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In my latest article in Journal of Agrarian Change, I argue that through the categories of world-ecology, the history of Australian capitalism is rendered legible. The article emerges from my 2023 doctoral thesis, which placed sugar alongside histories of invasion, pastoralism, and fossil capital to develop an eco-Marxist account of the origins of capitalism in Australia.
The post Race, Mortality and Value: Sugar in colonial Queensland appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

The city of Kilkenny is known to possesses a rich medieval history, yet the streets of the larger city are scarred by the injustices which occurred whilst under the colonial rule of Britain. One place not included in the heritage tourism of the city is the former workhouse which is now the site of a […]

In The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions, Adam Kuper interrogates the history of anthropological museums and considers questions of colonialism, race, and cultural appropriation around the artefacts they hold. As these institutions face a moment of global reckoning, Kuper offers a balanced, nuanced book on the historical and evolving role of museums, writes Tim Chamberlain. … Continued

In a ruling that is important beyond Kenya, the Kenyan High Court has delivered a milestone judgment. By striking down a provision of the Kenyan Criminal Code on subversion, the Court takes a significant step towards further doing away with the colonial legacy in the Kenyan legal system. The judgment exemplifies how judges in postcolonial contexts interpret the law against the backdrop of the country's history.

On 2 June 1937, members of the Labour Trade Union of Kenya returned to work after their masterfully strategic 62-day strike secured them an eight-hour work day, a nearly 25% wage increase, and recognition from colonial employers. Shiraz Durrani's A Struggle of 62 Days dramatises the legacy of this mass strike. In this article, ROAPE contributor Zachary Patterson reviews Durrani's play and writes on the history of the Kenyan labour movement in the struggle for independence and liberation.
The post A Struggle of 62 Days – Lessons of resistance from Kenya's anti-colonial struggle appeared first on ROAPE.

Long-standing unresolved colonial history and territorial issues between China and Japan, as well as the two countries' opposing world views, have increasingly manifested in the escalation of tensions. With high-level political/diplomatic communication at a standstill, the relationship has become adrift.

The critique of settler space is a pressing task in the context of movements for Indigenous justice in settler-colonial societies across the world. My recently awarded PhD thesis contributes to this critique by investigating the historical production of settler space, on the premise that thinking through this project of settler spatial history may help shed light on the contradictions and contours of settler spaces today. It is available to download from the University of Sydney Library here.
The post Settler Space: a spatial history of nineteenth-century Sydney appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar


Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in the United States for a state visit that is expected to highlight India's importance as a rising economic and military power, and the only country in Asia that can be a counter to China in the 21st century. Modi's Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has long promoted its Hindu nationalist agenda by claiming that India was the world's richest region under glorious Hindu rule for thousands of years before being conquered by Muslim invaders in the 11th century and British invaders in the 18th century. The BJP says foreign invaders transformed a sone ki chidiya—a golden bird—into an impoverished chattel. Modi has promised to make India a great world power again, and his U.S. visit aims to be a step in that direction.
The BJP often cites historian Angus Maddison, who estimated that India accounted for 32 percent of world GDP in 1 CE (during the Hindu period), a share that sank to just 4 percent by the time British rule ended in 1947. However, the BJP is cherry picking data from Maddison's work to create a false historical narrative of a once‐​rich country impoverished by foreign invaders. For a full picture, read my new Cato Policy Analysis, "Indian Nationalism and the Historical Fantasy of a Golden Hindu Period."
A close look at Maddison's magnum opus, Contours of the World Economy 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro‐​Economic History, tells a less flattering story. India's high share of world GDP in 1 CE was due mainly to its high share (33.2 percent) in world population. Since this yielded a GDP share of 32 percent, India per capita income was slightly below the world average at just $450 per year. This did not rise at all in a thousand subsequent years of Hindu rule. So, this supposedly golden period was one of stark poverty and economic stagnancy. Conditions were almost as bad in the rest of the world. High mortality, arising from disease, drought, and war kept India's population stagnant at 75 million for a thousand years till 1000 CE. Simply staying alive was a challenge.
Under Muslim and British rule, India's GDP edged up. Falling mortality rates meant a significant rise in the population too. This rising population partly offset the rise in GDP, so per capita income grew slowly. Maddison estimates it at $550 in 1700, towards the end of the Muslim period. This edged up to $619 by the time British rule ended. Progress was very slow in the thousand years of Muslim and British rule yet was better than the stagnancy in the preceding thousand years of Hindu rule.
Colonial‐​era history books spoke of the great blessings that British imperialism had brought to India. Maddison's figures show those claims to be absurd. But they also disprove the claim that colonial rule impoverished India.
After becoming independent, India's GDP rose much faster and mortality rate fell more dramatically than ever before. By 2003, says Maddison, India's per capita income was up to $2,160. Both in terms of income and life expectancy, India's golden period—if you can call it that—is today, not in the ancient Hindu past.
India is still a lower middle‐​income country, but in PPP (purchasing power parity) terms is already the third largest economy in the world. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund estimate that it was the fastest‐​growing major economy in the world in 2022 and will continue to be so this year. It runs a fiercely independent foreign policy and has refrained from condemning Russia for invading Ukraine. India is a major buyer of Russian oil. Even so the United States sees India as an important strategic partner, though not an ally. That is why Modi's visit is expected to include the signing of military deals for U.S. supply and coproduction of high‐​tech aircraft engines and drones. Despite foreign policy disagreements and worries about the suppression of dissent and liberal values in India, the United States wants to help Modi build an India that will become a major Asian power that can check China's dominance.

Isaac Samuel is an independent researcher whose work focuses on African history and economics. His prolific output on pre-colonial African history can be found on his blog AfricanHistoryExtra, which as a collective body of extraordinary scholarship puts the lie to the still widely held belief that – in the words of esteemed University of Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Rope in the 1960s – there is no African history, "only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness". Here, in a blistering account, Samuel shows how German philosopher Georg Hegel – one of the most influential figures of 19th century philosophy – wilfully misinterpreted first-hand accounts of the Asante kingdom from the 18th century. The result, both in the work of Hegel and those who followed him, was the construction of an absurdly fictional account of African society, steeped in popular beliefs of his time about the continent's supposed backwardness, that deliberately subsumed the richness and complexity of Asante history in order to legitimate imperial expansion and colonial rule.
The post How Hegel's Deliberate Ignorance of African History Legitimated the Colonisation of Africa first appeared on ROAPE.
The post How Hegel’s Deliberate Ignorance of African History Legitimated the Colonisation of Africa appeared first on ROAPE.

Views of the Israel-Palestine conflict are polarized worldwide between those who have experienced the past few centuries as an East-West conflict and those who have experienced it as a North-South conflict.For the first group, the storyline of the past few centuries begins with the American and French revolutions: The former established the first constitutional democracy. The latter overthrew an absolute monarchy in the name of the people, emancipated the Jews, and spread its doctrine of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité throughout Europe. The progress of freedom culminated in the victorious struggles of democracies against first Nazism and fascism and then communism in the twentieth century. President Biden's foreign-policy theme of a global struggle of democracy against autocracy is the product of that narrative. Atrocities of fascism and communism included both the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and an almost equal number of non-Jews were murdered, and Soviet repression, in which up to 20 million perished in the gulag, the purges, and man-made famines. From this East-West perspective the establishment of the state of Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust and the struggle of the Arab and Muslim worlds against it are extensions of the victory of the Allies and Hitler's genocidal program. For many of this narrative's believers, the October 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas reinforced this view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For the second group, the main story of the last five centuries has been the subjugation of Asia, Africa, and Latin America by European colonialism, and the consequent anti-colonial struggles. The trans-Atlantic slave trade took two to four million lives. The genocide of the native American peoples led to the deaths of 90 percent of the population. Between 1885 and 1908, the atrocities in the Belgian-ruled Congo Free State produced death tolls estimated at from three to ten million. British policies in India set off the 1943 Bengal famine that killed three million people in eight months. For those who see history through this North-South lens, the 1922 League of Nations mandate to establish "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine without the consent of that land's inhabitants; the 1948 violent expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe; the annexation and occupation by Israel of lands conquered in 1967; and Israel's evolution into an undeclared nuclear power armed and supported by the U.S. amount to the extension of colonialism into the 20th and 21st centuries. Israel's current war against Gaza and the uncritical support it receives from the U.S. confirm this view.In 1905 Negib Azoury, a Lebanese Christian former deputy governor of Ottoman Jerusalem, alerted the world to "two important phenomena, of a common nature, but opposed to each other, the awakening of the Arab nation and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient Kingdom of Israel on a large scale. The fate of the whole world," he wrote, "will depend on the result of the struggle between these two peoples representing two opposing principles." Azoury argued that regardless — or because — of their similarities, the only possible outcome would be for one side to defeat the other. Azoury was right about the common origin of the two movements — the resistance to different forms of oppression that have driven some to become Zionists and others to become Arab nationalists or Islamists differ less in their nature than in the positions into which their proponents are born.The degradation of the outlook of some on both sides into dehumanizing hatred is an inevitable result of the consequent century or more of violence. But must one ultimately defeat the other? Both narratives derive from genuine experience and pain. Is it beyond our power to acknowledge that no single narrative recounts the whole of history's polymorphous cruelty? The "fate of the whole world" may now depend on our ability to recognize that tragedy and prove Azoury wrong.

Nessim Znaien is a Junior Professor at the University of Marburg, currently holding the (Post)colonial Maghreb Chair. He conducts research on the history of material culture in the colonial and post-colonial Maghreb, in particular on the history of food and cereals and is the author of "Les raisins de la domination. Une histoire sociale de l'alcool en Tunisie à l'époque du Protectorat (1881-1956)". A conversation with Diana Abbani.

In this insightful piece, Upasana explores the transformation of Bharat Mata, from a unifying colonial symbol to a contested figure post-independence. Examining the impact of India’s printing press and Hindu god prints, Upasana delves into the complexities of Bharat Mata’s evolution from a nationalist icon to a symbol embodying both secular and religious dimensions. Uncover … Continued