Latin America, the 1947 UN Partition Plan, and decolonization. On July 7 1937, the Peel Commission presented its report to the League of Nations, where it made the case for partitioning Palestine.
“The National Home is bent on forcing the pace of its development, not only because of the desire of the Jews to escape from Europe, but because of anxiety as to the future in Palestine,” the report partly reads. Within the context of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which was incorporated into the British Mandate, partition was the next phase in the Zionist colonial enterprise. The UN has since reinvented the anniversary of its disastrous Partition Plan with the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which is marked every year on November 29. Slaughter in Indonesia: Britain’s secret propaganda war. In early 1965 Ed Wynne, an official from the Foreign Office in London in his late 40s, arrived at the door of a two-storey villa set in the discreet calm of a genteel housing estate in colonial Singapore.
But Wynne was no ordinary official. A specialist from the Foreign Office’s cold war propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD), he had been assigned to lead a small team. A junior official, four local people and two “IRD ladies”, seconded to the unit from London, would join him. The arrival of Wynne and his colleagues in the Winchester Road cul-de-sac marked the beginning of what would later be claimed, by those who led it, as one of the most successful propaganda operations in postwar British history. Walter Rodney’s Lost Book: One Hundred Years of Development in Africa. One of the most astonishing books that Walter Rodney–the Guyanese revolutionary and historian–ever wrote was published several years after he was assassinated on 13 June 1980.
The story of this book and how it came to be published is almost as remarkable as the life of the revolutionary himself. In 1978, Rodney was working as a full-time activist of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. The WPA was a revolutionary organisation seeking to unite the African and Indian working class in the highly divided country, then run by the brutal Forbes Burnham. UK urged to return sacred treasures hidden away for 150 years to Ethiopia. They are hidden religious treasures that have been in the British Museum’s stores for more than 150 years, never on public display – with members of the public strictly forbidden from seeing them.
Now hopes have been raised that Ethiopian tabots, looted by the British after the battle of Maqdala in 1868, could finally be returned home following a new legal opinion and an appeal backed by Stephen Fry, the author Lemn Sissay and the former archbishop of Canterbury George Carey. The wood and stone tabots are altar tablets, considered by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as the dwelling place of God on Earth and the representation of the Ark of the Covenant. They have, everyone agrees, huge spiritual and religious value for the people of Ethiopia. A letter has been sent to British Museum trustees signed by supporters including Fry, Sissay, the actor Rupert Everett and the former British ambassador to Ethiopia Sir Harold Walker.
Global poverty & its colonial roots: a re-education. Striking Against Colonialism: The General Strike in the Irish and Algerian Revolutions – The Irish Story. By Dónal Hassett The recent Centenary of the Irish General Strike of 1920 has underlined the potential power of a movement that can marshal the forces of labour behind the cause of resisting colonial repression and securing national liberation.
The co-ordinated withdrawal of labour has long been an important weapon in the arsenal of those opposing colonial rule in different geographical and historical contexts. However, if the strategic potential of the general strike was almost universal across imperial possessions, the ability of activists to implement it effectively was not.
When is it OK to wear an item from another culture, and when is it appropriat... Krystal Quiles You may think glaringly offensive items have nothing to do with you or your closet.
“I would never buy an offensive item or appropriate something from another culture,” you might say. “That’ll never be me.” But it helps to be sure. I’ve seen blond Caucasian women wearing henna hand tattoos or cornrows with dashikis (traditional African caftans), and American tourists posting selfies while wearing turbans with embroidered caftans in the Middle East. How Europe Became So Rich.
How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin?
Learned tomes by historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars fill many bookshelves with explanations of how and why the process of modern economic growth or ‘the Great Enrichment’ exploded in western Europe in the 18th century. One of the oldest and most persuasive explanations is the long political fragmentation of Europe. Sciencemag. BERLIN—Step into the main hall of the Natural History Museum here and you'll be greeted by a towering dinosaur skeleton, the tallest ever mounted.
Nearly four stories high and twice as long as a school bus, the sauropod Giraffatitan brancai was the largest dinosaur known for more than a half-century. It has been a crowd magnet since it was first displayed in 1937. But the tidal flats Giraffatitan bestrode 150 million years ago weren't in Europe. It lived in eastern Africa, today's Tanzania, much of which was a German colony when the fossil was unearthed in the early 1900s. Australia Was Founded on an Act of Genocide. It’s Time to Make Amends. A new book by Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, is the product of a lifetime spent researching the frontier wars that the British settler colonies in Australia waged against the Aboriginal people.
Reynolds takes his inspiration from the “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” released in 2017 by the First Nations National Constitutional Convention. The statement demands the Australian government to amend its constitution to mandate an indigenous voice in parliament. Obelisks in Exile: Ancient Rome's Fascination With Egyptian Monuments. Between the reigns of Augustus and Theodosius I, numerous Egyptian obelisks were expatriated to Europe.
These monoliths of antiquity would impress any conqueror. But in ancient Rome, their significance took on a multifaceted nature. To start with the obvious, they represented imperial power. When the Romans captured Alexandria in 30 BC, they were overwhelmed by the majesty of its Egyptian monuments. Augustus was now a self-styled Pharaoh, and Egypt his most prestigious province. The amazing 200-year-old shell grotto hidden in a corner of Wales you can onl... Hidden away between tall pines in deepest West Wales, this amazing shell grotto looks foreboding and maybe even Gothic. But when the sun shines, the rays glinting off the roughly hewn white quartz, it's transformed into something magical - a shimmering whiteness among the trees. This is the Cilwendeg Shell House Hermitage, one of the most remarkable ornamental grottos in the country and an incredibly rare survival in Wales.
It's not until you open the tiny door and let your eyes get accustomed to the gloom inside that you can fully appreciate this extraordinary woodland retreat. Because inside, lit by the soft glow from the stained-glass windows, is a profusion of native seashells, minerals and coloured glass fragments arranged in impossibly intricate patterns. No surface is left undecorated and even the floor is laid out in a delicate design using the knucklebones of sheep and oxen. Se connecter à Facebook. ‘Liverpool is built on transatlantic slavery’: how city’s museums are tacklin... A year ago, Laura Pye would have said that she had been a champion of diversity throughout her career. And then George Floyd’s murder sparked a movement that took hold in the UK on an unprecedented scale.
“I would have said that I was anti-racist before, but I never understood the scale of racism and what that looks like on a daily basis in some parts of our society until the last 12 months,” she said. Pye is the director of National Museums Liverpool (NML), a collection of seven museums and galleries in the city. One of those is the International Slavery Museum (ISM), which opened in 2007. As demonstrations spread last summer and the statue of the slaver Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol, the conversation in Britain turned to the lasting impact of the slave trade.
Race taxonomy - How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race. As a graduate assistant in biological anthropology at the University at Buffalo, I was tasked with curating the primate skeletal collection. The collection of skeletons—taken from cadavers studied during a primate anatomy class—had been neglected for a few years.
Most of the specimens had lost their labels. So, when I began re-cataloguing the collection in 2016, I ran into trouble. I knew that the skeletons were from three different species of macaques, but I didn’t know how to tell them apart, given that most research tends to focus on skeletal variation at a higher taxonomic rank, like genus or family. I wondered if one species had an anatomical feature that others did not which had been overlooked by previous scientists. How Mosquitoes Helped Shape the Course of Human History. Fifty-two billion people—almost half of the cumulative human population—are thought to have perished at the hands of a creature no bigger than a fingernail: the mosquito.
In his new book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, historian Timothy Winegard exposes this insect as not merely an itchy pest, but a force of nature that has dictated the outcome of significant events throughout human history. From ancient Athens to World War II, Winegard highlights key moments when mosquito-borne diseases caused militaries to crumble, great leaders to fall ill, and populations to be left vulnerable to invasion. In addition to addressing the mosquito’s pivotal role in battle, Winegard reveals some uglier effects of its diseases, such as how malarial resistance contributed to the rise of the African slave trade, and the concept of biological warfare.
Winegard spoke with Smithsonian about his new book and if modern technology can defeat this threat to humanity—and whether it should. Frantz Fanon: Decolonisation through revolution. A review of Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015), £12.99, Lewis R Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015), £28.49 and Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution (I B Taurus, 2016), £14.99 The last few years have seen a renewed interest among activists and within academia in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. The recent arrival in French of many of his previously unpublished letters, plays and writings will only add to this.
Se connecter à Facebook. Se connecter à Facebook. How the British Empire Built the Food System that Is Destroying the Planet. Our home on native land. Se connecter à Facebook. The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make - BBC Future. Goods from the East, 1600–1800. How Portugal silenced ‘centuries of violence and trauma’ Archivists Against History Repeating Itself. How Britain stole $45 trillion from India.
Log into Facebook. Britain Robbed India of $45 Trillion & Thence 1.8 Billion Indians Died From D... Se connecter à Facebook. British guilty of 'feigned amnesia' over imperial legacy, Irish president says.