Poverty: Causes of Poverty

There is rarely just one reason why people facing poverty are poor. Instead, there are various reasons – some of them are sufficient in themselves to cause poverty while others contribute to it. The most influential cause of poverty relates to where and how a person is born: people born into poor agricultural regions of India or sub-Saharan Africa, for example, face so many difficulties that it is next to impossible for them to escape from the poverty into which they are born.

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Poetry of Blake: A Warsong to Englishmen

English history is marked by the numbers of times that groups of men have been called together to fight, most commonly overseas with a view to conquest but within the country as well. English troops dominated Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as well as France and other parts of Europe and, in combination with imperial troops, allies and mercenaries, across the Americas, India and east Asia, Africa and Australasia.

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Review of Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes

When I was at school, history lessons were mostly about the Tudors and Stuarts and, to some extent, the destiny of the English people (occasionally and grudgingly including the Celtic periphery) to conquer most of the world as part of an empire on whom the sun would never set. From time to time, colonies or subject peoples would rebel (e.g. the Indians, Americans and Mau Mau of Kenya) for no readily explicable reason other than ingratitude. Who could object to the benefits of civilization: trade, protection and the abolition of slavery?

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Marx: Ireland’s Revenge

From the end of 1854, Marx was persuaded by Max Friedlander to become London correspondent for the newspaper to which he himself contributed – that newspaper, the Neue Oder-Zeitung was perhaps the most radical of its time and, as a result, was often persecuted by the repressive quasi-militaristic regime in force in Germany (which was to become a familiar occurrence for Marx and his comrades).

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Marx: The British Rule in India

Marx wrote ‘The British Rule in India’ for the New York Daily Tribune (June 25th, 1853). It is in some ways a typical example of his journalism concerning countries he had never visited and about which he relied for knowledge on his extensive reading and his ideological and analytical frameworks.

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Review of Slocomb’s Colons and Coolies

Many of the evils of colonization have been well-documented and the determination with which so many of the colonized fight for their independence indicates just how strongly the process is resented. Yet there are many aspects of the process by which colonization has actually been put into practice remain elusive. In particular, the interactions between the imperial project and capitalism, the conjunction that is between the public and private sectors, are not well understood, particularly in the less accessible parts of the world.

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They Seem to be Incapable of Acting Together

This is the abstract for the paper which I propose to present at the forthcoming 4th ICTL in a couple of weeks:

“They seem to be Incapable of Acting Together:” Robert Gordon and the European Categorizers of the Mekong Region

Abstract

Robert Gordon’s trip to the Mogok ruby mines in northern Burma, as reported in his testament to the Royal Geographical Society in 1888, represents one of the most blatant uses of travel as empire building in the Mekong Region. While European explorers and adventurers had been travelling to and along the region for centuries, most had been intent on mapping, surveying and categorizing its contents for purposes of their own profit, in one way or another. Gordon, while of course not unmindful of his own career, represents the traveller aiming to be of service to the greater power. As such, what were the ways he visualized and described the various features most commonly exercising the gentlemen tourists of the times: the hazards of disease, alienation and women principal among them. This paper draws upon a number of accounts of travellers to the Mekong Region with a view to understanding how and why they made their arduous efforts and what it profited them.

I think this is an interesting subject and that I might be able to write something interesting about it – but I do have to find some time actually to sit down and write it.

Review of Rubies of Mogok: Thabeit-Kyin, Capelan, Mogok

This slim volume consists of two separate documents: a reprint of Book 12 of The Silken East; London, 1904, the original goes from Chapters XLIV to XLVIII, pp.751-832 and, secondly, Robert Gordon, C.E., “On the Ruby Mines near Mogok, Burma,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society and Monthly Record of Geography, Read at the Evening Meeting, February 27th, 1888. It will be part of three volumes gathering together documents concerning the ruby mine district in Burma and lavishly illustrated as ever by White Lotus Press in Bangkok.

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Review of The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

One hundred years after the Wopuld family became rich after the creation of the Empire! board game, which only truly began to rake in the money when it was transplanted to an electronic platform, the whole gothic collection of characters is due to meet up at the rambling estate in the north of Scotland (the eponymous Garbadale) in order to determine whether to sell out to the American Spraint people.

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The United Fruit Company

The term ‘banana republic’ is used these days as a clichéd term for any country which is badly organized or administered. Yet the term had originally a specific and literal meaning and was attached to those central American countries in which large and powerful American fruit companies held enormous power over government. The presence of technology (e.g. railroad construction) and capital (from Wall Street) enabled these fruit companies not just to buy up vast tracts of lands for banana plantations but also to enter into contracts with local governments to provide infrastructure development.

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