In 1511 CE, Portugal became the first of the European empires to establish a presence in East Asia. That was the year in which conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque established the first of the Portuguese empire’s characteristically heavily-armed trading/raiding outposts at Malacca, a strategic choke-point in today’s Malaysia that has always been a major node of … Continue reading European empires competing in 16th-century East Asia
Last week, I wrote three blog posts about the involvement of Quakers in various phases of the White-supremacist settler-colonial project here in Turtle Island (the United States.) But all those phases were after the allocation by England’s King Charles II of a huge chunk of land in Turtle Island to the Quaker William Penn, which … Continue reading Quakers and settler colonialism before William Penn
Earlier this week, I wrote about some of the activities undertaken by the Indian Affairs Committee of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM) of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.) Amazingly, that committee has been in continuous– or sometimes, possibly a bit sporadic?– operation since 1795 CE. In that blog post, I interrogated the commonly voiced … Continue reading White settlers with “good intentions”
On Monday, I wrote about the involvement of Quakers in William Penn’s settler-colonial project in Turtle Island in the 17th century CE. Now, I want to fast-forward to the early 19th century CE, and start looking at the involvement of Baltimore Quakers in various stages of the ongoing westward expansion of the project, which was … Continue reading Baltimore Quakers & westward expansion in the early United States
On Friday, I sent out an “institutional” email blast on behalf of Just World Educational, the non-profit educational org that I founded in late 2015 and have headed ever since. That email/newsletter took me much longer than usual to write, hampered as I am by the eye problem that first struck me in early November… … Continue reading My January Syndrome strikes again…
In the past few months I have, I confess, fallen very seriously off the writing wagon atop which, back in 2019, I had vowed to ride into the future. My only defense is that I keep getting carried away by other kinds of broadly educational projects that seem at the time to be both urgent … Continue reading The 500-year project
Sometimes, you find a book. And sometimes, when you are ready for it, a book finds you. Such has been my experience this past week with Sven Lindqvist’s slim 1992/96 volume “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. In recent weeks, as alert readers … Continue reading To Zinder
I’ve been researching and thinking a lot about the forms of settler colonialism unleashed and maintained by “White” European nations– mainly, my own people-of-birth, the British– against people of color in many parts of the world. At times, doing this research– reading these accounts, seeing and trying to understand these pictures– makes me deeply, deeply … Continue reading The British genocides against Australian First Nations
Today, an Air Algerie plane conveyed to the Houari Boumedienne International Airport in Algiers the mortal remains of Sheikh Ahmed Bouziane, commander of a native-Algerian force overpowered by the invading French in Zaatcha, Algeria, in November 1849, and 23 other members of the defeated Algerian defense force. According to this account by Madjid Zerrouky in … Continue reading The unbearable legacies of settler colonialism
Alert readers will recall that last week I wrote about re-reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s amazing book Another Day of Life, which is about the 1975 collapse of Portugal’s empire in Africa. This was part of my current investigation of the phenomenon of imperial decline, in general. The collapse of Portugal’s worldwide (mainly African) empire is an … Continue reading Exploring imperial decline with Kapuscinski and Farrusco
