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Notes from Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

August 29, 2022 – 9:08 pm

p. 4 Given the importance that Caesar attributed to the Bruids, and their apparently centrality in Gaullish society, one would expect them to feature prominently in his long and detailed description of his conquest of the region; but they are completely invisible in it. Nor do they appear at all in his account of his two expeditions to Britain. They are only mentioned , in fact, in that self-contained survey section on native customs, which does not seem to have any relevance to his practical experiences in Gaul. That this is not simply an authorial policy on Caesar’s own part is strongly suggested by the fact that his history of the Gallic war was continued after his feath by another Roman politician, Aulus Hirtus, who also made no mention of Druids in his depiction of the action,

p. 5 Cicero “ commented that he had met a Gallic Druid, Divitiacus of the Aedui tribe. This man had claimed to Cicero to be learned in the ways of the natural world, and he made predictions, sometimes observing the flight of the birds and sometimes spontaneously,,, Caesar wrote quite a lot about him, because he was the most steadfast native ally of Rome. He never, however, called him a Druid; Diviacus is represented rather, as a leading Gallic politicians and spokesman for his tribe in an assembly of chiefs…. Sean Dunham has made this one prop of his argument that Caesar’s account of Druids as a special caste is misleading and that druides was in fact simply a Latinisation of the native term for the religious functions of chiefs and leading aristocrats of Gaul. Roman senators, after all, doubled as priests just as Diviciacus seems to have done.”

p. 9 “It was once suggested that Strabo was adding a little extra information to a medly of Caesar and Diodorus, and that Pomponius was just a rehasj of Caesar with a few imaginative flourishes. The last of these arguments may still stand, although it is also possible that Pomponius was quoting another authority or authorities, now completely lost. In the case of Diodorus and Strabo the situation has been made to seem simpler. Since the 1950s there’s been a widespread consensus that behind the description of Gaul given in both lies a single lost source: the work of a Greek philosopher from Syria, Posidonus, who visitred southeastern Gaul in the early first century BCE> It has also been proposed that Posidonius represents the earlier authority who Caesar might have been quoting for his set portrait of Gallic society. If this is the case, then pretty well all that is recorded of Druids before the Roman conquest disrupted their society and authority rests on the indirect testimony of one traveller.

Specialists of the period have therefore come to speak of a Posidonian tradition of Greek and Roman writing about the ancient Druids … were at once quite sophisticated thinks and scientists, with a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, and practitioners of large-scale human sacrifice by a variety of cruel means … suggested that Posidonius exaggerated the sophistication … by imposing Greek concepts of philosophy on it… accused him of acting as a propogandist by tainting the Gallic tribes with barbarism. Piggott noticed that the description of human sacrifice by shooting to death with arrows is off, because archery is not mentioned in any accounts of the warfare of the Gauls or related peoples.

p. 21 Suetonius and Loiny both stated that the Druids had been suppressed by imperial decree, but Pliny then proceeded to write as if they still existed, raining the possibility that only their political power and religious role had been destroyed. If that was the case, it would explain the remaining references to them in ancient texts, three of which appear in the series of potted biographies of Roman emperors known collectively as the Agustan History. In each of these a Gallic dryas or drydis, or a group of druidae, makes a prophecy to an emperor or future emperor that turns out to be perfectly accurate… the prophets concerned are clearly female. In one case she is the landlady from whom the emperor-to-be is rending a billet during his service in Gaul. These are the first and only appearances of female Druids, by name, in the whole of ancient literature. It is possible that they had always been present in Gallic society. It is possible that, with the annihilation of their religious and political role, the Druids as a whole were reduced to local healers, soothsayers and folk magicians, and came to include women as part of this loosening of their society identity. It is also possible that terms related to Druid were being applied by Roman authors who knew little of Gaul and the Gallic language, to kinds of magical practitioner very different from the original Druids.”

p. 48 “This is how an Iron Age Druid is fashioned: from selected parts of Greek, Roman, Irish or Welsh texts usually mixed with archaeological data. The process made to compose the result is more or less an arbitrary one, determined by the instincts, attitudes, context and loyalties of the person engaged in it. Virtually none of the ingredients employed have the status of solid material… The manner in which these ancient and medieval images of them have been put to use is therefore a perfect case study of the way in which the modern British have liked to think and feel: about humanity, nationhood, religion, morality and the cosmos.”

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Books Early modern history History

Notes from Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money

July 27, 2022 – 11:18 am

p. 55 “In 1237, the bankrupt Latin government of Constantinople mortgaged Christ’s crown of thorns to a syndicate of Venetian and Genoese merchants for a loan of 13,134 bezants, or iperiperi (coins of African gold)… The relic was despatched to Venice but was redeemed by that pious monarch Louis IX of France. On August 18, 1239, it was borne in triump through the streets of Paris, the King himself leading the procession , barefoot and in his shirt. To house the crown and other relics, St Louis built to famous chapel in Paris known as the Sainte-Chapelle at a cost of 20,000 marks.”

p. 58 End of feudalism “For Georg Simmel, the greatest German philosopher of money, writing in about 1900, that was the magic moment of human emancipation… “The lord of the manor who can demand a quantity of beer or poultry or honey thereby determines the activity of the latter in a certain direction. But the moment he imposes a merely amoney levy the peasant is free, in so far as he can decide whether to keep bees or cattle of anything else.”… Yet even within the world of money, the tenant is still liable to his lord if he fails in his money payments. Final liberation comes, Simmel believed, when all the payments in a foreseeable future are rolled into one payment, a process known as capitalisation… Those who cannot free themselves lose even the thgreadbare protection of feudal reciprocity. Eventually, in England for example, they may be evicted from the common land by a provcess known as enclosure.”

p. 127 The word millionaire, which is French, was invented in the open air in a little street near what’s now the Centre Beauborg in Paris known as the Rue Quincampoix or Quincenpoix in the autumn of 1719. That it was not admitted by the Academie Francaise until 1762 merely shows the caution of that body. It is the legacy to the language of the world of a moment when the world turned and of the master and instigator of that manouevre, M. Quincampoix himself, the Schotsman John Law of Lauriston.”

p. 131 “”In the memoires of the Duc de Saint-Simon we can see Law flattering the vain old thing much more clearly than Saint-Simon himself. Law finally captures the duke by financing the purchase for the French regalia of an Indian diamond “the size of a greengage” then being hawked around Europe at a price of two million livres. (It is now in the Louvre.” With the collapse of the System in May 1720 and the death of the Regent three years later, the rentiers that Law despised were restored. French finance fell into the hands of his business rivals and his reputation into those of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who disapproved of him. Law’s ideas languished until thtey were revived in the asignats and the mandats of the National Assembly; the enthusiasm of 1790 produced an excellent edition of Law’s writings… but the hyperinflation of the assignats had its reaction in Bonaparte, whose mind was closed to credit and, with his sanguinary conquests and pictereqsque titles was everything Law was not; he sold Louisiana to the Americanms for four cents an acre; an oceanic discount to the future earnings of the Mississippi basin.”

p. 138 At some point, he gains a partner, a certain Lady Catherine Knollys, who left her gusband for him. Of her surivivng portraits, that in Het groote Tafereek sgiws a cery handsome woman in a tricorn gat captioned with a corase riddle … “Je suis ni epouse, ni veuve,,, She bore Law two children, but they never married, even after her husband died: when the scandal became public at the fall of the System, the Refent cancelled the annuities Law had bought for her and the children and left her destitute.”

p. 164 “The English and French literature of the 19th century gives an impression of stability, even smugness, in the social order. In 1888, Kipling wrote in “The Education of Otis Yeere” “All good people know that a woman is the only infallible thing in the world, except Government Paper of the ’79 issue, bearing interest at four and a half percent.”  .. confidence in money, in the form of British Consols, reached its peak in 1896. Two years later, the West Shore Railroad in Chicago issued 4 per cent bonds maturing in AD 2361: in other words, the bond buyers assumed money had been made eternal. At which point, it fell to bits.”

p. 173 In 1906 my grandfather, though still a young man, gave his siste Anna an allowance of £100 a year. It had an effect he hadn’t foreseen. The next year, Anna went to India, wrote a novel and supported herself and several other people from her royalties for the rest of her life.”

p. 176 – the invisible hand – In Defore’s Moll Flanders, printed in 1722, it is aeupemism for for ill-luck or retribution “an almost invisible Hand that blasted all my Happiness. In Smith’s first use of t he phrase, in his juvenile History of Astronomy, it is the supernatural agency to which primitive people attribute irregular or alarming natural phenomena. By 1759, when Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that malign and unpredictable force has become the good god of the Stoics, who has arranged the universe fo that all events, even the most alarming, work towards the prosperity and perfection of the whole … Fourteen years later, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s wonderful machine is promoting GDP… How soothing to ruthless minds and bad commercial consciences… converted the self-serving business slogans of the 17th-century City into a creed.

p. 178 “In the two centuries after Smith, more mental effort was wasted on objectifying his system of belief than on any other in history, not excluding the immortality of the soul and the rentability of civilian nuclear power.”

p. 180 Such is the prestige of mathematics, and the charm of talk about money, that the economists have imposed their arithmetic on the world. Though, in their own existences, most people recognise that money and happiness or not co-terminous: yet they will accept whatever money quantities are fashionable with the economists – national product, balance of payments, consumer price indices or wahetever – as measures of national welfare; and because those sums, being sums, have a technically rational sound about them, people forget there are other goals of national, as there are of individual, aspiration. That the economists can’t measure any of their quantities even to their own satisfaction, can explain neither prices not the rate of interest and cannot even agree what money is, reminds us that we deal here with belieg not science.”

P. 278 “Money, far from being the harmless arena of human emulation as its apologists hold, is a great destroyer. Because money is eminent desire, there is no satisfaction in the external world unless it is conveyed in money, until the world is possessed in monetary garb … Columbus sucked a thousand years of gold from the Caribbean in two or three, and then extinguished all of its human life. The Conquest he not so much inaugurated as carried to the New World now ranges all over the globe, including its polar regions. Woods are paved, mountains mined, seas eaten, species annihilated. All the large land and sea animals of the weather and most of its birds, are under sentence of extinctions. They are being killed not by the rifle, but by a more lethal invention, money.”

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Books History

Notes from Fallen Idols by Alex von Tunzelmann

July 27, 2022 – 11:16 am

p. 23 “Congress approved the final text of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. Two days later, John Hancock sent a copy to Washington, asking the general to read it aloud to his army in New York. Washington received the broadside on 8 July. He gathered his troops at the common (now City Hall Park) the following evening at 6pm…An excited crowd headed down Broadway to George III’s statue. The crowd included perhaps 40 or so soldiers (and sailors) led by Captain Oliver Brown, as well as the New York chapter of the Sons of Liberty, the revolutionary party that had been responsible for the anti-tax protest known as the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Accounts differ as to how many civilian New Yorkers joined in or spectated. The protesters climbed the fence, attacked ropes to the statue and pulled it off its plinth… Special humiliations were reserved for George II’s severed head. John Montresor was a loyal British captain in New York at the time… sent a man to steal it from the tavern and bury it. Later, her dug it up. “I rewarded the men, and sent the head by the Lady Gage to Lord Townshend, in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed country.”

p. 27 “The images of the mob as a manifestation of American heroism bore striking similarities to those of Black Lives Matter protesters pulling down statues in 2020. When that happened, two famous paiontings of the pulling down of Geroge III’s statue were turned into memes. William Walcutt’s 1857 version was overlaid with text that reads “July 9 1776: After hearing a reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, New Yorkers ‘Destroy History’ by toppling a statue of King George II. And that’s why no one know who won the American Revolution”.

p. 29 William, Duke of Cumberland… “ a man who was once celebrated with statues, flowers and song, yet whose reputation fell fo far that in 2005 historians voted him the ‘Worst Briton’ of the whole 18th century.” Culloden “commenader ordered ‘no quarter’ be given to injured or fleeing Jacobites, or to any civilians, including women and children, who were unfortunate enough to live nearby.. thousands of wounded soldiers and ordinary people were murdered in a spree of vengeance. Some were executed by firing squad. Others were burned alive in buildings or clubbed to death.”

p. 31 “By May 1746, people were beginning to ask why, if Cumberland had won such a decisive victory, there were so few Jacobite prisoners in British prisons. Tobias Smollett, then a surgeon in London, published his first poem shortly after the news of Culloden reached the capital. Entitled “The Tears of Scotland”, it was a haunting evocation of what we would now define as war crimes: “when the rage of battle ceased,/The Victor’s soul was not appeased;/ The naked and forlorn must feel/ Devouring flames, and murdering steel.” Cumberland acquired a new nickname, “The Butcher”. An engraving of the time showed him, dagger in mouth, using his bare hands to skin a Highlander alive.”

p. 37 “In 1868, the 5th Duke of Portland took Cumberland’s statue down from its plinth in Cavendish Square. The official explanation was that its lead body had deteriorated badly, and required restoration or possibly a full recasting. This was probably true, though it may not have been the only reason. The Portland estate promised Cumberland’s statue would be back soon. It has not been seen since.”

p. 38 In 2012, the equestrian statue of William, Duke of Cumberland, reappeared on its plinth. It was a replica made of soap, installed by the Korean artist Meekyoung Shin. … In addition to Shin’s comment on the changeable nature of historical memory, her statue’s sent recalled Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1. Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, hallucinates bloodstains on her hands that she cannot scrub off.”… Cumberland’s scummy remains were finally scraped off his plinth in 2016.”

p. 55 while Stalin projected political power with his monuments, Rafael Trujillo projected sexual power as well.. ruled the Dominican Republic for three horrific decades… a sadist, a torturer and a murderer…by the time of his death in 1961, there were 1,800 public statues and busts of Trujillo, roughly one for every 27 km2 of land… built his power upon appropriating national wealth, business and industry, and on horrific violence. His regime’s violence was so stylized that some historians have described it as theatrical. .. He created an atmosphere of terror by humiliating both his favourites and his enemies… Random disappearances were common… He was said to throw the mangled bodies of his enemies to the sharks. In 1937, he ordered the indiscriminate slaughter of black people, presumed to be Haitians. An estimated 17,000 to 35,000 people were beaten or hacked to death with clubs and machetes over the course of two to five days. Officers had been ordered not to waste bullets on Haitians.”

p. 60 The Monument to the Peace of Trujillo was dedicated in 1955, proclaimed the ‘Year of the Benefactor’ by Trujillo to mark a quarter century since he had come to power. The celebrations were termed the ‘Free World’s Fair’. Trujillo – while running a vicious dictatorship himself – curries favour with the United States by posing as a champion of freedom and enemy of communism.”

p. 62 “Successive administrations had tolerate and even supported Trujillo. Now, though, Eisenhower’s government was worried about Castro’s administration in Cuba. It hoped to build an international consensus against Castro, but was struggling to do so – because Latin America widely considered Trujillo to be much worse.”

“resistance was growing inside the Dominican Republic – and part of that was due to four young women known as the Mirabel sisters. Patria, Dede, Minerva and maria Teresa Mirabel were part of the anti-Trujillo underground. … In November 1960, three of the sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, were ambushed in their jeep and beaten to death. The jeep was pushed off a cliff in an unconvincing attempt to make the deaths look like an accident… Eisenhower sent emissaries to persuade the dictator to step down, offering him asylum in the United States,, In early 1961, a new president, John F Kennedy tried again. Kennedy was told ion February that the CIA was arming revels in the Dominican Republic.”

p. 90 “The African American journalist and politican George Washington Williams travelled to Leopold’s domain in 1890, and was horrified by what he saw. He wrote an open letter to Leopold detailing failures and brutalities committed in the name of the Congo Free State, including the enslavement, torture and murder of Congolese people… found that existing language was inadequate to describe what he had seen. He had to invent a new term for what Leopold was doing – “crimes against humanity” – which was later used to describe the Nazi holocaust, and is now part of international law.”

p. 91 “Outrage spread across the world and was picked up by writers including Mark Twain, Booker T Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Felcien Cattier of the Uniersity of Brussels investigated in the late 1890s and early 1890s, concluding that it was “the clear and indisputable fact that the Congo Free State is not a colony in the proper sense of the term; it is financial speculation.” Its only purpose, Cattier said, was to make money for Leopold.”

p. 213 In recent years, there have been movements in Britain and the United States to raise more statues of women and people of colour. These campaigns are no doubt well meant, but they do not address the fundamental problem that statues represent the Great Man theory of history. Supplementing Great Men with a few Great Women represents a cosmetic change, not a meaningful change, in how we think about history… Statutory itself is the problem. It’s didactic, haughty and uninvolving. In the modern world, its links with the history of tyranny and racism are regrettably strong.”

p. 215 “The Monument to the Laboratory Mouse in Novosibirsk, Russia, honours those mice that have (involuntarily) contributed to scientific research, with a bronze statue of one in spectacles knitting a DNA double helix. The statue of Charles La Troke at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is upside down, balanced on its head with the plinth in the air – because the scultpro thought universities should turn ideas on their head. One of the few political statues that Londoners treat with genuine affection is the ‘Allies’ sculpture of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a public bench in New Bond Street… It invites visitors to sit between Churchill and Roosevelt and interact with them in any way they like.”

p. 216 “A symbolic moment such as pulling down a statue may have resonance. What it does not do – at least, not by itself – is actually change anything. Pulling down a statue does not create liberation.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Elizabethan Democracy and Epistolary Culture by Elizabeth R Williamson

July 17, 2022 – 8:05 pm

p. 37 “the embassy undertaken by Sir Amias Paulet as resident ambassador to France from 1576-9.

“The ambassador’s wife, Margaret, and their six children were part of the embassy, and accordingly were expected to take leave from the Queen in person. Though most ambassadors travelled without their wives, the practice was increasing: Gemma Allen puts the percentage of 16th century ambassadorial wives on embassy at 25%, rising in the 17th century. Hilliard [miniaturist who could sketch Elizabeth’s potential suitor Francois, Duke of Alencon] was recently married and so his wife Alice accompanied him in the embassy train, and the household’s chaplain, Arthur Wake, brought his wife and departed with her when she became pregnant. .. It is telling of the general perception of the wife of the political man that one place she does appear is in a fondly recalled domestic vignette, written by Francis Bacon, years later, where she cures a wart on his finger. The meeting of female domestic responsibility and political activity in the embassy in glimpsed in Hotman’s single reference to the role of the wife in The Ambassador. After warning that care is to be taken concerning who is accepted into the household, since there are ‘so many spies”, he syayes: “It shalbe the best way, if he can, to bring his wife with him, whose eie will stoppe infinite abuses amongst gis people, and disorders in his house, unlesse hee can trust there with some one of his owne followers, that may carry an eye and charge over the rest.”… she is in charge of internal security and supervision of all who come into the household; this is a key role, particularly for a large embassy, and one that places her firmly in the diplomatic world of information gathering and political communication.

p. 38 There is a brief mention of Lady Paulete in her husband’s correspondence that hints at an even weightetier, though subtle, role in diplomatic activity. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth on 22 June 1577, Paulet describes his recent audience with the French King and Wueen Mother, stating “and thus I was dismissed from the K and the Q mother, after that I had thanked Q mother for the good intertaynement which she had given my wife on Sondaye last, as indeed bothe shee and the Frenche King’s wife did use her with great favor and familiatitie, and amongst theire other talke made great protestacions of theire sincere affection towards your Majesteie”… it is a political statement to entertain the wife of the English ambassador… both a ceremonial activity and one that contains the opportunity to negotiate on an ostensibly informal level ,,, women in court could find it easier than men to conduct diplomacy with other women in power during leisure time; it is thus even more relevant to search for women in diplomacy in embassies to France around this time, considering the powerful political presence of the French Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici.”… one of Paulet’s daughters and his eldest son Hugh died during his appointment.”

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Books Early modern history History Politics

Notes from Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order

June 19, 2022 – 4:22 pm

P.11 MacDonald summarizes the dominant state of thinking in the discipline on why Europe conquered much of the rest of the world by exactly replicating the military revolution argument: “European warfare underwent a profound transformation beginning in the 16th century. On land, the spread of gunpowder-based weapons, as well as specialised fortifications designed to resist these arms, transformed the nature of combat. European armies were increasingly compelled to raise large standing armies, which were dominated by highly-trained and well-drilled infantry. Although driven by competition between European states, the unintended consqeuence of this ‘military revolution’ was to widen the gap in military power between Europe and the rest of the world.”

P. 20 “this process of discerning ‘what worked’ is by no means as easy as it sounds. Victory and loss in war are a result of complex and varying combinations of factors, many of the most important of which, like leadership and morale, are intangible. A study of contemporary military effectiveness  stresses indirect and hard to change factors like the international environment, political culture and social structure.”

P. 22 “In order for selection mechanisms to create a population of homogenous effective organisations … the ‘death rate’ amongst organisations has to be very high, the differences in effectiveness have to be large and consistent, and the environment has to stay fairly constant,,, these differences are difficult to meet in the context of military competition.”

P. 34 The way Westerners fought in the wider world in the early modern period was almost entirely different from the way they fought wars in Europe was almost entirely different from the way they fought wars in Europe with respect to nearly every one of the criteria that define the military revolution thesis. .. Rather than armies of 10s of thousands, the forces in Europe more commonly numbered only in the hundreds, While cannon-armed sailing ships were superior to anything other powers could put on the open ocean, they did not fundamentally change the balance of power.”

P. 36 Unless they enjoyed a major epidemiological advantage, Europeans were unable to defeat even middling non-Western powers in the period 1500-1750, and generally maintained their predominately nabal mercantile empires in the East under the sufferance of the Asian and African rulers o f the day. In the rare instance where Westerners sought to challenge this arrangement, they generally lost.”

P. 37 In Asia, great power armies that dwarfed their European counterparts hsd either already anticipated key elements of the military revolution centuries before Euopre, or had come up with alternatives.

P. 61 One of the few instances of the Portugese trying to conquer territory in Asia was their campaign against the rajah of Kandy in Ceylon. In 1594, 1630, and 1638 this resulted in disaster, as Portugese forces were ambushed and destroyed, their commaners being killed on each occasion… Kandyan forces did not have guns or armour like the Portugese, being armed with bows and spears, and thus they tended to avoid frontal attacks. Instead, they used the mountainous and forested terrain to wear down the Portugese with ambushes and attacks on their supply lines”

P. 74 There is no question that mainland Southeast Asian and perhaps most of the islands too had gubs well before the Europeans arrived. .. the sultan of Malacca was lentifully equipped with cannons by the time of the Portugese attack in 1511… diffusion of gunpowder weapons as beginning in Burma and Vietnam in the 1390s, before advancing to the rest of the region and Northern India through the next century, parallelling the fact that Mamluk and Ottoman guns had reached Western India by 500. Chinese cannons reached Java by 1421.”

P. 86 “the Mighals were not defeated by European,s and that though internal dynamics were the determining factor in their fall, their most dangerous military foes were Persians and Afghans, not the Portugese, Dutch or British.”

P. 87 “Bengal alone had a larger population than Britain in 1750.”

P. As in Africa, none of the Asian great powers had an interest in controlling sea routes or maritime trade in the way that Europeans obsessed about, making compromises and accommodations between the two groups much easier to strike.”

P. 100 “The repeated European disappointments and defeats at the hands of Islamic foes in North Africa right through to the 19th century scotches any notion that Western overseas expansion swept all before it. These reverses are even more significant given that the Spanish and Portugese committed far more resources in their failed expeditions across the Mediterranean than they ever did to those across the Atlantic or to the East. The Ottomans were dominant in Europe right through what is said to be the key century in the military revolution. The fact that their eclipse came only in the second half of the 18th century, and then at the hands of the Russians, is an awkward fit with the tenets of the conventional story. It is a strongly underappreciated fact that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed far more extensive and longer-lasting military and geo-political success than supposed paragons of modernity like the Dutch and the Swedes… Non-Western powers are portrayed as mere failures waiting to happen.”

P. 134 The Industrial Revolution was certainly a vital part of explaining how Europeans were able to build their new empires. But the prior question is why Europeans wanted to build huge empires. Given the at-best uncertain returns in military and economic terms, in many cases later imperial expansion seems to have reflected concerns about prestige and status in an international context where great power standing required colonies. In the decades after WWII, however, being in possession of colonies went from being valorized to being deeply stigmatised as part of a fundamental change in the mores of international society… the rise and fall of European empires were crucially driven and shaped by changes in ideas and cultural contexts, rather than just, or even mostly, material factors and rational means-end calculation.”

P. 134 “the functionalist model, premised on rational learning and Darwinian survival pressures, is implausiable. Against the expectation of convergence on a superior Western style of warfare, it is striking how often non-Western opponents have improved their performance by adopting a very different style of war.”

P. 143 Outside the settler countries of the Americas and Oceania, European dominance fell even more suddenly than it had been established. .. the declining legitimacy of empires reinforces earlier conclusions about the importance of culture and ideas, as distinct from rational pursuit of power and wealth, in the making and remaking of the modern international system. Second, the fact that ‘backward’ non-Western forces have repeatedly bested ‘advanced’ Western forces supports earlier skepticism about the significance of weapons and military technology in isolation from broader concerns.”

P. 144 The wars of decolonisation, and subsequent Western counterinsurgency campaigns, decisively undermines easy assumptions that victory goes to those with the most advanced technology, the largest economies, and the most developed state apparatus. .. Us and Western forces are perhaps even further away from solving these problems than they were 50 years earlier… Claims that these kinds of insurgencies are not ‘real’ major power wars completely fail to deal with the fact that this kind of expeditionary warfare was how Europeans built their empires and created the international system in the first place.”

P. 150 “Moving away from the conventional story of Western hegemony puts our current circumstances in a new light. A more cosmopolitan, less eurocentric perspective, giving due weight to regions beyond Europe, shows Western dominance of the international system as relatively fleeting, and thus makes it much less surprising if this dominance is now being challenged with the rise of powers beyond the West. A multipolar global international order becomes the historical norm rather than the exception. … The questions that we ask, and fail to ask, about history changes our views not only of where we have come from, but also where we are, and where we are going.”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea

June 7, 2022 – 3:33 pm

P. 55 The Ulster Scots, or Scots-Irish, among other collectives, had turned the world inside out for decades… this group’s re-emigration is significant, because it confirms the choice to relocate as a political tradition. Between 1718 and 1775, more than 100,000 men and women migrated from Ulster to the North American colonies, in the largest such movement in the 18th century… Why did they leave the Old World. Many feared that a ‘counterrevolution’, a political upheavel that would undo the Glorious Revolution, was inevitable – they felt that their privilege as Protestants ion Ireland would be threatened… the expansion of linen manufacturing in Ireland had brought opportunity, but it also brough exposure to market downturns. Many Scots-Irish families had lost whatever security they once held, .. new labour practives were challenging the traditional roles of male householders… The Ulster Scots were not the poorest in Ulster, but they were under pressure during economic downturns. They felt that they could only retain their position by moving out… Bernard Bailyn has focused on the “distressed” Yorkshire “countryfolk” who faces “an uncertain economic future, many in a high state of religious agitation and eader to withdraw into a separate community of like-minded worshippers. Often affected by Methodist propaganda, they had a passionate desire to “draw apart from a corrupt and abusive world and to create a refuge for themselves and their community on the far margins of the British periphery. The promotional material for emigration to America insisted on the absence of feudal obligations… a desire to avoid landlords was more and more paralleled by a despire also to escape markets (a very demanding landlord indeed). On settler noted with pride that in America there “was no need for market days since each farm did its own slaughtering and raised most of what it consumed”.

P. 67 “as Cuba burned during the first war of independence, the colonial authorities were imagining a resettled order through displacement. An official scheme in 1871 proposed to import between 40,000 and 50,000 German immigrants to the island. Following a similar logic, and facing revolution during the second war of independence, they thought of displacing enture populations to strategic locations under a policy of ‘reconcentration’. These were the first concentration camps. But cramming the countryside with German settlers or emptying it entirely of unmanageable populations were two sides of the same coin. Displacement was still understood as an antidote to revolution.”

P. 70 “White in Britain Paine was a revolutionary, in America he was not. He chose America, arguing for its independence and for a repudiation of aristocratic and monarchic privileges … Radical egalisatrianims was his stance in one location but defence of property rights characterised his posture in another. Displacement had transformed his politics. Much later, in Agrarian Justice (1797), Paine suggested that 15 pounds be paid to every person on turning 21: a social entitlement that would have ensured the establisjhment of a yeoman republic of independent landowners. It was a proposal very similar to that found in Harrington’s Oceana, a proposal also evoked in Lane’s later “commonhold”.

P. 75 Wakefield believed that capitalism tended to produce the conditions for its own demise … Pauperisation was not the only problem: the sons of the lesser gentry were finding no career opportunities, and small capitalists were downwardly mobile – he would have known, as he was one of them. This was the social revolution that most concerned Wakefield, because, if the conditions of the labouring poor would necessarily deteriorate before they could improve, an imminent revolutionary crisis was inevitable. “A ruined man is a dangerous citizen,” Wakefield sourly noted, before adding “there are at all times in this country more people who have been ruined than in any other country.”

P. 88 Caroline Chishom’s activism for women’s emigration – she published tThe ABC of Colonisation in 1850 – also aimed to turn the world inside out. Chisholm consistently and influentially advocated for the sponsored emigration of “respectable” poor farmers and especially single women. The latter would enable colonial fathers of working-class families to become respectable manly breadwinners. Her insight was that it is appropriate reproduction that turns the world inside out and she called for the systematic “population” of Australia, which she saw as “the future England of our Southern Hemisphere”. 

P. 99 This synthesis had important gendered implications. Jefferson assumed that a farmer knew what was best for his fam, and that a father knew what was best for his family … Jeffersonianism represented the “apotheoiss of the republican father and head of the household”.

P. 106 “The Market Revolution was revolutionary indeed. Predicated on other revolutions – including the transport, legal and industrial revolutions – and on unprecedented economic development and a commercial boom, initially in wheat and cotton, it prompted many worlds turned inside out. Charles Sellers set the scene of ongoing culture wars between opposinig subcultures. “Arminiam” market contronted Aanitnomian” land … The market fostered individualism and competitive pursuit of wealth by open-ended production of commodity value that could be accumulated as money. But rural production of use values stopped once bodies were shelter and clothed and bellies provided for. Surplus produce had no abstract or money value and wealth could not be accumulated. Therefor the subsistence culture fosted family obligation, communal cooperation and reproduction over generations of a modest comfort”. 

“Banks, paper money and ‘money changers’ were all perceived as part of the market revolution from which the settlers were escaping in the first place.”

P. 298 “The political tradtions that aim to turn the world inside out constitute an anti-revolutionary sensibility that relies on three fantasies: perpetual household production, where capitalism never begins; perpetual primitive accumulation, where capitalism permanently remains in its initial stage, and where social contradictions are always deferred; and in the promise of political community somewhere else – the promise of a political community that is born without the need of violence or revolution. The first two fantasies are found to remain unfulfilled – contradictions are displaced too, sometimes quite rapidly. The spatial fix is at best a temporary solution. The first fantasy rests on a fundamental exclusion – a move that is inevitably and often spectacularly bio;lent. Setting up a polity against someone – in the case of settler colonialism, against indigenous peoples – is not like setting up a polity without them: the settler colonial polity cannot be amended by inclusion, because it is foundationally violent and dispossessory. If this exlusion is to be addressed, the settler colonial poultry must be dissolved, which is a … revolution. The world turned inside out cannot keep its promises.”

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