain they had never seen until they came to Afghanistan – to mop it up.”

p. 54 “They soon settled into life in the diverse and prosperous Constantinople suburb of Pera where the embassy was based, across the Golden Horn from the main sites of the city … “My Grooms are Arabs,” she wrote about this diversity, “my footmen French, English and Hermans; my Nurse an Armenian; my Housemaids Russians; half a dozen other servants Greeks; my steward an Italian; my Janizary’s Turks”.

p. 71 “Mary occupied a unique position. She was always convinced that the Turkish method of engrafting, using only a tny quantity of smallpox matter, was best. She was the only person to say that a doctor was not necessary and that there was no need for purging or sweating either before or after treatment. In fact, she warned against ‘miserable gashes’ and the unnecessary weakening of patients. She rasped that it was in the doctors’ interests to medicalise the process and opposed this… the first wave of parents who had their children inoculated all teneded to be aristocratic and to have had a personal acquaintance with her. She was probably responsible for their various inoculations. THe upper classes also wanted to ensure that their servants were free of smallpox, so Mary probably inoculated them as well. The Fielding family, the children of her counsin the playwright Fenty Fielding, were all inoculated, for instance, probably by Mary herself. Later in life several of these inoculated children, such as Wilhelmina Tichborne, were to become her friends as adults.”

p. 79 “She would have known Mary Astell before the Turkish trip and had read Astell’s work when she was a teenager, but not something altogether closer developed between the two women. Mary Astell was 23 years older than her young friend, a mother figure for her. The two lived very differently. Mary Astell never married, kept no carriage and lived simply in the relatively undesirable neighbourhood of Chelsea. Her income was a mere £85 to £90 a year (about £14,000 today)… the original bluestocking, Mary Astell elieved that women should create societies of their own, away from emn. She was critical of Mary’s various flirtatious relationships, but she made it clear when it came to writing that she saw Lady Mary as her anointed successor. On four separate occasions she used the image of laying laurels at her young protegee’s feat. Lady Mary’s Embassy Letters were her idea. She was involved in the editing and rewriting that went on and she even contributed a Foreword.”

p. 97 “At some time before 1732, Mary wrote a confidently argued essay in French entitled Sur la Maxime de Mr de Rochefoucault, in priase of marriage. She argued in favour of the institution that ‘ it is married love only which can be delightful to a good mind’. It was to become the piece of writing for which she most renowned during her lifetime. .. Marriage might be a convenient institution, Rochefoucault argued, but marriages were “never delightful”. Mary respectfully disagreed. Lasting happiness could only be found if husband and wife became friends, she explained to her readers. A long marriage was 2a life infinitely .. more elegant and more pleasurable, than the best conducted and most happy gallantry.” Passion was danergous and dark, something best avoided.”

p. 139 “In April 1736, the 47-year-old Lady Mart met the 24-year-old Francesco Algarotti and the meeting changed her life forever. With two weeks of being presented to the young, cultured Italian she was madly, hopelessly in love with him.”

p. 60- “Ernest Jones and Chartism became synonymous in the mid-1850s.”… long taken an interest in Indian affairs, writing stinging polemics in the People’s Paper about the management of the East India Company in 1853, when its charter came up for renewal before parliament. In these, he had described a ‘mighty and magnifient country’ turned into ‘a nest for the most profligate nepotism’ by the greed of a ‘race of harpies’. .. When by August it had become clear that what was unfolding in India was indeed a large-scale uprising, Jones… set himself to deciphering the text of the rebellion against the grain of the interpretation provided by The Times and the other organs on the side of the East India company. He found … evidence of a will to resist, an insurgent consciousness exhibiting an ‘internal drive’ to transform historical circumstances.. He went on openly to attack The Times – the ‘dishonest’ and ‘unprincipled’ organ of the ‘Leadenhall Moneymongers’ for parroting the line that events in India constituted a military mutiny rather than a national insurrection. It was clear to him that the ‘independence’ of India had to be recognised… Once the full scale of the bloody uprising became clear however, Jones would read events more in terms of their own implications – clearly enthused, even surprised, by what seemed to be an even more powerful revellion than he claimed to have anticipated. … reform was not too little, too late, since the claims of the insurgents themselves had to be central”.

p65 Jones “If they massacre us, we taught them how.”

p. 88 Morant Bay 1865 “The ‘Jamaica affair’ was one of the few Victorian crises of empire in which there is a record expressed British working class cympathies for victims of violent colonial repression… not invoked simply out of generosity or a colour-blind egalitarianism, but in response to a self-assertion which made claims upon workinhg-class solidarity. We know, for cintance, that in earlty September 1866, by which time the Royal Commission had reported back very fully on events leading up to the rebellion, Eyre was burned in effigy on Clerkenwell Green. Funerary decorations used in some condemnatory working class protect meetings hailed Gordon’s death as that of a martyr… Dickens complaining in a letter to a friend: “So we are badgered about New Zealanders, and Hottentots, as if they were idenitical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell, and were to be bound by pen and ink accordingly”.

p. 94 In her influential work on the Eyre controversy, Catherine Hall has suggested that slave emancipation itself provoked a hardening in the typologies of racial difference … it “raised the spectre of black peoples as free and equal”… of what the Spectator magazine correctly described as “the demand of negroes for equal consideration with Irishmen, SCotchmen, and Englishmen”… shapes the ideological fault line that became visible in its wake. .. The presence of colonies, writes Linda COlley, made inescapable the question of whether colonial subjects, ‘those millions of men and women who were manifestly not British but had been brought under British rule by armed force.. have any claim on those vague but caluable freedoms so many Britons considered to be peculiarly their own”.

p. 107″For the white properties class of Jamaica and their supporters in Britain, the perceived refusal of freed blacks and their descendants to submit to the regimes of plnatation labour in favour of tilling their own blocks of land threw their self-serving idea of ‘freedom’ into crisis. The liberty of black Jamaicans to sell or withhold their labour power as they pleased was as much an economic problem as a political one.

p. 121 in the Bee-Hive, a regular columnist “Plain Dealer”

“Plain Dealer warns against allowing sympathy and solidariy to emerge solely on race lines. “Those of our countrymen who, in any dispute between white and black, confine their fellow-feeling to that side where they find complexions like their own, are not to be trusted, let them protest ever so loudly their devotion to the cause of public freedom and to the interests of their community.”… Real freedom is necessarily universal, so that its violation in one place constitutes its violation in another. “Most certainly the only way to preserve the liberties of our country is, to assert and vindicate them wherever they are assailed and violated.”

p. 133 “Some historical scholarship has dismissed [Wilfrid] Blunt as an “anti-imperialist British gadfly’ even as many scholars of that period of Egypt’s history have drawn on his copious notes of what unfolded during the Urabi uprising. Yet no study of British anticolonialism can ignore this figure… Blunt’s criticism was frequently more radical and textured than that produced by Positivists, including Harrison, and that this was in no small part due to his regular contact with anticolonial figures from the Arab world… Blunt sought to provide an alternative voice to British establishment discoure on empire, and self-consciously construct a counter-history delineating “the truse condition of things”. This he opposed to what he called the “manipylation of the organs of public news in the interests of our diplomacy”, including the presence in Cairo and elsewhere of what we might today call “embedded journalists” – a fact he cautions future historians to bear in mind when consulting newspaper files in search of information.”

p. 141 “Urabi’s nationalism was focused on land rights and economic grievances rather than on exlcuding racial or religious outsides… the fellah leader exuded an open attitude to “humanity at large without distinction of race or creed”. It is really at this point that Blunt’s growing understanding that freedom from bondage could be thought of as a shared human aspiration rather than one unique to European thought appears to have crystallized into a clear insight.”

p. 145 “The Blunts returned to an England in the spring of 1882 where the political landscape had changed significantly and for the worse. The Liberals, now in power, had abandoned their “enthusiasm for Eastern nationalities and Eastern liberty” and were full of ideas of “imperial coercion” in relation, not least, to Ireland. Answering hostile parliamentary questions after the bombardment of Alexandria, Gladstone insisted that, without European intervention Urabi “would have become dictator of the country”… Blunt’s work was cut out for him: to undo the myth-making of imperial self-justification alongside the concomitant demonizing of Island and Muslims, itself a legacy of the 1857 uprising, which the British authorities blamed largely on Indian Muslims.”

p. 157 Positivist intellectual and writer Frederick Harrison. “If the colonial enterprise was indeed to be understood as one based on spreading liberal values, as Gladstone was claiming, how strange was it that “the Egyptians grew sulky at so much civilisation”? Perhaps the answer lay in more grossly material realms: “A native pays tax of 12% annual value on his house; the European lives tax free. The native fly-driver pays a heavy tax on his carriage; the European banker drives his pair tax free. Next, the civilisers having obliged the country with some 115 millions sterling at 7 and 10 per cent, obtained “concessions” for about 35 millions more. Then they kindly exempted themselves from taxation, were good enough to set up local courts in which they had the right to bring their civil and criminal affairs to a judge of their own nation. An army of European judges, and secretaries, and assessors, and barristers were called in at very liberal salaries, who kindly undertook to do the law for the Egyptian people.”

p. 177 “the Swadeshi movement in Begal threw up a decisive ideological fault line within the Congress, signalling the first turn to radicalizing and consolidating anti-colonial resistance in the Indian subcontinent. The bitterly opposed Partition of Bengal in 1905, aimed at diffusing growing militancy in the region, resulted instead in the emergence of the figure of the ‘Extremist’, whose militant agitational tactics were the counterfoil to the more traditional petitioning mode of those deemed “Moderate”… While the term self-emancipation” would not explicitly appear on the rhetorical horison of British anti-colonialism until the 1930s, the idea that the governed would claim the reins of governance for themselves – and not just wait for them to be offerred – would from this point on become an increasingly significant dimension of critizques of empire in Britain.”

p. 216 Shapurji Saklatvala “sought actively to force a language of opposition to empire that would at once undo the pretences and prevarications of gradulaist reformism and make clear that resistance to empire was in the interest of both the Indian and British working classes. Where Hardie, MacDonald and others who visited India during the Swadeshi years came back to make the case for reforms that might defuse the ‘unrest’, Saklatvala was arfguably the first MP to make a sustained case in parliament against reformism and ‘liberal’ approaches to colonial governance in themselves. … To the later dismay of the British Communist Party he was also committed to retaining something of his Parsi cultural and religious heritage. Described later by George Padmore as the “most independent-minded Communist ever”, during his parliamentary carrer Saklatvala … put in place an unbridgeable antagonism between empire and democracy, refused to accept that reforms or ‘trusteeship’ were possible in the context of political subjugation, identified the centrality of capitalism to the imperial project, and stressed the revolutionary agency of the oppressed out of which common ground would emerge”.

p. 272 League Against ImperialismGeorge Lansbury MP “no communist by a long shot… was vociferous in defending thwt he called the ‘spontenaity; of the gathering in Brussels against charges of following a Comintern line.. apostrophized the enormous diversity … the first [organisation] “specifically and without qualifications [to challenge] the right of the white races to dominate, control and exploit races which are described as backward.” The organisation’s constitutive repudiation of paternalism was clearly pivotal here – with a remarkable degree of self-reflexivity, Lansbury acknowledges that, even among socialists, the historical tendency had been to go along with the claim that ‘white men organise and control coloured people for the good of those controlled”.”

p. 284 “the London Manifesto made visible a fault line that would haunt metropolitan anticolonialism and debates on the left over the next decades. In the excevution of capitalist crime, where the project of empire was inextricable from the project of capital, could it be that white labour ‘is particeps criminis with white capital?.. how could and should white labour assess its role in the project of imperialism given thhe extent to which, both consciously and unconsciously, not least through its share of the vote in modern democracies, it had “been cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes”.

p. 297 Nancy Cunard “already something of a celebrity as a poet, writer, journalist, collector, artistic muse, music aficionado and publisher, Cuard had written to solicit a contribution for her anthology, Negro, originally titled Colour… wanted to curate a panoramic work that would at once function as a cultural history of African and Acrican-American life and as a forum for black liberation globally… rooted in Cunard’s friendships with black musicians, writers, artists, and photographers, and her sense that any resolution of the “Negro question” would require engagement with the histories and struggles of black peoples across the globe.”

p. 324 Mussolini’s invasion – “Emperor Haile Salassie (Ras Tafari), croowned only a few years elrier, in 1930, would take the fateful but hugely important decision not to follow the path of appeasement urged by Britain, but to lay his case before the League of Nations, stating categorically that, as the maps showed, Wal Wal lay well inside soverign Ethiopian territory. In doing so, he was boldly staking Ethopia’s claim to equality of status with soverign European nations and, equally significantly, challenging the league to show that its vaunted universal principles – collective security, peace and order – would be applied beyond Europe.His attempt to hold them to their stated universal commitments would fail signally, and that failure, which enabled Italy to invade his kingdom unchallenged, would reverberate across an outraged West Indies and Africa”

p. 385 “The war had afforded colonial governments the chance to further repress resistance and suspend civil liberties in the name of security. Censorship prevailed widely and interning agitators was commonplace. This included two Irish women who had come to Trinidad to help organise the labour movement there. Padmore’s tribue to Kathleen Donnellan, who died attempting to escape, and her comrade E. Cahill, was eloquent with anger…”I am sure West Indian workers will remember them with affection and gratitude long after the little Hitlers who now sit on their backs have been relegated to the dustbin of history.”

p. 389 “The Manchester Pan-African Congress… on 15 and 16 October 1945 … had about 200 delegates and several observers.. of historical significance for the case of characters it brought together, for the analyses and resolutions which emerged from it, and, not leasy, for apotheosizing the currents of black self-assertion and radical anticolonialism that had emerged so powerfully in the previous decade.”

p. 399 “The movement that came to be known as ‘Mau Mau’ was the culmination of many years of resistance by those dispossed of their lands and put to work on European farms. At the heart of their grievances – which also included low wages, racist passbooks known as kipande, and lack of electoral representation – was ‘land hunger’, large swathes of arable land coming under settler occupation while poor Kenyans, mainly Kikuyu, lived economically deprived lives in ‘Reserves’ or on tiny plots on settler land which they worked.. the roots of the uprising lay in the post-war intensification of fear and anxiety among ‘squatters’ – the misleadingly named communities of farm labour who worked settler plantations and faced intensidication of pressive measures to contain them – and the resistance they frequently put up to exploitative regimes of labour extraction.”

p. 405 “When Seretse Khama of Bechuanaland was infamously deposed from his chieftainship by a Labour government for the crime of marrying a white Englishwoman – for fear of offending South Africa, where ‘miscegenation’ was illegal – Brockway stood agains his own party’s ministers in support for Khama.” (Labour) “Brockway would also attempt strenuously to slough off his paternalist tendencies in order to become what he called a ‘world citizen’.”

p. 414 “A 16-year-old African boy is taken into custody as a suspected insurgent. The bext day his body is returned to his family; he had been shot “while trying to escape”. When his father tries to find a lawyer, he and his friends are also taken into detention. A young boy shins up a tree in terror; though not an insurgent, he is shot by the security forces, wounded he falls to the ground. A third young man is being made to ‘confess’ that he is Mau Mau. Tied up with his dead between his knees, dirt forced down his throat, he is left out in the cold night air and refused foor as he slowly slumps to death. These were a few of the shocking stories Daily Mirror readers encountered in the run-up to Christmas 1955, in a syndicated set of articles focusing on the Emergency in Kenya. They were authored by Labour MP Barbara Castle who, commissioned by the tabloid, had undertaken a ‘one-woman probe’ into allegations of widespread acuse by British forces in Kenya during the Emergency.”

p. 439 “Perham’s Reith Lectures were not precisely a defence of anticolonialism, they were certainly a stringently honest account of how it had shaped the present… Why, Perham asked, had the official world of Britain been so myopic, made such serious miscalculations on the basis that anything resembling African independence was a long way off? “perhaps the reason for this degree of blindness is that British people do not understand nationalism, do not recognise it, or at least its strength, in others.” This was not because Britain was immune to nationalism; on the contrary “the confidence arising from our former power, may have bred in us an unconscious kind of nationalism, one that seldom neeeded to assert or even know itself.”

p. 444 “As Christopher Hale has noted, though Malaya has long been used as an example of a thoughtful and #benign’ counterinsurgency on Britain’s record, unlike thos in Cyprus and Kenya, “The Emergency War in Malay as a nasty and brutal business,” involving, as it had in Kenya, subterfuge, illegality, collective punishment, forced resettlement and unjustifiable civilian bloodshed, which along with the lethal consequences of colonial divide and rule, manifests malign consequences even today: the paper trail itself may well only be partial.”

p. 447 “It has been the argument of this book that British public life and political discourse have been mired in a tenacious colonial mythology in which Britain – followed by the remainder of the geopolitical West – is the wellspring of ideas of freedom, either ‘bestowing’ it on claves and colonial subjects or ‘teaching’ them how to go about obtaining it. The assumption does not restrict itself to the undoubtedly copious body of writing on the idea of ‘liberty’ which is certainly a notable feature of British and American intellectual history; it extends… to the very impulses that drive human beings to make their own history, in circumstances not of their own choosing. It is this mythology which has enabled two successive 21st century Labour prime ministers to make historically dubious promouncements – in one case with lethal consequences:

The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over … We should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.

If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer.

To undo this myhology systematically, then, remains a project of the highest interllectural and political importance.. In Insurgent Empire, I have tried to show not only that insurgencies were frequent during British colonial rule, but that resistance to empire and the crises it generated shaped dissent around the imperial project within Britain. Put another way, the resistance of the periphery helped radicalize sections of the metropole. In the process, ideas of freeom that were not reducible to Obama’s ultimate “triumph of a system of free enterprise that unleashes the full potential of individual men and women” did make their claims heard, even if they were not always heeded… Tracking the lines of dissent and opposition within Britain and the ways in which these frequently emerged as part of a diaological and transational process is one way in which Britons today can both interrogate the seamless national mythologies they are routinely invited to consume. It enables Britons to lay claim to a different, more challenging history, and yet one that is more suited to a heterogeneous society which can draw on multiple historical and cultural resources.”

p. 454 “Rohes was of course far from being a lone imperial ideologue. But was he so very completely endorsed in his time and by his peers? Here is another distinguished classicist writing in his memoirs about his return to Oxford where he had studied and taught for a number of years: “I cannot say that I saw with pleasure my old University made a pedestal for the statue of such a man as Rhodes.” Goldwin Smith, who wrote this, was not a revolutionary, but he had been a member of the Jamaica Committee, which had sought unsuccessfully to bring Governor Eyre to book. By the end of the 19th century, even a few literary works which had begun to ask troubling questions about the imperial project and white supremacy more broadly were well know: Joseph Conrad’s very different novels Almayer’s Folly, set in Dutch South East Asia, and The HEart of Darness, set in the Belgian Congo, and Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, set in southern Africa. In the interwar period emerged Forster’s A Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days. Dissenters from the imperial status quo may not have carried the day, but they were no lone wolves either, as we have seen…. Fenner Brockway and the Movement for Colonial Freedom, for instance, became deeply involved with the ultimately successful battle to end apartheid in South Africa, to which boycotts on the part of an international community were essential. Brockway was also the initiator, working together with ethnic minority groups in Britain, of legislation to end racial discrimination in public places, successful only at the eighth attempt. In the face of disdainful dismissals and active silencing from various quarters of the establishment, it is these lines of resistance and geneaologies of dissent that must continue to give heart and hope to those who look togwards a more fully decolonized future for both Britain and the postcolonial world.”

p. 19 The Mississippi River’s drainage basic is the third largest in the world, exceeded in area only by the Amazon’s and the Congo’s. It stretches over more than 1.2 m suqare miles and encompasses 31 states and slices of two Canadian provinces. The basi is shaped a bit like a funnel, with its spout sticking into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Great Lakes’ drainage basin is also vast. It extends over 200,000 sqyare miles and contains 80% of North America’s fresh surface water supply… drains east into the Atlantic, by way of the St Lawrence River.
The two great basins abut each other, but thety are – or were – distinct aquatic worlds. These was no way for a fish (or a mollusc or a crustacean) to climb out ofone drainage system and into the other. When Chicago solved its sewage problem by digging the Sanitary and Ship Canal, a portal opened up, and the two aquatic realsm were connected. For most the 20th century, that wasn’t much of an issue, the canal, loaded with Chicago’s waste, was too toxic to serve as a viable route. With the passde of the Clean Water ACt and the work of groups like Friends of the Chicago River, conditions improved, and creates like the round goby began to slip through.

p. 106 It’s estimated that one out of every four creatures in the oceans spends at tleast part of its life on a reef. According to Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at Australian National University, were these structures to disappear, the seas would look a lot like they did in Precambrian times, more than 500 million years ago, before crustaceans had even evolved. “It will be slimy,” he has observed.

p. 120 “Cane toads are native to South America, Central America and the very southernmost top of Texas. In the mid-1800s, they were imported to the Caribbean. The idea was to enlist the toads in the battle against beetle grubs, which were plaguing the region’s cash crop – sugar cane. (Sugar cane, too, is an imported species,; it is native to New Guinea.).. in 1935, 102 toads were loaded onto a steamer in Honolulu. 101 of them survived the journey, and ended up at a research station in sugar-cane country, on Australia’s northeast coast. Within a year, they’d produced more than 1.5 million eggs. The resulting toadlets were intentionally released into the region’s rivers and ponds.
It’s doubtful that the toads ever did the sugar cane much good. Cane rubs perch too high off the ground for a boulder-sized amphibian to reach. This didn’t faze the toads. They found plenty else to eat…In the early phase of the iinvasion, the toads were advancing at a rate of about six miles a year. A few decades later, they were moving 12 miles a year. By the time they hit Middle Point, they’d sped up to 30 miles a year. When researchers measured the toads at the incasion front, they found out why. The toads on the front lines had significantly longer legs than the toads back in Queensland.”

p. 172 The first government report on global warming – though the phenomenon was not yet called “global warming” – was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical exmperiment,” it asserted. The result of burning fossil fuels would, almost certainly, be “significant changes in termperature,” which would, in turn, lead to other changes. “The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea levels by 400 feet,” the report noted. Even if the process took a thousand years to play out, the oceans would “rise about four feet every 10 years,” or “44 feet per century”.

p. 200 “Andy Parker is the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which works to expand the “global conversation” around geoengineering. His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”
But to imagine that ‘dimming the fucking sun’ could be less dangerous than not dimming it, you have to imagine not only that the technology will work according to plan but also that it will be deployed according to plan. And that’s a lot of imagining… scientists can only make recommendations; implementation is a political decision You might hope that uch a decision would be made equitably with respect to those alive today and to future generations, both human and non-human. But let’s just say the record here isn’t strong. (See, for example, climate change.)
Suppose that the world – or just a small group of assertive nations – launched a fleet of SAILs. And suppose that even as the SAILs are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a reurn to the climate of pre-industrial days or even to that of the Pleistocene or even that of the Eocene, when crocodiles based on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedneted world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.”