Kehinde Andrews

THE NEW AGE OF EMPIRE

How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World
 Contents

Foreword: Racism Is a Matter of Life and Death

Introduction: The Logic of Empire
1 I’m White, Therefore I Am
2 Genocide
3 Slavery
4 Colonialism
5 Dawn of a New Age
6 The Non-White West
7 Imperial Democracy
8 Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
 About the Author

Dr. Kehinde Andrews is Associate Professor in Sociology at the School of

Social Sciences at Birmingham City University and developed the Europe s
first Black Studies undergraduate degree. He is also director of the Centre
for Critical Social Research, founder of the Harambee Organisation of
Black Unity, and co-chair of the Black Studies Association.
For Assata, Kadiri, Omaje and Ajani
 Foreword

Racism Is a Matter of Life and Death

Witnessing the police killing George Floyd in May 2020 was the straw that
broke the camel’s back, coming so close on the heels of the lynching of
Ahmaud Arbery and state-sanctioned murder of Breonna Taylor. A wave of
protest and rebellion was unleashed onto the streets in the United States,
reminiscent of the hot summers of the 1960s, when racial tensions exploded
and cities burned. Millions of people across the world joined the movement,
protesting the experiences of racism that are all too common. Black Lives
Matter came into vogue and was adopted by media companies, major
corporations and even national governments. An optimism has been felt,
that society is now ready to face up to the realities of racism. But rather
than celebrating the new-found enthusiasm for talking about racism, we
should approach with extreme caution. Unilever and L’Oréal loudly
trumpeting that they were removing the word ‘fair’ from their skin-
lightening products is the perfect metaphor for the meaningless change
being offered in response to the moment. Rebranding a racist product is not
a step in the right direction, it is a kick in the teeth to all those who suffer
the impacts of White supremacy. We entirely miss the point if we believe
that racism can be overcome with token gestures, commitment to diverse
hiring practices or statements of brand solidarity. It is not mere coincidence
that the latest wave of protests took hold during the lockdowns for the
Covid-19 pandemic. The cynic in me will always be convinced that the lack
of other news and places to go was a major factor in the mainstreaming of
racial justice. We saw the exact same responses to the murders of Alton
Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016 from Black communities across the
globe, which somehow failed to grasp the attention of the Whiter wider
public. But by the time the protests kicked off, the pandemic itself had
already exposed the racism underpinning society.
Covid-19 tore through the West so completely that there were discussion
about whether the virus was the ‘great leveller’ of conditions in society.
When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized with the virus,
we were reminded that no one was safe. Donald Trump, the most unlikely
president of the United States, started taking the anti-malarial drug
hydroxychloroquine, later proved to be ineffective, in an effort to protect
himself. Facing the impending loss of tens of thousands of lives, nations
went into unprecedented lockdowns, and even the most right-wing,
neoliberal governments provided economic safety nets for families and
business that would have won the approval of Marx. But the delusions of all
being in it together, or that viruses do not discriminate, quickly fell apart as
the evidence began to show that Covid-19 simply laid bare existing social
inequalities. The poor, the vulnerable and ethnic minorities were all shown
to be far more likely both to catch the virus and to die from it, in Britain and
the United States. The surprise at these findings tells us just how little we
understand racism, which is not about personal prejudice, but rather is a
matter of life or death. Covid-19 targeted ethnic minorities, thanks in part to
our heavy concentration in the inner cities; disproportionate rates of
poverty; and over-representation in the ranks of key workers.1 These same
conditions mean that in both Britain and the United States minorities are
more likely to suffer almost all chronic illnesses and conditions, including
asthma from polluted neighbourhoods, diabetes and obesity because of food
deserts, and the rest of the so-called ‘comorbidities’ that increase the risk of
Covid-19 deaths. The result of these inequalities is statistics like Black men
in England and Wales being up to four times more likely to die from Covid
than their White ‘counterparts’.2 The brutal and uncomfortable truth is that
racism takes years off a life and the ability to enjoy it. But the racial fault
lines in the developed world are minor cracks compared to the devastating
chasms of the value of life across the globe, and the response to Covid-19
reveals the logics of empire that continue to govern the world.
When the West was threatened with a staggering death toll, it was
remarkable to see how quickly investment in and the development of a
vaccine occurred. A vaccine within a year of the virus appearing would
previously have been truly unprecedented but has been willed into
existence. Malaria has existed for over a hundred years and claims the lives
of 400,000 children annually, but there is still no reliable vaccination. If
those children were dying in Europe, rather than Africa, the political will
would have existed to find a cure. We saw the speed with which a vaccine
was developed for Ebola once the disease left Africa and arrived in the
United States. Even illnesses for which there are vaccines, that have been
all but eradicated in the West, still claim lives in the Rest. Tuberculosis kills
1.5 million people annually. The primary logic underpinning the Western
world order is that Black and Brown life is worth less.
The Covid-19 death toll will pale into insignificance compared to the loss
of life annually due to poverty. Nine million people die around the world
each year due to hunger. A child dies every ten seconds because they do not
have access to food and water. These lives are almost exclusively Black and
Brown. One of the main reasons that Covid-19 was not as devastating in
Africa is because there are far fewer old people, because they die younger.
In Nigeria, which has the largest population on the continent, only 2.5 per
cent are over sixty-five, compared to over 15 per cent of the United States.
In South Africa, one of the supposed success stories of the continent, more
people die each year in the 30–34 age bracket than the 80–84 range.3 Such
a figure is unimaginable in the nation’s former colonial ruler, Britain, where
there are almost fifty times as many fatalities in the older age group. A virus
that mainly kills old people was never going to be as much of a problem for
a region whose life expectancy has just crept above sixty. Covid-19 brought
the fear of life and death into the West that is the daily experience of
billions around the globe.
For all the so-called aid dumped into the underdeveloped world, the
problems of poverty remain entrenched. The majority of the progress of the
much-lauded United Nations Development Goals, which sought to reduce
world poverty by 2015, has been because of China’s success. We still live in
a world where a family of four, including children, farming tobacco leaves
in Malawi for multinational corporation British American Tobacco can
expect to earn £140 for a whole year.4 These kinds of conditions are just as
prevalent in the majority of the world, where people live in levels of
poverty that we in the West can only imagine. We’re so used to this reality
that we forget it is no historical accident. There is a reason and a logic
behind global poverty. Although you would never guess it from the analysis
of the United Nations (UN), World Bank, International Monetary Fund
(IMF) or Western governments, racism still governs the entire political and
economic system. Truly addressing this inequality cannot be done without a
transfer of wealth and resources that would be transformative to the West.
As long as we delude ourselves with rebranding and tinkering at the
margins we will never be able to address the issue of racism.
 Introduction

The Logic of Empire

We urgently need to destroy the myth that the West was founded on the
three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead we need to
trace how genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones
upon which the West was built. The legacies of each of these remain present
today, shaping both wealth and inequality in the hierarchy of White
supremacy. The Enlightenment was essential in providing the intellectual
basis for Western imperialism, justifying White supremacy through
scientific rationality. In other words, the West invented scientific theories to
‘prove’ the superiority of White people and acted as if they were truth. It is
also in the Enlightenment that we can see the roots of the new age of
empire, the universal application of colonial logic.
The breakdown of European countries’ direct administration of their
colonies made way for the United States to become the centre of empire.
The UN, IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization all play their part
in administering colonial logic and neo-colonialism. In the new age of
empire, the so-called independence of the colonies laid the groundwork for
the emergence of an elite in the underdeveloped world who administer the
system with brutal efficiency. Colonial logic has always incorporated the
ladder of White supremacy, with some taking advantage of their superior
positions in the racial hierarchy. We must consider how China has adopted
Western approaches to enrich itself by plundering Africa for its resources.
This feeding frenzy is not restricted to China but includes nations from
across the underdeveloped world. If the former Third World cannot be
relied on for solidarity the same is certainly true for the new so-called
radicals of the Western left. Rather than offering truly radical visions of the
future we must consider how Whiteness pervades these movements that are
continuations of racist progress. Following the 2008 financial crisis we are
in a moment where the chickens are coming home to roost in the seat of
empire. China is becoming a more efficient version of the West; the
financial crisis further unleashed the forces of neoliberalism; and the
children of empire are migrating into the old mother countries because of
what the West has done to their homelands. The world looks different today
than it did four hundred years ago but the same logic which were being
embedded into the system then continues to shape the world in the image of
White supremacy.
Before we delve into the book I want to draw attention to four aspects of
the new age of empire that are not referred to by name again but are present
throughout. The aim of the book is to build on these concepts and ideas in
order to understand the logic of Western imperialism.

RACIAL CAPITALISM
In the new age of empire, the United States has become the centre of
modern colonial power. The country likes to present itself as a victim of
British colonialism, which freed itself from tyranny and now looks to do the
same for the rest of the world. But this is a delusional fantasy. The United
States is in fact the most extreme expression of the racist world order. Not
only does the United States have its own history (and present) of colonial
possession but its entire existence is based on the logic of Western empire.
Built by enslaved Africans on land stolen through the genocide of the native
inhabitants, the United States became a Garden of Eden for Europeans
looking for wealth and opportunity. After the Second World War, the great
European powers having exhausted themselves, the United States inherited
its birthright as the leader of the new age. Now we have major institutions
that manage globalization and maintain the logic of empire under the guise
of ‘development’: the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United
Nations are all based in the US. This new regime is as effective as the
European empires were at maintaining global White supremacy and
colonial domination.
 Racism is not only the glue that holds the system together but the
material of which it is comprised. In his classic work Black Marxism, the
late Cedric Robinson explained the nature of ‘racial capitalism’.1 On the
domestic front we can see how these dynamics play out in the United
States. Ava DuVernay’s heartbreaking documentary 13th brought a greater
awareness of the extent of the racist problem of mass incarceration, which
is so stark that one in every three African American boys born in 2001 is
expected to spend time in prison.2 The film takes its name from the
Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which abolished slavery and
‘involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted’. After emancipation, African Americans
were far more likely to be arrested and imprisoned, to be put to work in
various forms of prison labour, and slavery was therefore maintained within
the prison system. The fact that the state of servitude was maintained in the
very amendment that ended slavery is a chilling reminder that there is no
such thing as progress in racial capitalism.3
Michelle Alexander explained in The New Jim Crow how the ‘war on
drugs’ following the crack epidemic took the problem of racialized
incarceration and pumped it with steroids.4 By racializing the drug crisis in
the 1980s the United States government targeted Black communities,
flooding neighbourhoods with police and incarcerating unprecedented
numbers of people. This was a shared conservative and liberal project, with
each side outdoing the other to seem ‘tough on crime’. We should never
forget that it was the so-called first ‘Black president’5 Bill Clinton who
introduced the infamous Crime Bill in 1994 that was so pivotal in
amplifying the impact of mass incarceration and which included three-
strikes sentencing; flooding the streets with police officers; and a huge
boost in funding for prisons. In the last forty years the United States prison
population has ballooned by 500 per cent, almost exclusively by
incarcerating predominantly African Americans for non-violent drug
offences.6 There is perhaps no better illustration of how racism works in
the United States today, but also of how intertwined it is with capitalism.
One of the drivers of mass incarceration is the privatization of the prison
industry, which creates incentives to lock up historic numbers of people.
Slave labour is also an economic incentive; there is no need to outsource if
you can pay prisoners a few cents an hour for their toil. In 1994 the
telephone company AT&T broke its workers’ union action by laying off call
centre workers and replacing them with prison labour. McDonald’s, Macy’s
and Microsoft have all exploited prison labour, as well as countless more
corporations across the United States. The US government has a Federal
Prison Industries company, Unicor, producing a vast array of products
including air filters and office supplies, that pays its workers between 23
cents and $1.15 an hour. Prior to 2011 its products were only sold within the
public sector, but since that restriction was lifted Unicor has been selling
goods and services with relish to private corporations. As well as the
benefits of modern-day slave labour wages Unicor also touts that
companies can stamp their products as ‘Made in America’ with pride. This
is Third World wages for homemade produce, the embodiment of Trump’s
promise to ‘Make America Great Again’. In the first half of 2018 alone
Unicor had made $300 million worth of sales in goods and services across
the public and private sectors.7 Providing prison labour on the cheap is a
form of corporate welfare: the state foots the bill for their incarceration and
the companies make a profit off the lack of prisoner wages. Incarceration is
expensive for the state – over $35,000 per prisoner per year in federal
prison.8 It seems like insanity for them to provide labour at this huge
expense – until we remember that it fits perfectly into the logic of racial
capitalism.
Veteran prison activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore explained how
she first saw prisons a ‘consequence of state failure’ but had to learn they
were actually a ‘project of state-building’.9 Billions of dollars spent on
incarcerating a disproportionate number of Black people is not only
corporate but social welfare. The major problem the United States has with
its Black population is that they are now surplus to requirements. Slavery
was the reason we were taken there in chains and that labour is no longer
needed. During the era of the New Deal and national regeneration African
American labour was needed once again to build the infrastructure and the
promise of a new America. In the war years that followed African American
labour was once again vital. But neoliberalism has cut public sector jobs
and labour has either been outsourced to the underdeveloped world or
mechanized. We are once again surplus to requirements, and it is no
coincidence that mass incarceration coincided with the transition to
Reaganomics. Neoliberalism is just a more extreme version of Western
society, so racism was bound to be emphasized in an economic regime that
steeply increases inequality. A major reason that the unrestrained
individualism at the heart of the neoliberal project won at the ballot box is
because there was no way that the body politic of the United States could
survive if social welfare was dispensed to African Americans in the
amounts needed, because the nation is so steeped in racism. A functioning
welfare state, that at least dulled the harder edges of poverty, would
probably cost the state less than mass incarceration in the long run. But we
must remember that throughout the history of the West the state has been a
mechanism for private enterprise to reap the benefits of racial exploitation.
Various versions of the welfare state in different countries were but short-
lived experiments in sharing the spoils of empire more fairly in the West.
Racial capitalism makes the public happy for their tax dollars to be spent on
caging the mostly Black and Brown, as corporations are then free to feast
on modern-day American slave labour. And of course, all that profit will
eventually trickle down to the average voter.

COLONIAL NOSTALGIA
‘Make America Great Again’ was a slogan built on colonial nostalgia, for a
time when the logic of empire was much neater. Racial segregation; no civil
rights legislation; respect for law and order; and unchecked United States
dominance of the globe. Britain also experienced its own bout of yearning
for the good old days. Once the nation had freed itself from the supposed
shackles of the European Union in 2016, Whitehall officials fantasized
about the prospect of the nation re-engaging with the world and establishing
‘Empire 2.0’. The vote for Brexit was driven in large part by a colonial
nostalgia to make Britain great again by returning to the days when
Britannia ruled the waves. One of the main slogans from the Vote Leave
campaign was ‘Take Back Control’ in order to return the nation to its
former glories. Empire 2.0 was at least an acknowledgement that Britain
was only ever ‘great’ when it ruled over an area so large that the sun never
set on its dominions. Brexit, apparently, provided the opportunity to
rekindle the country’s abusive relationship with its former colonies.
Yearning for the glory days is not a new phenomenon in Britain, which
has the Empire firmly embedded in its psyche. Almost 60 per cent of people
believe that the Empire was ‘something to be proud of’, apparently either
unaware of or uncaring about the centuries of slavery and brutality that
Britain inflicted on other parts of the world.10 Given this, it is unsurprising
that the monarchy in general, and the Queen in particular, are extremely
popular. Replete with crowns crusted in jewels stolen from various
colonies, Her Majesty may be the premier symbol of Whiteness on this
planet. Britain’s former colonies remain part of the Commonwealth group
of fifty-three nations, and the Queen is still the head of state of fifteen
former colonies, a list that includes Jamaica, Australia, Canada and Belize.
The royal family represents all the problems of elitism in Britain and
privilege given to mediocre White people, with their only claim to their
position being that they were born to rule. This is clearly not just a British
problem, given the adulation the Queen receives from around the world.
The popularity of Netflix’s The Crown shows the cross-Atlantic appeal of
imperial romance.
The idea of refashioning the Empire was problematic for an array of
reasons. For a start, Britain lost the majority of its colonial possessions prior
to joining the EU. In fact, the lack of an empire to exploit meant that Britain
needed (and still needs) to be part of a large economic bloc to maintain its
standing in the world. Many of its former colonies fought for their freedom
and would not be happy to simply fall back under the thumb if Britain
renewed its colonial ambitions. Not only that but India, at one point the
jewel in the crown of the Empire, is now one of the fastest growing
economies in the world, which Britain could not re-colonize even with
force. The tables have turned so much that Indian company Tata took over
what was British Steel in 2006. Whilst the ‘Empire 2.0’ episode did tell us
just how much the colonial arrogance of the British ruling class remains, the
Empire is never coming back, whatever the dreams of Whitehall officials.
The emergence of nations like India as leading world powers has
bolstered the narrative that the West is in decline. The G20 forum for
international economic cooperation, made up of the most apparently
influential countries in the world, now includes South Korea, Japan, India,
Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Summit pictures are more reminiscent of a United Colours of Benneton
advert than the imagery from the 1884–5 Berlin Conference, where
European nations carved up Africa between them. China’s rise in particular
has shaken the West’s confidence in itself and its prospects for continued
global domination. This changing global arithmetic has led to many a think
piece on the so-called decline of the West. In many ways Trump’s election
was driven by this desire to see White America at the forefront of global
politics again, with his ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan. On the
campaign trail Trump railed against globalization and in office has sparked
trade wars with China to try and recapture the lost power of the United
States. Running through all of this is the existential dread that the West has
lost the battle for power, and that the underdeveloped world is leading the
path into the future. But don’t believe the hype. China’s rapid economic
development has been achieved in large part by exploiting their own poor
and looting Africa in a disturbingly European fashion. Diversifying those
dining on the spoils of empire does not change the menu and there is
nothing new about some Black and Brown people taking advantage of a
framework designed to exploit them. In other words, a handful of rich
Nigerian students studying at Oxford does not change the system of
oppression. Conditions in the underdeveloped world today are marked by
the kind of poverty that those of us in the West could not imagine. To
pretend we have moved into a post-racial dream is to ensure that the
majority of Black and Brown people of the world continue to experience
the Western nightmare.
So-called independence in the former colonies has provided for a
privileged few to reap financial rewards from access to a slice of the
Western imperial pie. A post-colonial elite have amassed wealth well
beyond the dreams of even those doing relatively well in the West. There is
also a growing middle class in the underdeveloped world who have some of
the same opportunities as those in the West to spend money buying
unneeded commodities. But their access and wealth are based on exploiting
the same system that impoverishes the vast majority of those in the world
who are Black and Brown. As I will discuss at length in Chapter 6, the
multitude of ‘dark mankind’11 are not a homogenous mass but a varied
group of people, many of whom have few qualms about using the
hierarchical ladder of global White supremacy to pull themselves up on the
back of those less fortunate.
All the old inequalities were simply built into the supposedly progressive
system of international trade and law, ensuring that the West remained in an
exploitative relationship to the former colonies. The new age of empire
depends on corporations, unfair trade practices and puppet governments in
the underdeveloped world, all of whom are perfectly happy to take their cut
from selling off their population’s assets and labour. The inclusion of the
elite from the underdeveloped world has allowed for the mirage of progress
in the new operating system. Institutions like the UN and the G20 even
offer seats at the tables of power but, as Malcolm X warned us, ‘sitting at
the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that
plate’.12 If these leaders are meant to be representing their people then the
question is not whether they are getting a taste of the delicacies of the West
but whether their nations are being nourished. The stark reality is that the
hierarchy of White supremacy is alive and well, with the White West at the
head of the table and Africa lucky if it gets any scraps from the floor.
Racism frames life in the new age of empire just as fundamentally as it did
during the eras of slavery and direct colonization.

RACIAL PATRIARCHY
‘Thinking intersectionally’ means recognizing that there is no way to fully
understand society without appreciating the interlocking oppressions that
shape inequality. We must however recognize the roots of the concept in
Critical Race Theory, Black Feminism and mobilizations such as the
Combahee River Collective. It was by viewing the world from the
standpoint of Black women that intersectionality was born, highlighting the
nature of inequality. Unlike in some of the co-opted takes on
intersectionality (which has been reduced to a buzzword in many academic
and policy circles), it is impossible, in any genuine understanding, to
remove racism from how we think intersectionally. A central thesis of this
book is that White supremacy, and therefore anti-Blackness, is the
fundamental basis of the political and economic system and therefore
infects all interactions, institutions and ideas. My aim is to trace how White
supremacy has been maintained and plays out in the various updates to
Western empire. Discussions of genocide, slavery, colonialism, unfair trade
practices and everything else we will consider all echo across the
intersections of race, gender, class and other social divisions. But I have not
generally touched the rich vein of vital work exploring the detailed
intersections of racism and interlocking oppressions. If we see racism as the
intersection then this book explores the junction but has not traced the roads
that lead to it.13 Scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor, Patricia Hill Collins, Mikki Kendall and many other Black feminists
have travelled these arteries and produced exceptional insights into the
intersectional dimensions of oppression.14
It is essential to understand how fundamental patriarchy is to shaping the
modern world. Academics have tended to locate class as the primary prism
through which to understand society. But class relations in capitalism are
produced out of the colonial logic of Western imperialism. Industrial labour
is only possible because of the wealth generated from colonial exploitation.
Without genocide, slavery and colonialism there is neither the wealth nor
the resources for the supposedly revolutionary proletarian toiling in the
European factory to come into existence. Therefore, Marx’s hero of history
is in fact a product of racism. Social classes existed before the dawn of the
new age but were fundamentally transformed by the new system. But the
patriarchy is different. It was not created by Western imperialism, although
empire was propagated through it, via figures like the great male explorers
Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, who braved the new worlds and
conquered the savages. Violence was the key ingredient in establishing
Western empire, and sexual violence against women was a universal tool.
The foot soldiers of empire, colonial leaders and slave owners, all
presided over patriarchal households where women were relegated to the
domestic realm and unable to contribute fully to public life. White men
were deemed to be at the top of the food chain of human beings while
women were thought to be incapable of rationality because of their
troublesome biology. So deeply ingrained were these ideas that Black men
in the United States were allowed to vote (at least in theory) decades before
the privilege was extended to White women. Gendered inequality remains a
hallmark of empire, deeply seated in the West and around the globe.
The inspiration for this book came from a short video that I made for the
Guardian called ‘The West Is Built on Racism’, which went viral. One of
the responses to that was a tweet exclaiming that it was constructed on
‘patriarchy too’. As fundamental as patriarchy is to the enactment of
empire, this is not strictly true. The West is practised through patriarchy but
is built on White supremacy. It is the expansion into the Americas and the
exploitation of Black and Brown bodies and resources that enabled the West
to come into being. I do not want to make the same mistake as Marx here in
reducing other forms of oppression to the margins. To say that Western
imperialism is practised through patriarchy does not diminish it, rather the
opposite. Just as communism does not necessarily lead to the end of racism,
overthrowing Western imperialism does not automatically dispense with
patriarchy. It is perfectly possible to imagine a revolutionary future free
from the West but governed by patriarchy. Equally important is the truth
that patriarchy could potentially be abolished in a new iteration of Western
imperialism, however unlikely that is.
Racial patriarchy lies at the heart of the new age of empire and tracing its
practice is utterly essential. To do so means understanding that gender plays
out at the intersection with racism in complex ways. For instance, whilst
there is no doubt that women have experienced, and continue to experience,
gendered oppression it is also true that those who are White accrue the
benefits of colonial logic. Like the working classes in the West, women here
are also spared the conditions of the underdeveloped world. For all the
exclusions of women in the middle and ruling classes, they remain
privileged compared to those poorer than them. While we remember the
brave male pioneers of genocide, slavery and colonialism it was Queen
Isabella of Spain who gave the green light to this new world ‘discovery’ and
Queen Elizabeth I who launched Britain’s industrial involvement in the
slave trade when she assented to John Hawkins’ mission on the slave ship
Jesus. In the Jim Crow South thousands of Black people were lynched by
mobs of predominantly White men. Not only were many White women
happy to join in the festivities around the strange fruit hanging from the
poplar trees but their false accusations of rape and sexual misconduct
against Black men often triggered the lynching in the first place. In the
infamous murder of Emmett Till – a fourteen-year-old boy – Carolyn
Bryant Donham had the ‘decency’ (or rather, the audacity) six decades later
to admit she had made up her allegations against him.15 Ida B. Wells, the
African American anti-lynching activist, found support from White
feminists of her day entirely absent because they did not view the murder of
predominantly Black men as a feminist issue.16 The failure to see how the
issue of lynching was a result of racial patriarchy, and that the so-called
‘protection’ of White women was a central feature of anti-Black racism,
was a major failing of White feminism at the time.17
If thousands of Black men are being lynched then the impact will
inevitably be felt by Black women, who lose their partners, brothers, family
and friends. An assault aimed disproportionately at Black men is therefore
an attack on Black women, and vice versa. We can see the same process at
work today with mass incarceration and the incredible levels of state
violence that Black men are subject to. It is estimated that there are 1.5
million fewer Black men in the United States than there should be due to
these effects. In Ferguson, the problem is so acute that there are 40 per cent
fewer Black men than women.18 Given this disparity we really should not
be surprised that single parenthood rates are higher in African American
communities, the result being that Black women with children are far more
likely to live in poverty and to be evicted. This is not to mention the police
violence and surveillance that invades communities in order to maintain the
sheer number of African Americans in prison or on probation. Black women
are also caught up in the same processes, and are far more likely to be
arrested, jailed and killed than their White counterparts. In the UK we see
exactly the same processes playing out, with Black men far more likely to
be arrested and far less likely to be employed than their White counterparts.
One of the results of this is a mirroring of higher rates of single parent
households and poverty for Black women.
The assault on Black men is a result of the same racial patriarchy that
subjugates Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains that ‘Black men are
feared, Black women are despised.’19 Europeans enslaved Africans
because they believed we were subhuman, more beast than person. Black
men were seen to be hypermasculine, with no intellect but instead full of
brute force and dangerous sexual energy. In plantation societies like Haiti,
around two-thirds of the enslaved were men, and 80 per cent of the Africans
enslaved by the British were male, because the nature of the labour required
the savage brute.20 Deeply woven into these racist ideas was the brute
sexual force of the beast, something that had to be restrained after
emancipation. Black men were, and remain, very publicly assaulted.
Beaten, whipped, lynched, and gunned down by police. Black women were
also subject to all these crimes, but the primary mode of their oppression
has been behind closed doors. They have been subjected to sexual violence,
either in the house on the plantation or at the hands of the police in the
present day. They have lived with the impact of poverty, evictions and steep
health inequalities. As well as conforming to the public/private sphere split
in terms of how we are oppressed, racial patriarchy also changes traditional
expectations for men and women.
Sexual violence was not reserved for women, but was also meted out to
enslaved African men as away to pacify and control them on the plantation.
Rape and castration were common punishments used to control the savage
beast. The enslaved were prevented from marrying and families were
subject to being sold at the whim of their ‘owners’. During slavery the
nuclear family was essentially legislated against. After emancipation the
idea of the male breadwinner was difficult to maintain due to high male
unemployment, a process that has been exacerbated with mass
incarceration. The right, in both Europe and the United States, criticizes
Black communities for lacking the supposedly ‘correct’ familial structure,
when it is racial patriarchy that makes the supposed ideal more elusive.
In Britain, one of the reasons that Black women were encouraged to
emigrate from the Caribbean to work as nurses was so that White women
could be put back into the home after their taste of work during the War.
While White feminism was bemoaning the role of the housewife, Black
women were being conscripted into the labour force. There was nothing
novel about this. Women were incorporated into plantation society in order
to put them to work. Ideas about gender were transformed when
intersecting with race and were not simply re-enacted on different bodies.
Intersectionality is not about adding up various oppressions, but rather
accounting for the interplay of race, gender, class and other divisions.21
There have been attempts to treat an analysis of racism in intersectionality
as optional but this completely undermines the concept.22 Racism is always
there, an ever-present factor shaping the way we relate to each other and
society. There is no way to understand how patriarchy plays out for Black,
White or Brown women without considering the colonial logic of Western
imperialism. For instance, rape was permissible on the plantations because
Black women were seen as subhuman, not only the property of the master
but chattels who had no rights that needed to be respected. White women
were also subject to rape, but there really is no comparison to the systemic
sexual violence used against the enslaved. Thomas Thistlewood, for
example, was a Brit who worked his way up the slavery system in Jamaica,
starting as an overseer in 1750 and eventually owning his own plantation.
He is notable only because he kept a diary of his barbarous exploits that
remains a testimony to the horrors of slavery. He kept a log of the 3,852
sexual ‘encounters’ he had in his sorry life, the majority of those being with
enslaved Africans.23 The fact that there appears to be debate as to whether
these were consensual tells us just how poor understandings of both race
and gender are in society. Thistlewood documented his subjection of
numerous women to repeated rapes, none of which were considered crimes
because of their racial status as slaves. Women do not escape colonial logic
because of their gender. The same is true of White women, who benefit
from Western imperialism.
The liberalization of gender roles in the West is built on the same benefits
from empire as those which accrued to the working classes. Gendered
inequalities in the underdeveloped world are not a result of backward
attitudes that can be undone with some Western education but are rooted in
the political and economic system. For instance, when child mortality is
high there is a need to have large families because the chances are some of
the children will not survive. The role of women then becomes largely
reproductive, delivering as many children as possible to ensure that the
family can continue. Children are also necessary as labourers because pay
and conditions are so poor. When women’s roles are seen as wholly
reproductive, this intensifies a public–private dichotomy where the man is
seen as the breadwinner, the earner. It should be no surprise then that boys
are more valuable in such societies because they can work rather than
reproduce. The liberalization of gender roles in the West was dependent on
improving child mortality rates because this meant that women could afford
to have fewer children, safe in the knowledge they would likely survive to
adulthood. In the underdeveloped world, where we have seen child
mortality rates decrease in recent decades, there has also been a decrease in
the number of children per woman, reducing the maternity imperative. If
current trends continue, with improved access to health, we will reach ‘peak
child’ in 2057 when the average number of children per woman globally
will be two (down from over five in 1950), meaning that the population will
not continue to grow exponentially.24 It is because of the riches bestowed
on the West from imperialism that women’s equality is at an advanced
stage.
We have not even mentioned how the riches stolen from the
underdeveloped world allow for higher wages, the welfare state and
therefore no need for child labourers to make ends meet. Contrary to
popular belief, girls not being able to go to school in the underdeveloped
world is not the same problem as the gender pay gap, thanks to the differing
ways they experience womanhood, due to the intersection of race and
gender. Women in the West are simply battling for equality of access to the
resources leached from the underdeveloped world, the exploitation of which
is a direct cause of why girls around the globe have poorer access to
schooling.
The New Age of Empire focuses on tracing the colonial logic of the West
and explores how Whiteness is embedded into the political and economic
system. In doing so I have not specifically engaged in how the application
of empire is gendered. Tracing the histories and legacies of racial patriarchy
is central to a complete understanding of Western imperialism, but such a
task would require at least another book, and more likely several. It is my
hope that this book can be useful for taking that vital work forward.

POST-RACIALISM
If the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he does not
exist, then the proudest achievement of Western imperialism is the delusion
that we have moved beyond racism, that we are in a post-racial society. We
are assured that the real people losing out are not minorities, or those in the
underdeveloped world, but White people who are being left behind by a
changing world. It is multiculturalism, immigration and globalization that
are all conspiring to hold White people down. In this climate the right have
even managed to hijack the legacy of Martin Luther King.
On the forty-seventh anniversary of the infamous ‘I have a dream’ speech
Glenn Beck, a quasi-fascist talk radio host who had previously declared
Obama ‘a racist who hates White culture’, took thousands of mostly White
Tea Party supporters to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, invoking King’s
famous speech.25 He even brought along one of King’s nieces, Alveda
King, to burnish his post-racial credentials. The march was in order to
‘restore the honor’ of the US by turning to God and also to raise money for
a charity providing finance to the children of special forces killed in action.
Alveda King’s address urged the audience to ‘focus not on elections or on
political causes but on honor, on character … not the color of our skin’, as
well as supporting Beck’s vision that ‘there is one human race … we are not
here to divide. I’m about unity.’ She really twisted the post-racial knife
when she announced the reason she was speaking was to ‘honor’ her
uncle.26 Malcolm X denounced the 1963 March on Washington as a
‘farce’, a ‘circus with clowns and all’, due to its integrationist ‘love thy
enemy’ approach.27 After this debacle he is probably teasing a furious King
with taunts of ‘I told you so.’
King’s speech must be one of the most abused political statements of all
time. A militant campaigner for racial justice who was widely unpopular
when he died, has been transformed into the cuddly uncle (Tom) of the
nation, used to ease the conscience of White America. The mechanism for
this whitewashing of King is primarily the most famous soundbite from his
dream that his ‘four little children will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character’.28 Rather than viewing this comment in the context of trying to
solve racial inequality, it has been turned on its head to avoid addressing the
very issues that King spent his life fighting against.
The yearnings for the good old days of empire or Jim Crow could be
used to indicate that there has been a fundamental shift, that we actually are
in a post-racial moment thanks to all the progress that has been made over
the last fifty years. Nothing could be further from the truth. Critical Race
Theory (CRT) emerged in the United States in the late eighties precisely
because those involved in key civil rights reforms realized just how limited
they were.29 So successful was the civil rights movement that the United
States now has affirmative action, something unimaginable in Britain. But
for all the successes, and the likes of Jay-Z having too much money and too
little sense to work with the NFL, the nation remains a beacon of racial
inequality. Segregation is more of a problem today than after the landmark
Brown vs Board of Education decision; poverty is still a blight on Black
communities; the police continue to gun down the Black population; and
there are new problems like mass incarceration that have made apartheid-
era South Africa the correct analogy for the US race problem.30 Britain is
no better, with stark racial inequalities in every area of social life; police
brutality and abuse of power; steep economic differences; health
inequalities; and unemployment.31 If you want one statistic to tell you the
scale of racial injustice in Britain then the fact that over half of the juvenile
prison population is from an ethnic minority should send shudders down
your spine.32 It is not just that we are making no strides towards freedom
but as Derrick Bell, one of the founders of CRT explained, ‘what we
designate as “racial progress” is not a solution to that problem. It is a
regeneration of the problem in a particularly perverse form.’33 By creating
enough opportunity for a Black middle class, and dare I say Black
professors, to exist we have given fuel to the lie that everyone can make it if
they would only just try hard enough and ignore the chips on their
shoulders. This of course is utter nonsense for those of us discriminated
against in the West and an even more ludicrous suggestion if applied to the
underdeveloped world. The purpose of this book is to put the final nail in
the coffin of the post-racial narrative, illustrating just how fundamental the
racist logic of empire remains in shaping the world.
 1

I’m White, Therefore I Am

‘Of course the Enlightenment was racist,’ I responded to Emily Maitlis on

the BBC television show Newsnight, when asked about the intellectual
movement that underpins Western society. It was 2017 and I was debating
the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) student union’s
campaign demanding that ‘the majority of philosophers’ taught on their
courses should be from Africa and Asia. Rather than questioning why the
intellectual production of a narrow parade of dead White men was ever
deemed a suitable basis of knowledge to understand the regions, the
students’ mild demands caused an uproar in sections of the British media
and the university establishment.1 The head of philosophy at SOAS called
the demands ‘rather ridiculous’2 and a slew of right-wing commentators
lined up to decry the ‘crackpot’ head of the union and the generation of
‘snowflake students’ who were too wrapped up in their security blankets of
political correctness to understand the real world.3 The backlash against the
SOAS movement was part of a wider reaction to the student-led movements
that asked ‘Why is my curriculum White?’ and campaigned to ‘decolonize
the university’.4 As one of the founders of the first Black Studies degree in
Europe I was there to give a counterpoint to the tired Eurocentric dogma
that cherishes the Enlightenment as though it were holy.
The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emerged
from Western Europe and the United States and is the intellectual basis of
the modern world. Condemning the sacred foundations of Western
knowledge as racist did not go down well with either the establishment or a
large segment of the Twitter commentariat, but I wasn’t exaggerating for
greater impact. My words were simply an honest and indisputable
assessment of the intellectual movement. In his criticism of the SOAS
students, my adversary in the debate Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of
the University of Buckingham and author of numerous biographies of
British prime ministers, accidentally hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t have
put it better myself – he said that ‘we need to understand the world as it was
and not to rewrite history as some might like it to have been.’ 5 If we were
to do this then we would understand the Enlightenment as the racist
intellectual project it was, and how culpable the ideas it produced are in
creating the unjust world we inhabit.
These debates are not simply academic. The world can only ever be as
equal as the knowledge it is built upon. The Enlightenment emerged at a
time when Europe had laid waste to much of the world through genocide
and slavery and was asserting its dominance through colonial expansion.
The arrogance of its thinkers was only possible due to the violence of the
first version of Western empire. The ‘great thinkers’ found themselves on
top of the world as a result and theorized about their apparent supremacy.
One of their purposes was to provide the justification for the genocide,
slavery and colonialism that were utterly indispensable to Western progress.
The Enlightenment was pivotal in the shift into the new age of empire: it
provided the universalist, supposedly rational and scientific framework of
knowledge that maintained colonial logic. It is heresy to question the dead
White men because their bodies of work lie at the foundation of the current
unjust social order. To push them aside would lead to the system crashing
down. Understanding how the Enlightenment and racism cannot be
separated is the first step in truly appreciating that colonial logic still
governs the world today.

YOU KANT BE SERIOUS

In the history of European thought we are presented with all the positive
aspects of the sainted philosophers and none of the negative. There is
perhaps no better example of this Whitewashing of the record than
Immanuel Kant. I never realized how cherished an icon Kant was until I
pointed out he was racist on television. Apparently, criticizing Kant is the
academic equivalent of questioning the morality of Jesus. His Critique of
Pure Reason is offered not only as the basis for anti-racism but as the
atonement for the sins of all mankind. I was surprised to find out that so
many held the man and his work so dear, or that they had even read it. What
is abundantly clear is that few have read Kant’s extensive writing on race,
where his racism is simply a matter of historical fact.
Even a scant review of his work would reveal Kant as a violent and ugly
racist who saw ‘humanity at its greatest perfection in the race of the
Whites’. Kant’s writing career spanned the second half of the eighteenth
century, after the genocide of the natives in the Americas and during the
peak of the transatlantic slave trade. He generously acknowledged that ‘the
yellow [Asian] Indians do have a meagre talent’ but asserted that the
‘Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the
American peoples’.6 His belief that the ‘Negro’ was ‘lazy, indolent and
dawdling’7 was not just used to disparage Black people but also to justify
enslavement. Kant even used his pseudo-scientific approach to advise the
most efficient way to beat the ‘indolent’ Negroes to get them to be
productive labourers. He explained that it was best to

use a split bamboo cane instead of a whip, so that the Negro will
suffer a great deal of pains (because of the Negro’s thick skin, he
would not be racked with sufficient agonies through a whip) but
without dying … the blood needs to find a way out of the Negro’s
thick skin to avoid festering.8

Prior to writing this book I had always known that the idea you can separate
Kant’s racism from his intellectual output is nonsense, but to see it so
clearly illustrated in his own words is shocking. The devil really is in the
detail. Not only did he use his ‘intellect’ to devise ways to inflict torture on
Africans, his work was some of the most influential in creating the modern
idea of so-called races and White supremacy.9
He outlined four different races based on biology and climate: White; the
Negro; the Hun (Mongol or Kalmuck); and the Hindu or Hindustani.10 He
detested Native Americans the most but thought they were a ‘Hunnish race
… not yet fully acclimated’.11 For Kant, geography was the key
determining factor in racial categorizations. He argued that all the
‘inhabitants of the hottest zones are, without exceptions, idle’.12 These
declarations about the different races were not separate from his moral
philosophy but an integral part of it. For Kant, through ‘moral geography’ it
was possible to grasp the true nature of what it meant to be human. His
pursuit was to find an ‘inner nature upon which to found moral
existence’.13 But, for him, this was not possible without the exterior of
moral geography, because he thought the climate shaped the extent to which
the different races possessed the talents necessary for moral development.
Importantly, these climates produce biological adaptions that become fixed
as different races even if people move to other parts of the world.
Kant’s explanation of how ‘blackness’ emerges is the perfect example of
his racial logic:

The growth of the spongy parts of the body had to increase in a hot
and humid climate. This growth produced a thick, turned up nose
and thick, fatty lips. The skin had to be oily, not only to lessen the
too heavy perspiration, but also to ward off the harmful absorption
of the foul, humid air. The profusion of iron particles, which are
otherwise found in the blood of every human being, and, in this
case, are precipitated in the net-shaped substance through the
evaporation of the phosphoric acid (which explains why all Negroes
stink), is the cause of the blackness that shines through the
epidermis.14

These supposed biological differences are used to explain why Black people
are incapable of being fully and rationally human. In terms of attempting to
understand reason and moral existence, Kant writes off those who are not
White. We’ve already discounted ‘Negroes’, and remember he saw Native
Americans as even less useful. Of the ‘Hindus’ Kant argued that they can be
‘cultivated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences.
They never achieve the level of abstract concepts.’15 It is for this reason
that Kant focused his discovery of the state of rational human nature in
Europe; he firmly believed that ‘the White race possess all the motivating
forces and talents in itself; therefore we must examine it more closely.’16 If
ever you need a quote that explains the Eurocentric curriculum you will not
find a better one. We have only covered a few of Kant’s pronouncements on
race but already it is abundantly clear that they are not just racist, but
absurd.
In order to defend his racial theory of climate Kant produced theories
about the blood of ‘Negroes’. He also believed that ‘Hindus’ had a lower
body temperature and therefore cold hands and that the ‘long slitty, half
closed eyes’ of the ‘Hun race’ came from living in the snow and then
migrating to East Asia.17 His declarations about the races were supposedly
based on evidence but he never collected any of this first-hand and relied on
the accounts of Europeans who actually ventured out to meet the savages.
One of the most dishonest defences of Kant that is also used to defend the
rest of the racist Enlightenment thinkers is when we are told that the
‘evidence available’ to him at the time supported his racist theories.18 This
is vitally important because it maintains the delusion that science is based
on logic and reason. But as the evidence changes, so does the science, and
therefore Kant was just a hostage to his time. We see this argument even
today in the idea that advances in genetic science are all we need to undo
racism; we have the proof that race is not real so we can all move on.19 But
we should reject this notion out of hand. There was plenty of ‘evidence
available’ that directly contradicted Kant’s ideas, he just chose to select the
accounts that suited his twisted agenda. Towards the end of his career in
1788 he wrote an article where he specifically chose to dismiss the claims
of abolitionist James Ramsay, who had spent time with those of African
descent and could testify to our humanity, and elevated the accounts of the
pro-slavery James Tobin, who stressed our laziness and stupidity.20 What
made this even more remarkable is that Kant’s work is part of his response
to a challenge from the anthropologist Georg Forster, who had first-hand
experience of the supposed savages and criticized Kant for his use of
colonial stereotypes.21 Forster was interested in seeing whether Kant’s
theories could offer a notion of humanity to the enslaved, and Kant
responded by advancing pro-slavery arguments.22
His racial philosophy was not based on evidence, but a particular – racist
– view of the world, which produced an absurd racial theory. But it gets
worse: at times Kant’s ideas cross the threshold into the ludicrous. His
racial theory was so universal that he theorized it reached ‘as far as into
space’. He genuinely supposed that ‘the intelligence of creatures on
different planets depends on the distance of the planet from the centre of
gravity: the closer the planet is to the sun, the mentally lazier its
inhabitants.’23 Kant’s pronouncements are so wrong-headed and bizarre
that it should make us question his entire intellectual output. Trying to
salvage the Critique of Pure Reason from the wreckage of his racial theory
is like looking for coherent moral philosophy on a far-right conspiracy
YouTube channel.
Nevertheless, Kant still has an array of defenders who contort themselves
into various untenable positions to stand by their man. The most obvious
example of doublespeak I came across was a defence in an academic work
of his racial theory on the grounds that it ‘is not racist simply because it
claims that there are superior and inferior races’. Apparently, a theory is
only racist if it relies on a ‘culpable neglect of evidence … or expresses or
encourages contempt or disregard for people because of the race they are
alleged to belong to’.24 The fact that Kant’s theory of race is guilty of both
of these is lost on the authors. Most defenders of Kant avoid trying to make
excuses for his obviously racist theory and focus on his other works,
essentially arguing that his universalist moral philosophy eventually makes
him an outspoken critic of slavery and colonialism.
It is certainly true that in his latest writings Kant condemns colonization.
In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals he says that ‘even if a
“superior” society encounters “savages” it is not justified in settling on their
land, even with the motivation of spreading civilization.’25 But to pretend
this makes him some kind of anti-racist takes a special kind of short-
sightedness. Kant came to the realization that non-Europeans have rights
that should be respected, but this is perfectly compatible with his racial
theory. In fact, as late as 1788, just a few years before the Metaphysics of
Morals, he reaffirms that the ‘Negro … holds the lowest of all remaining
levels by which we have designated the different races’.26 These two
positions are in no way contradictory; it is entirely possible to believe that
apes should have dominion over their habitat and be free from the gun of
the poacher. It is also reminiscent of the uncomfortable reality that, during
the Victorian period in Britain, black-and-white minstrel shows were a
central part of the British abolitionist movement. ‘White men in blackface
delivered anti-racist speeches’ from the stage in performances that criticized
slavery whilst embracing the stereotypes that made it possible. If even
avowed abolitionists upheld racial hierarchies, this demonstrates just how
inescapable they were, and remain, to understanding the world.27
Kant is just one philosopher, but he is an important starting point because
his work has all the ingredients that are so potent in the regimes of
knowledge that underpin and maintain the current unjust social order. His
concept of so-called universal human rights also laid the foundation for the
United Nations and the European Union. He is so vigorously defended
because he is one of the most important architects of the new age of empire.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AS WHITE IDENTITY

POLITICS
It is no coincidence that the architects of the Enlightenment were White
men who had very exclusive views about race, class and gender. In the
effort to deflect from the movement’s inherent problems there has been a
move away from seeing the Enlightenment as a unified whole. We are
directed to the English, Scottish, French and American versions and the
debates within and between them.28 But the West is founded on collusion
beyond national borders while pretending to maintain nationalist
sovereignty. Intellectual production is certainly no exception, and while
there has obviously been plenty of quite heated debate, there is consensus
on the key issues. No concept is more important to the West than race, so it
is no surprise that on the central premises the dead White men who
represent the foundation stones of knowledge sang from the same sordid
hymn sheet.
Racial science arose as a discipline to explore the superiority of the
White race, and it is telling that basically all the key Enlightenment thinkers
were architects of its intellectual framework. Voltaire (in France) believed
that ‘none but the blind can doubt that the Whites, the Negroes, the
Albinoes [sic], the Hottentots, the Laplanders, the Chinese, the Americans,
are races entirely different.’29 Hegel (in Germany) thought that ‘Negroes
are to be regarded as a race of children who remain immersed in their state
of naïveté. They are sold and let themselves be sold without any reflection
on the rights or wrongs of the matter.’30 John Locke (in seventeenth-
century England) believed that ‘Negroes’ were the product of African
women sleeping with apes and therefore that we were subhuman.31 David
Hume (in Scotland) was ‘apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the
other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be
naturally inferior to the Whites’.32 One of the architects of the Greatest
Democracy on Earth™, Thomas Jefferson (in the United States) believed
that Black people ‘whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by
time and circumstances, are inferior to the Whites in the endowments of
both mind and body’.33 All agreed that race was real and defined in
biology that determined the extent to which a people could claim full
humanity. The racial hierarchy that the Enlightenment produced is best
summed up by the botanist Linnaeus’ (who has a university in Sweden
named after him) classification of the human species:

Europaeus albus: ingenious, white, sanguine, governed by law;

Americanus rubescus: happy with his lot, liberty loving, tanned and
irascible, governed by custom; Asiaticus luridus: yellow,
melancholy, governed by opinion; Afer niger: crafty, lazy, careless,
black, governed by the arbitrary will of the master.34

White in this metric is right and even Johann von Herder, who was first
Kant’s student and later his rival, and is often ‘either quoted … in defence
of the struggle against racialism or ignored’,35 presented the same beliefs
(albeit more poetically):

the perfect human form found a site on the coast of the

Mediterranean, where it was capable of uniting with the intellect,
and displaying all the charms of terrestrial and celestial beauty to the
mind, as well as to the eye … Here figures were conceived and
executed, which no admirer of Circassian beauty, no Indian or
Cashmirian artist, could have invented. The human form ascended
Olympus, and clothed itself in divine beauty.36

Certainly there were differences in how each of these esteemed scholars

understood what exactly race was. Whether or not the different races were
from the same original source was the first dispute. Polygenists believed
that there was more than one original man and that the races were
completely distinct, whereas monogenists believed there to be one original
source of humanity, but that White people represented the most developed,
advanced incarnation of man. Voltaire and Hume were polygenists, who
could not conceive of the lesser races having any relation to the perfection
of Whiteness. The word mulatto was applied to those of mixed heritage
because scholars such as Voltaire believed they were a ‘bastard race’
produced by the same type of inter-species breeding as the mule, the
offspring of a horse and a donkey.37 In perhaps the most obvious example
of these great intellectuals ignoring all available evidence, Voltaire was
among a number of his contemporaries who argued that just like mules,
‘mulattoes’ were infertile because they were the combination of two
different species.
Whilst the monogenists believed that all races were part of a broader
human family, this did not mean that their concepts were any less racist.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, one of the most notorious racial
theorists, believed in the single human family and that ‘if Africans were
imported to Europe, their colour would gradually change and become
“perhaps as White as the native” of Europe.’38 Later, this idea was picked
up by the monogenist-in-chief, Charles Darwin, who incorporated it into his
theory of evolution. To support this hypothesis Darwin was not the first to
cite the ‘considerable evidence showing that in the Southern states the
house-slaves of the third generation present a markedly different
appearance from the field slaves’.39 Apparently these theorists overlooked
the rape of the enslaved by slave-masters as a far more logical explanation
for the successively lighter skin tones. This is surprising not only because it
is fairly obvious, but because it would have put a nail in the coffin of the
polygenist notion that ‘mulattoes’ could not breed. But that is precisely the
point: whichever side of the debate these so-called intellectuals fell on, they
were jointly contributing to the same cause. Buffon believed in shared
descent and also that slavery was justified on the grounds that ‘Negroes’
were ‘so naturally lazy’ that they were in a ‘violent state’ if not subject to
forced labour.40 Darwin’s theory of evolution was the perfect, supposedly
scientific scheme to prove the superiority of Whites. Man evolved from
apes, and Africans, with their differently shaped bodies and skulls, were
evidence of the chain of human progression. The search for the so-called
missing link between man and ape was in reality a discussion of which
African people most closely resembled monkeys. Distinct races observed
from supposedly scientific evidence are a key feature of White supremacy.
These ideas permeate the Enlightenment and bled into the Eugenics
movement that gave the theoretical basis for the Holocaust. There is a
reason that Adolf Eichmann, who was executed for crimes against
humanity, ‘appealed to Kant in justifying his behaviour’.41
Racial science was not some marginal concern at the corners of European
philosophy, it was an integral component of its intellectual framework. See
how coldly Darwin justifies the imperial conquest by the West that cost the
lives of tens of millions:

When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the

struggle is short … New diseases and vices are highly destructive;
and it appears that in every nation a new disease causes much death,
until those who are most susceptible to its destructive influence are
gradually weeded out; and so it may be with the evil effects from
spirituous liquors, as well as with the unconquerably strong taste for
them shown by so many savages.42

Darwin was simply building off the established intellectual order. Hegel had
already declared the natives of the Americas a ‘vanishing, feeble race’, and
asserted that ‘when brought into contact with brandy and guns these
savages become extinct’.43 Whilst John Stuart Mill had proclaimed that
‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,
provided the end be their improvement’.44
To think rationally is what separates man from beast, and the whole basis
of the Enlightenment is that rational thought is the sole possession of the
White man. Even the idea of bringing light to the world – that Europe is the
beacon to shine its torch on the dark and savage corners of the globe – is
instructive. For, whatever their disagreements, the dead White men were
unified in the belief that Europe was the foundation through which
knowledge was spread. As Herder explained, ‘The Negro has invented
nothing for the European … From the region of well-formed people we
have derived our religion, our arts, our sciences, and the whole frame of our
cultivation and humanity.’45 This is nothing short of White identity
politics, racist propaganda to boost the collective self-esteem of Europe.
The truth is that Europe was not superior to the rest of the world in the
fifteenth century. If anything, the only part of the world in a Dark Age
during that period was Europe, and it was only through violence and the
murder of hundreds of millions that the West established its superiority.
Imperial violence created the blank slate, the intellectual terra nullius
(empty land) from which the Enlightenment thinkers emerged with their
claims to a unique form of rationality and understanding.46 Had the world
not been built in the image of White supremacy the racial intellectual
framework of the Enlightenment would have been impossible. It was self-
evident that the natives of the Americas were inferior because they had been
exterminated. ‘Negroes’ were obviously closer to livestock than humans
because they were enslaved. Indians had nothing noteworthy to contribute
because the West had already plundered their societies. It is from the rubble
of colonial slaughter that supposedly universal reason emerges.
Enlightenment thinkers claimed that to be rational, to think, to be human,
was to be European. In other words, ‘I’m White, therefore I am’, and the
imperial world at their feet was all the empirical evidence they needed to
justify this claim. To sustain this belief, the truth about knowledge, science
and reason had to first be erased.
Kant once noted Hume’s challenge for ‘anyone to cite a simple example
in which a Negro has shown talents’, arguing that ‘not a single one was ever
found who presented anything great in art or science or any other
praiseworthy quality’.47 In the twenty-first century it should not be
necessary to offer a corrective to such racist fantasies. Unfortunately, I have
been involved in far too many conversations with supposedly educated
people to know that the idea that Europe produced science and reason is all
too alive and well. So let’s take up Hume’s challenge and take it further.
Not only can we find plenty of examples of talented ‘Negroes’, but the
foundation of the knowledge we have today lies almost exclusively outside
the West.

DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE
At the end of the fifteenth century Europe had been largely isolated from
the rest of the world for centuries, ever since the collapse of the Roman
Empire. The region was in a Dark Age dominated by religious dogma and
feudal repression, and aside from the crusades into the Muslim world had
little thought of, or interest in, conquering the globe. This was the age when
Christian beliefs supposedly explained the universe, and located the earth at
the centre of Creation. Such beliefs limited the European imagination, most
notably the idea that the world was flat and that to travel over the horizon
would lead to falling into the abyss. As I will discuss, 1492 marked the
beginning of the West, but importantly it also coincided with the fall of the
empire that Europe most directly drew its intellectual tradition from.
Columbus’s maiden voyage was delayed until the Spanish had conquered
Al-Andalus and driven the Moorish Empire out of Spain.48 For the 700
years prior to this, a large part of the south of the country had been ruled by
a Muslim empire that stretched out of North Africa. In fact, by the early
eighth century the Muslims occupied over 5 million square miles of land, an
area larger than the Roman Empire.49 Only once they were defeated could
the West begin its path to global domination.
By all accounts the Moorish occupation of southern Spain brought
unparalleled levels of progress and development to the region. Prior to the
Moors it had been ruled by the Visigoths who were so brutal and barbaric
that the locals welcomed their foreign invaders as liberators. More than half
the population had recently (707–9) died in a famine. When their Muslim
saviours arrived they brought with them eastern ‘sophistication’ including
the development of canals, irrigation techniques and farming expertise as
well as relative luxuries like toothpaste, hairstyling and cutlery.50 Córdoba
became a centre of knowledge and learning under the Moors and in the
tenth century a university famous for astronomy was founded in the
legendary Mezquita. In her book The Map of Knowledge historian Violet
Moller gives us an indication of just how far advanced the Muslim world
was compared to Europe during this period:

twelfth-century scholar Bernard of Chartres [France] was proud of

the twenty-four books he owned, but, in 1258, the city of Baghdad
boasted thirty-six public libraries and over a hundred book
merchants. The largest medieval library in Christian Europe, at the
Abbey of Cluny, contained a few hundred books, while the royal
library of Córdoba had 400,000.51

Throughout the Muslim Empire learning flourished and cities like Baghdad
competed for the honour of being the capital of knowledge production.
Ophthalmology, medicine and astronomy all thrived. In ninth-century
Baghdad scientists studying at Caliph Al-Ma’um’s ‘House of Wisdom’
could calculate the circumference of the world to within 400 miles of
modern measurements using astronomy. The algorithms that determine so
much of twenty-first century life are named after the Persian scholar Al-
Khwarizmi, and for the concept of zero we owe a debt to Hindu intellectual
Bramahgupta’s Siddhanta, which was written in the seventh century. These
are simple truths in direct contradiction of Enlightenment thinkers’ ideas
that only Europeans were capable of abstract thought. So central was the
Muslim world to scholarship that Christian scholar Paul Alvarus of Córdoba
lamented in the ninth century that ‘all talented young Christians read and
study with enthusiasm Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great
expense … they have forgotten their own language’.52
At the heart of the intellectual tradition in the Muslim world was the
acquisition and writing of books. After the fall of the Roman Empire there
was little left of the once-great library in Alexandria or of the key texts
essential to preserving knowledge. It was scholars in the Muslim world who
went about securing and translating the classic texts as well as adding to
them with new discoveries. Arabic became the language of knowledge until
the fifteenth century. Once Europe asserted its dominion this was no longer
allowed to be the case. Erasure of non-Europeans was at the core of the
Western project in terms of both actual slaughter and symbolic destruction.
After Granada was conquered by the Spanish, the powerful Cardinal
Ximenéz de Cisneros, in his position as part of the Spanish Inquisition,
organized a book burning on an almost unimaginable scale. In the city’s
main square almost 2 million Arabic books were incinerated because he
thought that to ‘destroy the written word is to deprive a culture of its soul,
and eventually its identity’.53 Although the books were burnt, their content
was not always lost. Latin translations had been made to Europeanize the
knowledge, the Arabic names changed to Latin ones. Ibn Sina, an eleventh-
century Persian scientist credited with being the founder of modern
medicine, became Avicenna. Abbas al-Zahrawi, who pioneered surgical
techniques in Córdoba in the tenth century, was transformed into Abulcasis.
By burning books and libraries and Whitewashing history, Western
intellectual thought was able to start from a clean slate of White supremacy.
It is likely that the Enlightenment scholars genuinely believed they had
inherited their knowledge solely from Europe, given the source material
they were working from.
Tracing the history of knowledge through the Muslim world is important
but also has limitations. For a start we could also explore the knowledge
produced in the rest of Asia: China has had unbroken civilization for
thousands of years. Then there’s the indigenous knowledges of the
Americas and Australia. The other major limitation is that this narrative
ends up leading back to Greece, where the texts that the Islamic scholars
were translating and building upon were largely produced. We could
therefore add in the Muslim world and still end up with a Eurocentric
foundation of knowledge. In The Map of Knowledge, from which I have
drawn many of the above examples, it is exactly this intellectual geography
that is reproduced. This is made worse by the exclusion of Timbuktu in
what is now Mali, which was at the heart of Muslim scholarship from as
early as the twelfth century when the University of Sankore was founded.
By the sixteenth century the university had grown to teach 25,000 students
and the library was one of the largest in the world, with hundreds of
thousands of manuscripts.54 The erasure of Africa from intellectual history
continues in the book when the only Egyptian city that appears in it is
Alexandria during its occupation by the Roman Empire. After reading it
you could be forgiven for thinking that Egypt played a negligible part in the
history of knowledge, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Prior to Greek civilization, Egypt reigned as the centre of progress for
thousands of years. The Greeks learned from the Egyptians and even their
‘cult of the Gods’.55 Egypt was undoubtedly well advanced in science
before Greece was. The pyramids alone are testimony to the civilization’s
scientific achievements. In school we learn that Archimedes discovered pi
in the third century BC, but if you divide half the perimeter of the Great
Pyramid of Giza, built over 2,000 years earlier, by its height, the number
you come to is an approximation of pi. It is clear that the level of
development in Egypt far outstripped anything in Europe at the time: even
scholars in early Europe agreed that the Egyptians, and before them the
Ethiopians, produced developed civilizations whilst Europe was in a stage
of ‘deep barbarism’.56 Just as Europeans Whitewashed the Muslims out of
their intellectual history, so the Greeks did the Egyptians. The most
excruciating example of this was Imhotep (c. 2700–2611), the great
Egyptian scientist and one of the earliest founders of medicine, who became
worshipped as Asclepius by the Greeks. Historical Whitewashing would be
bad enough, but in the 1999 film The Mummy Imhotep is the character they
choose to raise from the dead, and depicts an evil monster who wants to
rule the world. Imagine watching a movie where Aristotle comes back to
life to destroy the world and you have the scale of intellectual sacrilege we
are dealing with. As if defaming a dead scholar was not enough, the film
also managed to reproduce the commonplace racist depiction of the ancient
Egyptians by Hollywood.
Imhotep was played in the film by Arnold Vosloo, an actor who grew up
in apartheid South Africa. Usually, ancient Egyptians are misrepresented as
the Arabs who dominate the area today. In Vosloo’s case they browned-up
an actor classified as White by the apartheid regime. As I will discuss in
Chapter 2, Egypt is sealed off from ‘Africa proper’ in the intellectual
imagination. We are told its inhabitants were not part of Black Africa but
rather the Mediterranean, so that it can be annexed into the Western
tradition of intellectual thought. The truth is that though the country, and
North Africa, is now predominantly Arab this was not the case at the time of
the ancient Egyptian civilization. The Arab invasion of North Africa
occurred in the seventh century, in the same move that saw the Moors take
over southern Spain. In his classic work The African Origin of Civilization,
African intellectual Cheik Anta Diop forensically delivers the evidence in
terms of sculptures, artwork and history that the ancient Egyptians were
Black. He explains that ‘whenever the Egyptians use the word “Black”
(khem) it is to designate themselves or their country: Kemit, land of the
Blacks.’57 He also traces Egyptian civilization back to Ethiopians who
migrated north. The reality that maths, science and medicine were being
practised across Africa centuries before the Greeks imagined any of them to
be possible is undeniable. By focusing on the written word recorded in
books we have ignored the truth that ‘Africa is home to mathematical
bodies of knowledge so vital they provide the bedrock of modern
computing’.58 In her excellent book Don’t Touch My Hair, Emma Dabiri
uses the patterns encoded in African hairstyles as evidence of complex
mathematical formulas that have been used on the continent for centuries.
For instance, in braiding patterns widely used in Africa for centuries we can
see a representation of infinity. This may not sound particularly important,
but the concept of infinity was so far beyond the comprehension of the
Greeks it was associated with ‘paradox and pathology’.59 In 1877,
European scholar Georg Cantor tried to represent the concept but was
denounced as a heretic and ended his days in an asylum. His treatment,
even in the so-called age of reason, harks back to how scientists were
treated in fifth-century Greece: ‘In 415, a mob of Christian zealots
murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia. Believing her to be a
witch they flayed her alive with oyster shells.’60 Whilst infinity is
commonplace in traditional African hairstyles, village design and clothing,
it took centuries for the West to catch up.
It was also not as though the Enlightenment thinkers needed to go far to
find evidence of Black intelligence: there was plenty of it, they simply
chose to ignore it. In direct response to Hume’s challenge that Kant used as
evidence for Black inferiority we can present Thomas Fuller, an enslaved
African in eighteenth-century Virginia. He was so talented in mathematics
that he could ‘accurately count the hairs in a cow’s tail, or the number of
grains in bushels of wheat or flax seed’ doing ‘complex astronomy-related
calculations that today would be done by computers’.61 Fuller imported his
mathematical genius into the United States from his education in West
Africa before he was stolen into slavery. He was just one of countless
examples of Black excellence that Europeans were well aware of but which
were always discounted, interpreted as some kind of exception that proved
the rules of racism. For example, Phyllis Wheatley was taken into slavery
around 1760, but rose to become a world-renowned poet. Still, Thomas
Jefferson discounted her talent, arguing that it was impossible to ‘find that a
black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw an
elementary trait of painting or sculpture … Religion, indeed, has produced a
Phyllis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet.’62 Of course Wheatley
was just parroting White skills through her rigorous training, rather than
being capable of actually producing poetry. In direct conflict to everything
we are told about Western science, time and again the great thinkers of the
time ignored the clear empirical evidence around them in order to protect
the superiority that lay at the heart of their White identity politics.
In Jefferson’s case this was particularly egregious given that he not only
owned enslaved Africans but subjected one of his ‘property’ to long-term
sexual abuse. Jefferson’s so-called relationship with Sally Hemings began
when she was fourteen and his abuse of her continued for years. She bore
him several children, who were freed, but Hemings remained Jefferson’s
captive until he died. Jefferson’s ‘affection’ for Hemings and his children
did not dissuade him from his White supremacist philosophy.
Notwithstanding his obsession with Hemings, he asserted the ‘superior
beauty’ of the White race; that Black people gave off a very strong and
disagreeable odour; and that Black women preferred sleeping with orang-
utans than with Black men.63 These ideas were ideological, and the
available evidence was twisted to fit his diseased view of the world.
As should by now be obvious, the central thesis of the Enlightenment –
that knowledge and reason spreads out from Europe – is entirely bogus. It is
not an exaggeration to say that Europe is responsible for very few genuinely
new ideas and made its advances by building on an inheritance of
knowledge derived from other parts of the world. Science, maths, medicine,
reason and even political organization all have their roots in the world
outside the West, while Europe had a scant awareness of these concepts.
Even racism was not a novel European idea. As I will discuss in Chapter 2,
the Arab slave trade pre-dates Europe’s, and when Columbus started
enslaving the natives of the Americas it was for markets in the Muslim
world. As we have seen in this chapter, Western racial science codified the
idea of White supremacy based on biological superiority to the so-called
lesser races. But in the fourteenth century the Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun
was hundreds of years ahead of the dead White men in declaring that
Africans ‘have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are
quite similar to those of dumb animals’.64 Before we get too carried away,
although the West may not have birthed the idea of racism, it found its
prosperity by exploiting the concept to its fullest.
On the one hand, it is important to destroy the notion of the
Enlightenment as some unique achievement of Western civilization, to
recognize that it was built on a foundation of global knowledge. But we
should not give up on the idea that it is an utterly transcendent intellectual
tradition upon which the success of the West is built. It may be exclusive,
wrong and racist but that is simply the nature of the West. Without the racial
intellectual framework inherited from the Enlightenment the current version
of Western empire would be impossible. Decolonizing the curriculum has to
mean more than being a bit critical of Kant or adding some diversity to
reading lists. If, and this is a big if, we want to build an anti-racist society
we need to completely rethink the underlying basis of the knowledge that
produces the world.
 WHITE WORLD SUPREMACY
The global economy today is built in the image of White supremacy that
was so neatly outlined by the Enlightenment thinkers. Africa is the poorest
continent on earth, while the countries with White majorities are the richest.
We only need to look at Linnaeus’ ladder of the species to understand the
political and economic system. These debates are not simply about the past,
because the Enlightenment shapes our present: a society can only be as fair
as the knowledge it is built on, and established Western intellectual thought
is rooted in racism. The most frustrating aspect of the way in which the
Enlightenment is used is that we are told to believe ‘it is reason that will
enable us to solve the problem’, if only we can just shine light on the
relevant evidence.65 Absent from this propaganda is the reality that
Western concepts of reason can never be the solution to the problem of
racism they helped to create and continue to maintain. Ignorance was never
the issue: Western reason is based on White supremacy, the idea that those
at the top of the racial hierarchy have the monopoly on knowledge. Freeing
ourselves from the very nature of this intellectual framework is essential.
One of the main areas used to illustrate the positive contribution of the
Western intellectual framework is the arena of human rights, which is
deeply invested in the Enlightenment tradition.66 Key documents like the
US Bill of Rights and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of
Man are celebrated as the sacred texts of our freedoms, which are
guaranteed by the human rights agenda. It is in this narrative that Locke,
Hume, Kant, Voltaire and Hegel are applauded for their heroic theories of
individual rights and freedom. The only problem is that you cannot separate
their theories of rights from their racism, which goes to the core of their
intellectual output.
A case in point is the American framework of rights. All men were
apparently created equal – apart from Black men, of course. When the
founding fathers were designing the Bill of Rights at the 1787
Constitutional Convention in the newly formed United States, they came
upon the issue of representation for states based on population. The
Southern states wanted to ensure that their slave populations could be used
to give them representational power in the new nation. But a beast could
obviously not be taken to be equal to a White person, and could certainly
never vote. Therefore it was agreed that each of the enslaved would account
for three-fifths of a White full human being. A dissenting voice from
Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry objected ‘why should their representation be
increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, [rather] than
[on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?’67
It was not only race that limited rights in the United States:68 full rights
were granted solely to those who were wealthy, White and male. It should
be no surprise that it was only that same group who were able to access
university education at the time, where they created a framework of
knowledge and rights that only their kind could enjoy. Yale, one of the most
prestigious universities in the world, takes its name from Elihu Yale, a slave
trader who also enriched himself in colonial India. There is perhaps no
better representative of the unbreakable links to colonial violence and
knowledge, but Yale is by no means alone.
The racist nature of inclusion in democracy is not incidental; it was
embedded in those who were creating the concept of rights. Full
participation in humanity was reserved for White and wealthy men while
everyone else’s rights were contingent. We could presume that extending
rights only to White people was based on the erroneous assumption that
other so-called races were not human, and that now that those notions have
been (largely) cast aside these universal rights can be applied to all the
human family. While that might be a comforting idea, it is a dangerous one,
and ignores the basic framework of both knowledge and the political and
economic system in the last 200 years.
When the Enlightenment is presented as the architect of the anti-
imperialist movement it is on the basis that the movement eventually
accepted that freedom means tolerating the diversity, or pluralism, that
makes up humanity.69 Ultimately, this is the position Kant arrives at in his
later works. Whereas previously he used his ‘moral geography’ to justify
the enslavement of the savages, he later saw that even though the natives
were inferior they too possessed rights. But to pretend that this transformed
his basic position is delusional. Kant essentially believed that ‘special
protection’ was needed for the ‘childlike’ races, who could not be trusted to
look after themselves.70 We become accepted into the human family but
forever frozen in a state of nature, destined to remain a step below in the
racial hierarchy. We have the right to life, but the standard of that life was
never thought to be at the level of the enlightened European. So, not only
does Kant contribute to the theory of racial hierarchy, he also outlines a
moral universalist philosophy that can be summed up most neatly in
Kipling’s idea of the ‘White man’s burden’. Here we can see the fatal
weaknesses in the framework of human rights. It emerged at a time when it
was understood that only White men were fully human citizens and that
everyone else was deserving of rights according to their place in the
hierarchy of ‘moral geography’. Diderot ‘praised the primitive and rejected
the civilized … specifically celebrat[ing] the sexual freedom of
Tahitians’.71 Reminiscent of Rousseau’s idea that savages lived in a state of
nature which was purer than the rational world of Europeans, there was a
celebration of their perceived basic and carnal instincts. In this framework
the Tahitians have the right to maintain their supposedly backward ways of
life, stuck for ever historically as the happy, smiling natives at peace with a
world they do not truly understand.
I’ve seen these ideas at play countless times when having discussions
about global poverty. Well-meaning volunteers to the underdeveloped world
often come back fulfilled by the work they have done and contented with
the idea that the people they have met have been so ‘happy’ with their lives.
When you ask about the grinding poverty and conditions in which the
natives struggle, you are chastised for applying ‘Western’ ideals. In the
Enlightenment framework, humanity is not universal, it is contextual,
allowing us to provide a completely different set of standards of individual
rights across the world.
As seen in the example of the original US Constitution, property was at
the foundation of how rights were granted. The same was true in Europe,
where in order to vote, to have full rights, you had to be White, male and
have money. Even White women only had a set of individual rights which
disqualified them from taking part in democracy. The classed basis for the
franchise is important too, because this economic limitation to rights is still
in place today. There are no longer economic restrictions directly placed on
voting rights in the West and most countries around the world have some
sort of voting system. But wealth is indispensable to the kind of rights you
will be afforded. Take for instance the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child that offers universal rights to young people around the globe. Article
six has two parts, firstly that ‘every child has the inherent right to life’ and
secondly that all ‘parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the
survival and development of the child’. Sounds reasonable enough, but look
more closely: the ‘maximum extent possible’ is wildly different depending
on where you live. In the West child deaths are extremely rare and most
often occur in tragic circumstances. However, a child in the underdeveloped
world dies every ten seconds because they have no proper access to food
and water. The UN Convention in theory stresses the rights of those
children, but in practice absolves signatories from ensuring those rights are
achieved, due to their economic circumstances. That is the cultural
pluralism which is the hallmark of Enlightenment reason.
It is a diversity that we accept all the time, whenever we enjoy the
benefits of sweatshop labour or purchase smartphones powered by minerals
stolen out of Africa’s ground. Because living standards are so much lower
in the underdeveloped world, we have normalized a different framework of
reality. When children’s rights are discussed in the West, apart from in the
context of abuse, the topics are about the right to play or to not have too
much stress from exams. In the underdeveloped world they are still stuck on
the basic right to life. Vitally, these different economic conditions are racist.
It is no coincidence that the poorest countries are the darkest ones. The
West created a racial global order and then built a framework of rights that
would maintain the status quo.
A major vehicle for maintaining this uneven pluralism of rights is the
nation state. Sovereign nations were meant to deliver rights through their
constitutions and their representative democracies. Hopefully, it is easy to
see how this enshrines the unequal global order, making it the responsibility
of the nation state only to provide rights for its citizens. If nations were
empires, like Britain, then the colonial populations were subject to a
different set of rules and rights.72 It was Kant who first imagined a
supranational collection of states to govern world affairs, something akin to
the UN. It is the UN that has to ratify national sovereignty but, in testimony
to the elastic nature of nation states, the only consistent aspect of their
definition is that they have been legally recognized as individual states.73
Rather than being natural systems of organization, nation states are
containers used to control the political order. While the UN may look
democratic from the outside, with its one-member-one-vote in the General
Assembly, the organization is governed by fiat from the Security Council,
with four of the five permanent members – France, the United States,
Britain and Russia – being White Western countries. China is the exception
whose economic might could not be ignored. This is again the cultural
pluralism of rights: all nations have a right to a seat at the table, but only the
preordained ones get to decide what to eat.
Worse still, by operating under the framework of universal rights, the
West is free to moralize over its superior democracy and human rights
records compared to the underdeveloped world. The solution to the
problems of impoverished nation states is explained as the deficit of rights
and freedom: if only they had more democracy and good governance, then
of course they would prosper. The failure to provide economic freedom and
basic rights belongs to the nation state and the West has absolved itself of
all responsibility. The West has maintained its control over the world by
Balkanizing Africa into individual nation states so that it can be more
effectively managed and controlled.74 This would appear to be
contradictory to the universalist moral philosophy but, as we have seen, the
only aspect of these ideas that is universal is that the globe should be
exploited on the principle of White supremacy.
Ultimately, the problem of the human rights framework is its perceived
focus on the individual. The Enlightenment search for the moral agent, the
rational core of humanity, was based on finding the uniqueness at the heart
of man. This is usually taken to mean that what is true for one accounts for
all, and therefore we are presented with a universal theory that elevates all
humanity. As we have discussed, this is untrue. Human nature was
theorized to be influenced by the external (racial factors) which determined
the talents that people had to reach human potential. Full, rational, moral
humanity was not understood as something that all humans achieved, only
those with White skin. Therefore, the individual could be understood only
through their race and through their gender. It is for this reason that there
was no contradiction in Jefferson declaring that ‘all people were created
equal’ whilst owning Africans. He saw them as ‘Negroes’, chattels, not in
the category of human. All of the founding texts upon which the human
rights framework was built were designed as the rights of White men.
Within the West these rights have been extended, to some extent, to those
who are not White and male. But countless Black people killed by the
police would strongly contest their right to life. To be a full human being is
still defined in Whiteness, the unquestioned right to freedom and prosperity
that even the most privileged minority can only dream of. It remains the
case that those who reside in the underdeveloped world are not afforded
these rights. African migrants are left to drown crossing the Mediterranean;
sweatshop workers in Asia are subject to medieval conditions; migrants in
Latin America are brutalized on their journeys to find freedom; and Black
and Brown children die by the second. The architecture of a society that
creates these injustices is the Enlightenment and its universalist philosophy.
The transition of Kant from adviser of slave drivers to opponent of
colonialism is important because it marks the shift from the first version of
Western empire, one that was rooted in violence and direct control, to the
emergence of the updated system.
The Enlightenment was a product of the first stage of Western
imperialism, with slavery and colonialism clearing the ground for its
intellectual project. It then provided the intellectual bridge to the new age of
empire, which maintains colonial logic but has clothed itself in the
legitimacy of democracy, human rights and universal values. It is essential
that we unlearn the distorted view of history that we have been conditioned
into. We will explore the truth of how the West brutally established its
imperial dominance before the dawning of a new, more enlightened, age of
empire. To do so means starting at the beginning of the tale, in 1492 when
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
 2

Genocide

In the wake of protests following the murder of George Floyd statues of

Christopher Columbus became a target. Across the United States
monuments were beheaded, vandalized, torched and even torn down
entirely.1 The anger at Columbus shows the power he still holds in the
psyche of the nation, as does President Trump’s 4 July speech celebrating
the Italian as the person who ‘discovered America’.2 The reverence for
Columbus has a long history, particularly in Colorado, which is where the
Columbus national holiday celebrations first started.
In 2016 Denver City Council announced they would be celebrating
Indigenous Peoples’ Day rather than marking Columbus Day. This came
about as a result of decades of activism, notably in 1992 when, minutes
before it was due to start, the Columbus Day parade had to be cancelled
because 500 protestors descended on the scene.3 Halting the march in
Denver was seen as a key victory for the activists because the idea of
celebrating Christopher Columbus with a public holiday first came from
Denver. Angelo Noce, an Italian immigrant to the city, persuaded the state
to adopt Columbus Day in 1907 as a mark of recognition, given the
significant discrimination that Italians were facing in the United States at
the time.4 It took until 1937 for the celebration to be adopted nationally,
although this wasn’t due to Columbus being controversial – on the contrary,
Columbus is one of the most venerated figures in the United States. Most
US cities have monuments in his honour as well as streets and major
institutions named after him. There is a Columbus city in Ohio, and the
United States seat of government is housed in the District of Columbia. The
beatification of Columbus is remarkable, considering that he never set foot
in what is now the United States of America.
Protests against Columbus Day have been going on for decades, because
in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and when he got off the boat
unleashed a reign of genocidal terror on the indigenous people he
supposedly ‘discovered’. Notwithstanding his historical role as slave trader
and mass murderer, Columbus Day continues to be celebrated, but the tales
told to schoolchildren may as well begin ‘Once upon a genocide’.5
European expansion into the Americas was vital to the development of
the West. And yet explorers like Columbus did not ‘discover’ a new and
empty land to be exploited. When they arrived, they found millions of
people living in complex societies who needed to be erased in order to
create the clean slate necessary for Western progress. The genocide in the
Americas is without precedent, wiping up to 99 per cent of the natives off
the face of the earth. The bodies of those slaughtered are the foundation of
the current social order. Westward expansion was the key that unlocked the
bounties of European domination. Slavery, colonialism, industry, science
and so-called democracy are all indebted to the tens of millions sacrificed at
the altar of ‘progress’.
Although the genocide in the Americas was by far the largest in human
history, it is rarely commented on. It is consigned to the dustbin of history
as Western commentators decry genocide as the possession either of evil
regimes like the Nazis or of supposedly backward peoples in the
underdeveloped world. In truth, the West was birthed by genocide and
relied on the slaughter of millions of Black and Brown bodies to develop
and enrich itself. You cannot separate genocide and the West, which is by
far the most brutal, violent and murderous system to ever grace the globe.
Rather than come to terms with the centrality of genocide to the West it is
understood as a process alien to the progressive society built on science.
Understanding genocide through the lens of the evil perpetuated by Nazis,
or backward savages in Rwanda, allows the West to maintain its moral
superiority. In truth both examples were products of the West, born out of
the logic of empire. In order to appreciate this history we need to undo the
lies at the heart of how the West understands itself.
 ONCE UPON A GENOCIDE
This fairy tale revolving around Columbus has some key elements that we
need to dismiss. The first is that when Columbus mistakenly came across
the Americas, when he was in fact looking for India, he discovered the land.
Not only were there indigenous peoples across the Americas, there is clear
evidence that Africans had visited and settled long before Columbus took
his wrong turn. The Olmec civilization in Latin America made statues with
clear African features at least 2,500 years before Columbus made his
journey; remains of Africans have also been found in Olmec territory, along
with Egyptian artefacts, in the Americas.6 The finding of narcotics from the
Americas in Egyptian mummies in 19927 was roundly criticized mostly
because of the disbelief that Africans could have made it to the continent
before Europeans. Despite a wealth of evidence, scholars have been
deterred from tracing these connections for fear of career suicide.8 It is
only because of the conceit of Western ideas of supremacy that we ignore
the history of global travel and interaction that far pre-dates European
exploration. In fact, prior to Columbus departing on his third voyage to the
Americas King Juan of Portugal had told him that Africans had a trade route
to the region from Guinea, and Columbus confirmed this with the
indigenous people when he arrived.9 The notion that Columbus made a
discovery is based on the White supremacist logic of knowledge. If a people
live in a place and there are no Europeans around to witness it, contrary to
Western beliefs, they still exist.
Central to the idea of discovery is the notion that the Americas were
sparsely populated by pre-civilization natives who, even if we accept their
existence, are discounted because of their savagery. I must admit that this
myth is so embedded in how we understand the world that until I started
researching for this book I had assumed that the population numbers were
very low, though I obviously rejected the savagery part. But the midpoint
estimate for the number of people who lived in the Americas when
Columbus landed is 72 million.10 The sheer number of people who
inhabited the region is evidence that the image of the backward native is
one of colonial fiction. Latin America was home to empires like the Aztecs,
with cities and civilizations that dwarfed anything Europe had to offer.
When Columbus landed on what was then named by Europeans,
Hispaniola, rather than finding so-called primitives, he encountered a
complex society that had a strong history of civilization and social order.
Columbus did the most damage to the island that today is made up of Haiti
and the Dominican Republic. The Taino and Arawaks who inhabited the
islands had developed centuries of civilization, were experts in agriculture
and lived in harmony with the land. From first contact in 1492 up until
1509, when Columbus ceased to run the island, the population of native
Taino went from a midpoint estimate of 8 million to just 100,000,11 and by
1542 there were only 200 left. The scale of death has no parallel in human
history.12
Alongside grossly under-portraying the numbers of indigenous people
erased by Europeans, the bulk of the deaths are attributed to disease. It is
certainly true that illness was a major killer of tens of millions. Indigenous
populations did not have immunity to European illnesses like smallpox and
flu and these spread rapidly. But it would be wrong to excuse the invaders
for their accidental murder of millions. For one, there is no doubt that the
invaders could see the result of their presence and the deadly impact of their
germs. Evidently there were no steps made to stop the spread of disease,
because genocide was the logic of the European invasion. Instead
throughout the ensuing period of history we see the exact opposite, with
germ warfare being used to spread deadly diseases to eradicate indigenous
populations. For instance, during a siege by Native Americans of Fort Pitt
(now Pittsburgh) in 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of the
British forces, suggested that the indigenous people should be purposefully
infected with smallpox ‘by means of [infected] blankets as well as to try
every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race’. Captain
Ecuyer, of the Royal Americans, a colonial regiment of the British Army,
later noted that ‘we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the
smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.’13
As well as biological warfare contributing to the spread of disease, we
have to take into account the impact of the reign of colonial terror that
Europeans executed. Columbus was particularly brutal in his colonization
of Hispaniola. After his initial voyage he returned to the island in 1493,
invading with a band of mercenaries and man-eating dogs who rounded up
the natives and subjugated them violently by ‘hacking, roasting, burning
and working them to death’.14 Columbus instituted a law of tribute which
meant that if a native did not meet their quota of collected gold they would
have limbs chopped off. The brutal conditions in which the indigenous
people were forced to live made their succumbing to disease inevitable.
Starved of access to their usual diet, sanitary conditions and traditional
ways of healing, the Taino were unable to resist illness. There is no doubt
that European diseases would have taken a toll, but their genocidal impact
was only possible in the context of colonial brutality.15
It is impossible to overstate, or even imagine, the scale of violence that
Columbus inflicted on the Taino people. From the outset he saw them as
subhuman, godless creatures who were to be used as fodder to enrich
himself and his Spanish benefactors. After he realized he had ended up in
entirely the wrong place and that the bounty he imagined did not readily
exist, Columbus exploited the Taino, using them to find gold in newly
constructed mines, and as commodities in themselves, becoming one of
Europe’s first slave traders. In an example of the inhumanity and horror
induced by Columbus, in 1495 his mercenaries rounded up 1,600 Taino.
Five hundred and fifty were taken in chains and sold into slavery in Spain
and 650 were shared out between the Spanish colonists. The remaining 400
were set free but were so terrified that their tormentors would change their
mind, according to Michele de Cuneo, one of Columbus’s men, many of the
women with ‘infants at the breast … left their infants anywhere on the
ground and started to flee like desperate people’.16 This is the terror that
you are celebrating when you elevate Columbus to a hero worthy of naming
buildings and cities after, erecting statues of, or marching in a parade in
honour for. Columbus sparked the deadliest period in human history; it did
not take long for other European powers to fully immerse themselves in the
genocidal method.
Britain entered the Americas later than the Spanish and Portuguese, who
had an early monopoly over the region. But when the British did get
involved, they built on what their fellow Europeans had developed. In order
to establish themselves they had to overcome fierce resistance from the
indigenous populations. In contrast to the picture book story of backward
and disorganized natives, the indigenous people were extremely organized
and resisted Europeans to the bitter end. Hilary Beckles, in his book
Britain’s Black Debt, explains that one of the reasons that Britain’s first
slave colony was Barbados in 1630 is because the island had largely been
abandoned by the native Kalinago people.17 The Kalinago caused hell for
the Europeans through their resistance and organization. They mostly left
Barbados to build strongholds on St Vincent and Dominica, where they
maintained resistance and launched raids on other islands. For example, in
1640, the Kalinago attacked Antigua, killing at least fifty people and
kidnapping the governor and his family. Resistance accelerated the
genocidal impulses of the invaders, who viewed the Kalinago as enemies of
Europe.
Due to the disruption of British commercial interests on plantations in the
Caribbean in 1675 ‘“several merchants of London” addressed the Lords of
Trade and Plantations in support of Governor [of Barbados] Stapleton’s
extermination plan … to destroy the barbarous savages’.18 The genocidal
war with the Kalinago continued for a century, replete with expeditions and
massacres of men, women and children. In 1795 this resistance was
eventually broken on the stronghold of St Vincent and 5,000 Kalinago were
transported by the British to the island of Baliceaux. Within four months a
third had died from starvation and the rest were left to eventually die off in
horrendous conditions.
Massacres and removals were a pattern seen across the region, creating
an industrial method of death that cleared the path for European
advancement. This genocidal approach to conquest is the hallmark of
Western development, and an absolutely essential ingredient to building the
modern world. Columbus is an All American hero because he paved the
way for the nation to develop. In keeping with Columbus’s model, the
indigenous people were almost erased from the land with a complete lack of
regard for their lives.
During the American Revolutionary War, General George Washington
launched the Sullivan Expedition to break the resistance of Native
American Iroquois who had taken up arms for the British. With typical
brutality, he ordered a scorched earth policy with his expressed intent to
‘lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most
effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but
destroyed.’19 More than forty villages were destroyed and those who
remained alive fled to Canada. This conquest was vital to victory and for
establishing the US nation state. We see the same logic present in later
efforts to expand the nation: the indigenous population of California was
reduced from an estimated 310,000–750,000 in 1800 to just 18,000 in 1907.
This was done in part through brutal massacres by death squads. In one
such event around 1868 at Mill Creek, Norman Kingsley led a massacre of
the Yahi Yana so sustained that he changed his gun mid-shooting because
his rifle ‘tore up’ the bodies so badly, ‘particularly the babies’.20 A few
years earlier, during the massacre of the Southern Cheyenne at Sand Creek
in 1864, a Colorado death squad led by former minister John Chivington
raided a village shooting at unarmed men, women and children, following
them to the Sand Creek as they fled. Around 150 civilians were slaughtered,
and the following scene took place:

One poor woman, heavy with child, fell behind the others racing up
the stream bed. Soldiers killed her too. Then one of them cut her
open, and pulling out her unborn baby, he threw the little one down
on the earth bedside her.21

Native Americans were erased from their lands and eventually moved onto
reservations where they would be unable to interfere with the development
of the United States. In keeping with the celebration of the genocidal
Columbus, this period in American history is valorized in folklore. There is
a whole genre of Cowboy movies that show the brave frontier folk battling
savages and outlaws in order to make their way in the Wild West. The fairy-
tale representation of this history, with the hardworking Europeans bravely
taming the frontiers, provides the necessary comfort blanket for people
looking back today. Rather than being the heroes of this history, the new
Americans built their nation on genocidal slaughter. To recognize this
would mean honestly accounting for the racist foundations of the nation.

THE FOUNDATION OF THE WEST

Atrocities in the Americas were not carried out because of some pathology
within the European settlers. Erasing the natives was a necessary foundation
upon which to build the development of the West. The expansion out of
Europe was an essential step in the creation of industrial capitalism because
it provided all the ingredients for the modern world.
Columbus’s voyage was supported by the Spanish because he promised
to bring back riches, and it was this pursuit of gold that drove the
horrendous labour conditions for the natives of Hispaniola, which
decimated the population. Later, it was the Gold Rush in the United States
which accelerated expansion west. Rather than gold, Columbus stumbled
into a far more valuable resource necessary for the West: the land itself. The
Americas provided the territory necessary for the production that fuelled the
development of industry. As I will explore in the next chapter on slavery,
the key commodities that powered the Industrial Revolution were produced
in the Americas. Cotton and sugar in particular were of outsize importance
to capitalist growth. Colonizing the region was a pre-condition for slavery:
once the natives were made extinct the transatlantic slave trade began, to
provide the labour that built the modern world.
When Columbus accidentally landed in the Americas, Europe was behind
most of the world. Religious dogma, war and a Dark Age had caused
European development to stagnate. Europe did not dominate the world in
the fifteenth or even the sixteenth century. It was the wealth produced from
the Atlantic system that propelled the West to the position it is in today.
Gold and silver from the mines of Brazil allowed European countries to
amass wealth and make inroads into the East, which was far richer, more
developed and powerful than Europe at this time. It was the profits from the
Atlantic that allowed Europe to come to dominate the globe, leading the
way in industry and science. But none of this was possible without the
genocide in the Americas. Europe could not spread into the West and allow
the indigenous people to remain on the land. They had to be cleared away to
create the blank slate on which the West could be built.
Think of the Industrial Revolution, so much a part of the progressive
myth the West tells about itself. I will never forget my A-level History
course on the subject: the perfect example of schooling as propaganda. We
learned about the accepted causes of industrial progress, which included the
ingenuity of European scientists, capital investment, and also a population
boom that meant there was more demand for goods and therefore the
market had to work out ways to respond. At this point I did not know the
specifics but I did wonder how it was possible that transatlantic slavery was
not part of the discussion, given it was happening at the time and was
extremely important to the economy. My teacher’s response was very clear.
We would be ignoring any discussion of either slavery or colonialism
because it ‘wasn’t in the textbook’ and ‘definitely wouldn’t be in the exam’.
But if we want an honest assessment of the Industrial Revolution it is
impossible to separate industry from colonial violence and genocide. Just
consider the issue of population increase that was so central to providing
the demand for industrial production.
The Americas were not just a cash-cow, they became an extension of
Europe. Millions of Europeans flooded into North and South America,
leaving space for population growth in Europe. If increased demand was a
key driver of industrialization, there is no honest way to discuss this without
including the expansion into the West. As more commodities were needed,
science and industry had to transform to keep up with demand. I cannot
imagine my teacher’s response had I asked how it was possible for
Europeans to expand into territory that had tens of millions of native
inhabitants. Cooperating with the indigenous peoples, sharing land and
coexisting could never have produced the modern world. In a very concrete
way the genocide in the Americas cleared the way for the population
explosion of Europeans and the political and economic systems which
sustained them.
Worshipping at the altar of Columbus is tragically the appropriate
response, given his role in founding the West. It is not an accident that he is
adulated because nothing that we currently have would have been possible
without his so-called discovery of the Americas. To pretend that there is
some way to celebrate the birth of the United States that is free from the
history of genocide is perhaps worse than the delusional mainstream
narratives of its beginnings. Not holding a parade, or taking down every
statue of Columbus, would not alter the rotten foundations of the current
world order. In a perverse way, both sides of this debate are attempting to
present a distorted view of the nation. Pro-Columbus forces want to play
down the negative aspects to ease collective guilt, whilst the anti-Columbus
faction is hoping to eliminate the colonial nostalgia that makes it difficult
for minorities to feel at home in the nation. There are many versions of this
debate relating to all the horrors upon which the West is built. But
recognition of atrocities does not change either their history or legacy.
Acknowledging the barbarity of the West is meaningless unless we are
committed to undoing the system that was created by it. If you are proud to
be an American, Brit, European, or whatever else, and feel that there is
some utility in this wicked system then you should proudly celebrate
Columbus and all his genocidal contemporaries. They forged the way for
the West, burning, hacking, roasting and enslaving their way along the path
to the modern world. We can have theoretical debates about whether
genocide was a necessary condition for Western development; in some
alternate universe perhaps Europeans and the natives are coexisting in
capitalist harmony, but in our reality, the foundation stone of the West is the
tens of millions of bodies of the indigenous people of the Americas. If you
fly the flag for the West then every last one of your heroes is drenched in
blood. No amount of atonement can alter this basic fact.

SETTLER COLONIALISM IS GENOCIDE

As uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge, settler colonialism in the
Americas was an essential feature of Western development (it is not
coincidence that the United States is the richest Western nation), and it is a
method of imperialism that ‘destroys to replace’.22 Elimination of the
native population became a necessary feature once the invading population
became too large. Land and resources were taken away from the natives,
making their survival almost impossible. In the United States, for example,
the killing of buffalo for hides by Europeans drastically reduced the stock of
food available to the indigenous population.23 Destroying indigenous
peoples’ way of life ultimately led to conflict, and this resistance was used
as an excuse to annihilate the troublesome savages. The pattern that we saw
with Kalinago resistance in the Caribbean has been repeated so often that it
should be treated as a fundamental process of modernity. Europeans needed
land, the indigenous population resisted its seizure, and so they were
exterminated. It is a pattern that can be seen across the history of Western
colonialism around the globe.
When the British settled in Tasmania, an island off Australia, in the
nineteenth century, they eradicated between 4,000 and 7,000 of the
indigenous population, including all of those who were ‘full-blooded
natives’. Visiting after the native genocide was almost complete, the British
Reverend Thomas Atkins attributed the ‘“almost extinct” condition of the
Aborigines to the “universal law in the Divine government” that “savage
tribes disappear before the progress of the civilized races”’ .24 This
violence was essential to Enlightenment ideals of progress and White
supremacy in civilization. The genocide accelerated after a native rebellion
in 1826: extermination was the method chosen to quell resistance. The
remainder of the indigenous population were forcibly removed to a
reservation on Flinders Island, where the conditions were so dire that by
1847 only forty-six remained alive.
Exactly the same process occurred with the Yuki of California, whose
population was reduced from between 5,000 and 20,000 to just 300 by
1864. An article in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1856 justified the
slaughter of the Yuki by explaining that ‘extermination is the quickest and
cheapest remedy, and effectually prevents all other difficulties when an
outbreak [of Indian violence] occurs.’25 Wherever Europeans settled and
populated in mass numbers the policy of the British in Australia, terra
nullus or ‘empty land’, was enforced, regardless of the existence of native
populations. In places like the United States, Latin America and Australia,
where settler colonialism took hold and millions of Europeans migrated, the
genocide of the indigenous population was almost total. Space is, after all,
finite.
In Australia a debate has been ongoing over whether genocide is the
correct term to use for the treatment of the Aborigines. Tasmania is often
cited as a classic case study in genocide, but in Australia there has been
extreme reluctance to use that label for the nation’s actions. At the height of
the so-called ‘history wars’ between historians and right-wing
commentators, Prime Minister John Howard decried the usage of the term
as ‘outrageous’.26 Australia likes to see itself as a bastion of liberal values
and multicultural tolerance, preferring to imagine a deluded version of
history rather than the ugly truth that it is a ‘nation founded on genocide’.27
As with every other example of settler colonialism, genocide was a
necessary feature of creating the Australian state. The British did not find
empty land but a population who had been there for tens of thousands of
years. Britain’s entry and domination of the land led to the same patterns of
destruction we saw in the Americas. It is estimated that in 1788 there were
between 750,000 and 1.2 million Aborigines and by 1900 only 75,000
remained.28 After the British settled in Melbourne in 1835 the native
population dropped from more than 10,000 to less than 2,000 in eighteen
years – a decline of over 80 per cent.29 So stark were the consequences of
British settlement that in the ten years to 1849 there were only ten children
born amongst all the native tribes in the area. In Queensland alone it is
estimated that the death toll of indigenous people during the frontier period
was at least 50,000.30
 In terms of dodging accusations of genocide there is the common refrain
that much of this death was accidental. Disease or competition for food was
what led to the expiration of the Aborigines – an unintended consequence of
industrial progress. We should pour as much scorn on that notion as
possible. Not only did British settlement lead to the extinguishing of
countless Aboriginal lives, the settlers knew exactly what they were doing
and intended that very outcome. The first governor of Western Australia
pronounced in 1835 that the Aborigines must ‘gradually disappear’ and that
nothing could ‘prevent the ulterior [sic] Extinction of that Race’.31 In 1913
the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes celebrated that the inauguration
of the new national capital at Canberra was ‘taking place “without the
slightest trace of that race we have banished from the face of the earth”’ .32
Australians were well aware that annexing the land meant the destruction of
the Aborigines and had no problem watching a ‘backward’ race extinguish
itself in the face of Darwinian progress. Just as in the United States, the
settlers were also a key factor in perpetuating genocide.
Between 1860 and 1895 in Alice Springs approximately 20 per cent of
the Aboriginal population was lost to disease but 40 per cent to what the
colonists called ‘dispersal’, a practice that involved clearing the land of the
natives with the use of force and shootings.33 Queensland was notorious
for settler violence, supported by the Native Police Force, who created an
‘environment of terror which governed the lives of Aboriginal people’.34
Thousands were slaughtered, a subject that the British High Commissioner,
Arthur Hamilton Gordon, raised with British Prime Minister William
Gladstone in 1883. He was troubled by the culture of terror in Queensland:

The habit of regarding the natives as vermin, to be cleared off the

face of the earth, has given the average Queenslander a tone of
brutality and cruelty … I have heard men of culture and refinement
… talk, not only of the wholesale butchery … but of the individual
murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day’s sport, or
having to kill some troublesome animal.35

Such barbarity was not reserved for Queenslanders. In 1824 martial law
was declared in Bathurst, west of Sydney, to deal with the problem of
Aboriginal resistance. At a public meeting one of the largest sheep farmers
declared that ‘the best thing that could be done, would be to shoot all the
blacks and manure the ground with their carcases, which was all the good
they were fit for !’ At the same meeting it was ‘recommended likewise that
the Women and Children should especially be shot as the most certain
method of getting rid of the race’. After martial law was declared the
Aborigines were savagely attacked, which led to brutal inhumanities such
as this event recounted by L. E. Threlkeld, a missionary at the time:

A large number were driven into a swamp, and mounted police rode
round and round and shot them off indiscriminately until they were
all destroyed ! When one of the police enquired of the Officer if a
return should be made of the killed, wounded there were none, all
were destroyed, Men, Women and Children ! But forty-five heads
were collected and boiled down for the sake of the skulls ! My
informant, a Magistrate, saw the skulls packed for exportation in a
case at Bathurst ready for shipment to accompany the commanding
Officer on his voyage shortly afterwards taken to England.36

Such colonial brutality is the foundation stone of Australia, which could not
have come into being without it. Genocide deniers can point to the fact that
some in the leadership of the British Empire felt uncomfortable about the
violence, and blame the slaughter on individual acts of the settlers. In
theory the Aborigines were subjects of the British Crown and therefore
extended protections. After one of the most notorious massacres, at Myall
Creek, New South Wales in 1838, the perpetrators were eventually found
guilty of murder and hanged for killing twenty-eight Aborigines. But it
appears as though this massacre became notorious because it was one of the
very few times that any murderers were punished. In fact, the case had to be
re-tried after they were first acquitted and the perpetrators maintained that
‘they were not aware that in destroying the aboriginals they were violating
the law … as it had … been so frequently done in the colony before.’37 The
reality is that slaughter was an essential part of nation building: the state
was happy to turn a blind eye and to participate in it when necessary.
It is not as though an enlightened country emerged from this foundation
of colonial genocide. Australia maintained the logic of empire and
continued to treat its Aboriginal population as less than human. In 1956 in
the Maralinga Lands in South Australia, Aborigines were removed from
their lands to make way for atomic bomb tests. They were left wandering
the desert and many died from starvation and thirst. Conditions were so bad
that parliament commissioned a report, which condemned the awful fact
that Aborigines were going ‘blind and dying from thirst’ in a nation as rich
as Australia. But the report was dismissed as alarmist by politicians and the
right-wing press. In an ominous sign of what was to come, none other than
a young Rupert Murdoch flew in to investigate and found that the report
was ‘“hopelessly exaggerated” and that “these fine native people have
never enjoyed better conditions”’ .38 Aboriginal life was, and in many ways
continues to be, expendable in the pursuit of Australian so-called progress.
The more controversial dimension of the Australian genocide is the very
clear attempt to biologically absorb the Aborigines, or to put it another way,
to breed them out of existence. In Western Australia the 1936 Native
Administration Act outlawed the marriage of so-called ‘half castes’ with
supposedly ‘full bloods’, language steeped in the ideas of racial science. A.
O. Neville (ironically titled ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’) was clear that
the aim of this law was that Australia would be able to ‘forget that there
ever were any aborigines’.39 This followed a precedent set by the
Department of the Interior, which prohibited Aborigines from interracial
‘mating’, but also from sexual union with women of ‘part aboriginal blood’.
They were making ‘every endeavour to breed out the colour by elevating
female half-castes to the White standard’.40 In both law and policy this aim
was being driven by the state. Neville explained the policy of using so-
called ‘half castes’ in domestic service:

Our policy is to send them out into the white community, and if a
girl comes back pregnant our rule is to keep her for two years. The
child is then taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees
her again. Thus these children grow up as whites, knowing nothing
of their own environment. At the expiration of the period of two
years the mother goes back into service so it really does not matter if
she has half a dozen.41

The region’s records from this period corroborate the impact of this sordid
abuse of Aboriginal women. They reveal ‘a remarkably high rate of
pregnancy for girls indentured to service, especially those sent to the
cities’.42
 None of this should be surprising, given how Australia treated the
children of Aborigines. Between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal
children were removed from their families between around 1910 and
1970.43 Those of mixed descent were particularly preyed upon, given the
intent to breed out the natives. The award-winning 2002 film Rabbit-Proof
Fence, based loosely on a true story of three young girls who ran away and
made it back to their families, documents this history of abuse. Most were
not so fortunate, and the legacies of the damage done are still being felt. So
commonplace was the practice of removing children and placing them with
White families that when researcher Colin Tatz paid a research visit to the
Retta Dixon Home in Darwin in 1962 he and his wife were offered an
Aboriginal child for the one-time price of just 25 guineas. So accepted was
the practice that ‘they didn’t blanch at the prospective “sale”’ but drove
around for an hour contemplating the offer.44 (In a chilling parallel, in the
United States and Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there
were policies of removing native children from their families and placing
them in boarding schools in order to assimilate them into Western
culture.)45 The debate about whether the policy of removing children from
their parents was genocidal is essentially pointless: the intent was to
forcibly assimilate the Aborigines into Australian life in order to extinguish
them. It was part of the broader history of the nation where at both the local
and national level for the majority of the twentieth century the state
enforced a policy aimed at eventually destroying any trace of the
Aborigines.46
The question of whether we apply the genocidal label to Australia matters
so much because we need to shake ourselves out of the usual delusions we
apply to the term. One of the objections to using the term is that it
supposedly diminishes the unique suffering of Jewish people during the
Holocaust. If incidental killing, or frontier violence, or mating policies are
equated with the death camps and systematic slaughter of the final solution,
we are somehow devaluing the horror of what the Nazis did. The notion that
the violence suffered by Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis is unique
only holds true if you discount the suffering, torture and brutality meted out
to those who are not considered White. There is no questioning the horrors
of the concentration camps, but to elevate the Holocaust to the status of
primary evil done in the world has the added advantage of meaning that our
eyes are averted from the brutality that Europe inflicted across the globe.
Race cannot possibly be the defining logic if White people suffered the
worst crime against humanity. It also allows Western nations to distance
themselves from evil: Australia is progressive because it is not Nazi
Germany. To compare the two is therefore heresy because it shatters the
mirage necessary to maintain the nation’s distorted image of itself. In truth
the colonial logic of empire was at work in the destruction of both the
Aborigines and Jewish people. The Holocaust was the logic of empire
brought into the heart of Europe.
Before we deal in depth with the Holocaust, it is important to trace the
genocidal roots of the final solution to German colonialism in Africa.
German treatment of the natives in their colonies is particularly instructive
and, given the events of the twentieth century, also hugely influential in
how we understand the roots of modern genocide.
After the First World War, as a consequence of defeat, Germany was
stripped of its colonies. Due to this it is easy to overlook Germany as a
colonial nation, but make no mistake, the country was a major player in
imperialism, particularly in Africa. What are now Namibia, Tanzania,
Rwanda, Cameroon and Togo were part of the German Empire until
Germany’s defeat in the War. South-west Africa was initially seen as a place
that Germans could settle in, and as the British had done in India a private
company, the Society for German Colonization, was established to lead the
charge. The private enterprise’s progress was slower than expected, in large
part because of the resistance of the indigenous population, who did not roll
over and allow German conquest. As Chancellor, in 1891 Bismarck bought
shares in the company, nationalizing the colonial effort and imposing the
full force of the German Empire on the region.
At the turn of the twentieth century the Germans found themselves at a
military disadvantage to the native Herero and Nama people, who
outgunned them and were skilled fighters on horseback. This did not
prevent the colonizers from appropriating land, raping women or forcing
the natives into work. The practice of rape was ‘so common that German
settlers had names for it: Verkafferung, or going native, and
Schmutzwirtschaft, or dirty trade’.47 When the Herero and Nama rose up
against the Germans in 1904 the invaders were ill equipped to win a war,
either conventional or guerrilla. As we have seen elsewhere, genocidal logic
prevailed. In the Schrecklichkeit (extermination) order to his officers,
General Lothar von Trotha proclaimed at Osombo-Windimbe, on 2 October
1904:

All Hereros must leave the country. If they do not do so, I will force
them with cannons to do so. Within the German borders, every
Herero, with or without weapons … will be shot. I shall no longer
shelter women and children. They must either return to their people
or I will shoot them. This is my message to the Herero nation.48

After being slaughtered in the thousands, the Herero were on the run and
the Germans purposely forced them to retreat into the desert, fully aware of
what the consequences would be. Thousands perished in the harsh
conditions and the remainder were rounded up and put into concentration
camps. Of the 35,000 Herero forced into such camps between 1904 and
1906 it is estimated that only 193 survived.49 At least 70,000 Herero and
30,000 Nama were slaughtered by the Germans in just this two-year period,
devastating the population. Overall, fighting, hunger and disease killed
around 250,000 Africans as a result of German campaigns to stop rebellions
in their southern African colonies.50
In the present day, the populations have returned to what they were
before the genocide but the fact it took a hundred years tells us the scale of
the annihilation. The case of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia has
recently been in the spotlight because their present-day leaders sued
Germany in the United States for reparations for this genocide in 2017. The
reparations suit aims for historical redress for the mass slaughter and uses
the $90 billion paid to the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust as its
precedent.51 Linking the atrocities in Namibia to the Holocaust is
important because German actions in Africa were the precursor to the mass
murder of Jewish people almost half a century later. All the ingredients
existed: concentration camps, racial science, and of course genocide. The
annihilation of the Herero and Nama was the first genocide of the twentieth
century, and it provided the blueprint for what was to come.
The genocide was committed in large part by up to 14,000 soldiers and
became part of the folklore of the German nation. As though it were a
routine holiday destination, ‘a host of photographs [were] taken, and made
into picture postcards of soldiers sent with greetings from afar and
representing anything from concentration camps, over [sic] emaciated
prisoners in chains to execution scenes’.52 Gustav Frenssen’s 1906 novel
Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest was a gruesome celebration of the horrors
of the genocide told as an adventure of the German Empire. Not only was it
translated into several languages (including English), it sold 400,000 copies
in Germany up until 1945 and became standard school reading from 1908
until it fell out of favour with the fall of the Nazi regime.53 Genocide in
Namibia set an important precedent for the nation that may well have been
a necessary pre-condition for the Holocaust.

THE HOLOCAUST IS MODERNITY

During the Second World War the lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term
genocide. He was of Polish Jewish descent and lost almost fifty family
members to the Nazi Holocaust that devastated Europe, so it is no surprise
that he dedicated his life to defining and creating a legal framework for the
prevention of genocide. Up until this point there was no conceptual or legal
definition of the mass slaughter of particular groups and he based the word
on the Greek genos (for tribe, race or family) and Latin cide (killing),
explaining that genocide was the ‘crime of destroying national, racial or
religious groups’.54 The horrors of the Holocaust reshaped much of the
way that we think about the world, including defining generational
slaughter.
Undoubtedly the annihilation of 6 million Jewish people by the Nazis is
one of history’s worst atrocities. The manner in which families were
rounded up, forced into concentration camps and gassed to death as the
‘final solution’ left a sickening trail of destruction. ‘Never again’ rightly
became the mantra across Europe after seeing the consequences of
genocidal logic in Germany. But the way that we understand the Holocaust
detracts from an honest assessment of genocide and its fundamental role in
shaping the West.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote Modernity and the Holocaust in
1989, which upended how we view the genocide. Having fled from the
Nazis himself he was keenly aware of the brutality and significance of the
Holocaust but disturbed by the mainstream narrative. British Historian
Everett Hughes was typical of the dominant account:
 The National Socialist Government of Germany carried out the most
colossal piece of ‘dirty work’ in history on the Jews. The crucial
problems concerning such an occurrence are (1) who are the people
who actually carry out such work and (2) what are the circumstances
in which other ‘good’ people allow them to do it? What we need is
better knowledge of the signs of their rise to power and better ways
of keeping them out of power.55

If we understand the Holocaust in this way then the genocide is an

aberration in complete contrast to the progressive ideals of Western
development. Hitler and his gang of Nazis are the bogeymen of history,
pure evil in human form, whose type need to be prevented from seizing
power by any means necessary. Evil is located at the individual level and
soul searching is done to work out why so many people followed their
sinister tune.
Rather than seeing the Holocaust as an aberration, going against the
principles of the West, Bauman argued that

The Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-

eradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate
resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at
home in any other house.56

In other words, to see the Holocaust as the result of evil people who are not
modern is to miss the point. The logic of the Holocaust is the logic of
Western development. When we acknowledge this we can see the fallacies
within the dominant approach to ‘never again’. As we have already seen in
this chapter, while the Holocaust was a horrendously brutal genocide, it
does not stand alone in human history and certainly not within the
formation of the West. Since 1492 genocide has been a key organizing
principle of the rise of Western modernity, from the annihilation of tens of
millions in the Americas and the Caribbean, to the almost total eradication
of the Aborigines in Tasmania. The Holocaust represents colonial practices
coming into play in Europe. Africans, Asians and indigenous people being
slaughtered by Europeans did not trouble the psyche of the West, but seeing
colonial violence enacted on White bodies meant a complete rethinking of
long-held paradigms of race and power. Jewish people were racialized into
a subhuman position using the same racial science that justified colonial
brutality.
The fact that the term genocide only came to exist in the West during the
Holocaust is testament enough to the problem. Systematic killing of
hundreds of millions of ‘savages’ in the colonies did not merit the creation
of a new concept. There was unfortunately very little that was remarkable
about mass murder of the Black and Brown. As is evident from even the
smallest glance at history, the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia
is the grandfather of the Holocaust. But in the cases seeking for reparations
against Germany the government continues to resist calling the
indiscriminate slaughter a genocide. In a perverse way they are correct to do
so. The reason that the concept of genocide was not conceived of in the
West until the Holocaust is that the term does not apply to those deemed
subhuman, and the inhumanity of those that the Europeans encountered was
presumed from the outset.
In 1550 the question of whether the indigenous people of the Americas
‘had a soul or not’ was put to a theological trial in Valladolid. Bartolomé de
las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda debated the issue, with las Casas
eventually prevailing in his proposition that although the natives were
backward they nevertheless had a soul and so could be Christianized.57
Prior to this declaration it was assumed that the natives were subhuman and
therefore their annihilation and enslavement by Europeans was perfectly
acceptable. Las Casas had been arguing for the rights of the indigenous
Americans for years but at this point there was no doubt in the European
mind that Africans were inhuman beasts, more akin to animals than
humans. In fact, las Casas argued that indigenous slave labour could be
replaced with savage beasts from Africa. Transatlantic slavery was one of
the single most barbaric and murderous of systems and was justified by the
belief that Africans were not people.
It should come as no surprise then that even when the atrocities
committed in the colonies were so egregious that they turned the stomachs
of Europeans, their perpetration did not lead to any conceptual change in
the West. As reward for organizing the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 that
literally carved up Africa and divided it between the European powers,
King Leopold II was granted the Congo Free State. We have already seen
many examples of the European presumption that inhabited land was the
possession of the colonizers. But this was a step beyond the usual: Congo
was the personal possession of Leopold, who engaged his own private army
to rule the region.58 The result was perhaps one of the most extreme and
brutal colonial regimes, one that stands out even in the horrors of the time.
As a direct result of Leopold’s reign from 1885 to 1908, approximately
10 million, or half of the entire population of Congo were killed. Leopold’s
atrocities were crafted in the furnaces of Enlightenment thought, which led
him to actually believe he was on a noble mission. He declared that ‘to open
to civilization the only part of our globe which it has yet to penetrate, to
pierce the darkness which envelops entire peoples, is, I dare to say, a
crusade worthy of this century of progress.’59 Massacres, starvation and
extreme physical cruelty accounted for the mass loss of life, but even in
current literature there is debate about whether the deaths amounted to
genocide.60 In the twisted logic of Western scholarship, the intent to wipe
out the population is seen as a vital ingredient for mass deaths to qualify as
a genocide. In Congo much of the murder was done in efforts to get the
natives to work rather than to erase the population. But when we consider
the horrific brutality of Leopold’s regime it should be obvious that if we do
not consider it a genocide, that is only because of a deeply problematic
definition of the word.
Congo is rubber rich and Leopold made a fortune extracting it. In a
macabre similarity to Columbus four centuries earlier, he forced the locals
to collect his bounty with horrific tactics. Not meeting your quota meant the
amputation of your hand, even for small children. A particularly, but not
uncommonly, gruesome account from a sub-agent of the Anversoise Trust,
which Leopold set up to rule in Congo, told the story of being

sent into a village to ascertain if the natives were collecting rubber,

and in the contrary case to murder all, including men, women and
children. We found the natives sitting peaceably. We asked them
what they were doing. They were unable to reply, thereupon we fell
upon them all, and killed them without mercy. An hour later we
were joined by X—, and told him what had been done. He
answered, ‘It is well, but you have not done enough !’ Thereupon he
ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the
village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women
and children on the palisades in the form of a cross.61
Obviously, Leopold did not want to annihilate all the natives because if he
did he would have no one to do his labour. Settler colonialism was not an
option for a state owned by one man. But to debate whether the acts that led
to the deaths of 10 million people are genocide demonstrates the conceptual
problem at the heart of modernity. Black and Brown death simply is of less
value intellectually. The definition of genocide is taken from the Nazi aim
to eradicate all Jews and if we accept that as the definition of genocide then
it would not apply in the case of Congo. But the fact that we have no word
to account for the killing (intentionally or otherwise) of millions of people
shows how little thought went into the problem of colonial genocides.
It is also noteworthy that, alongside the Holocaust, Lemkin repeatedly
cited the Armenian genocide in 1915 as a motivator for a new language
surrounding ethnic violence. The Armenian genocide was also horrendous:
up to 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire in
Turkey, over fears that they would join the war effort against the Empire,
which was allied with Germany in the First World War.62 But it is telling
that the systematic murder of a Christian minority by a Muslim empire
would be central for the conceptual framework of the term genocide. There
is no doubt in Western philosophy that the Christian victim has a soul and is
therefore worthy of conceptual consideration. Colonial slaughter like that in
Congo has not, and maybe could never have had the same impact on
Western thought.
Apart from the sheer scale of the brutality, events in Congo stand out
because they drew widespread condemnation from the rest of Europe. An
international campaign to end the regime of terror in the Free State emerged
to bring an end to the slaughter. In 1908 the Belgian parliament bowed to
pressure and took Congo away from the sole control of Leopold. But before
we celebrate this as some momentous victory and turning point in Europe’s
relationship to the peoples of the colonies, we should tread with extreme
caution. No doubt the massacres, rapes, and mutilation of children had an
impact and brought home the realities of other nations’ own colonial
brutality. But Edmund Morel, a British journalist who was one of the
leading anti-Leopold campaigners, was honest in his objections to the Free
State. As well as humanitarian concerns he was deeply troubled that
Leopold’s private fiefdom was a ‘destruction of [the] commercial
relationship between the European and the African’.63 Not only was
Leopold disrupting free trade in the region with his monopoly of Congo, in
his excessive brutality he was endangering the colonial relationship
between Africa and Europe. The British have always favoured an approach
to colonial exploitation that left enough room for them to pretend they were
doing the savages a favour by nobly picking up the ‘White man’s burden’ to
civilize the world. Mutilated children and mass killings put that fantasy
beyond reasonable reach. Leopold had his playground taken away, but the
exact same relationship of exploitation and a more managed brutality
continued in its place. The rest of Europe also carried on with empire
without the reality of their genocidal logic ever hitting home. That was
impossible, until victims who we consider to be White were caught within
the very same mechanisms.
Nazis justified the Holocaust using the same racial science that
legitimized genocide, slavery and colonialism in the colonies. Germany was
at the forefront of racial science because of its genocidal approach in South
West Africa. At a ceremony in Berlin in 2018, Germany handed back
human remains including nineteen skulls from Africans in the region, but
still holds 1,000 skulls it took between 1884 and 1915 to conduct scientific
experiments.64 The archive of knowledge for scientific racism was built of
such macabre colonial exploits that provided rigorous ‘evidence’ of the
inferiority of Africans. Notorious Nazi scientist Eugen Fischer, whose work
influenced Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, cut his teeth researching in Namibia
in 1905 during the genocide. He created a device to categorize the ‘races’, a
box with thirty different strands of hair from blonde to black, with colour
and texture often meaning the difference between ‘life and death’.65 In a
testament to how widespread these ideas were, he gave this device to Karl
Pearson, who was one of the people who invented the field of statistics, at
University College London in 1908. Pearson was the protégé of Francis
Galton who pioneered the study of eugenics, which aimed to create a
superior human family by breeding only the best stock and sterilizing the
poor and non-White. These ideas of ‘racial hygiene’ were mainstream and
powerful in the early twentieth century. Tens of thousands of poor and
minority women in America were put through enforced sterilization and the
notion of lesser peoples was used to limit immigration into the United
States from Eastern European nations deemed to produce those of spoiled
stock.
Jewish people became subject to the same genocidal logic as natives in
the colonies because they were rendered subhuman by racial science.
Galton made it clear that ‘Jews are specialised for a parasitical existence’,
and the eugenicists agreed that they were on a lower ladder of human
development.66 The Nazis were not only influenced but also inspired by
the network of Western scholars in esteemed universities who provided the
‘evidence’ that Jews were less than human. They even copied the US
sterilization laws as one of the first steps to eliminate the backward race.
The Holocaust was the logic of race brought to bear within Europe. Racism
is as essential to the West as water is to human beings, so in looking to
explain the Holocaust we should not look for reasons outside the system
itself.
Bauman explains that only modernity could produce the Holocaust,
because of notions of scientific rationality developed in the Enlightenment.
Annihilating 6 million people over the course of a few years required an
efficiency and cold-blooded ruthlessness perfected in Western development.
Nazi scientists studied the most efficient methods to kill, devising the most
effective gas for the desired effect. The process of massacre in gas
chambers resembled the bureaucratic mechanisms of the assembly line.
Race was used to determine that Jewish people were subhuman and
capitalist bureaucracy was enacted to dispose of the unwanted people. Race,
bureaucracy, science and rationality, all key principles of modernity, came
together to produce a genocide, one of the key mechanisms for the
development of the West. The uncomfortable truth is that the Nazis did not
undermine the governing principles of the West, they took them to their
extreme, with deadly consequences. The simple ‘never again’ rhetoric
misses the mark so widely because it presents the West as the solution,
when in fact it was the system that was the problem all along. The call is
coming from inside the house that produced the Holocaust, and we can see
this same logical fallacy with how modern-day genocides are understood.

POST-COLONIAL GENOCIDE
Between April and July 1994 approximately 1 million Rwandans were
massacred in the worst genocide since the Holocaust. At its conclusion 70
per cent of the Tutsi (who were the primary target for annihilation) in the
country had been killed.67 Images of Africans butchering other Africans
with machetes cast the genocide as being derived from a barbarism that
went decidedly against the progressive values of the West. A tribal blood
feud between the Hutus and Tutsis perfectly fits the narrative of savage
Africa, unable to resist urges for violence and division. The West, and the
United States in particular, faced a lot of criticism for not intervening in the
violence sooner and for their reluctant to term the slaughter a genocide.
Declaring a genocide would have included a responsibility to react, and the
West was reluctant to do so. Rwanda had no strategic relevance and the
United States had already suffered an embarrassment in Somalia in 1993,
immortalized in the film Black Hawk Down, where a US helicopter was hit
with a rocket-propelled grenade. Bill Clinton, who was president at the time
of the Rwandan massacre, admitted in an interview with CNN in 2013 that
the slow response cost lives, saying, ‘If we’d gone in sooner, I believe we
could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost. It had an
enduring impact on me.’ Whilst on a state visit to Rwanda in 1998 he
apologized for the error, blaming a lack of awareness:

It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who
lost members of your family, but all over the world there were
people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not
fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being
engulfed by this unimaginable terror.68

It was in fact incredibly strange for the president to claim ignorance, when
it was later revealed that the US government knew the scale of the slaughter
almost immediately. Although the administration did not use the word
publicly until 25 May, at least as early as 23 April internal memos to the
government warned of the need to ‘stop the genocide’, and the words ‘final
solution’ were used to describe the situation to officials.69 Worse still, both
the CIA and US officials were well aware of the escalating tensions before
the genocide and the US provided arms to neighbouring Uganda in full
knowledge that these were crossing into Rwanda.70 All sorts of pragmatic
and cynical reasons existed for the US in particular, and the West in general,
to sit on their hands whilst the Tutsis were being exterminated. But the fact
that the United Nations only officially designated the systematic
annihilation of one ethnic group a genocide in February 2014 is a testament
to the conceptual problem of genocide in the colonies. As we have seen
throughout this chapter, the deaths of the Black and Brown do not matter in
the formation of the West. Genocide is a category reserved for the human
and even in the twenty-first century our presence in that category has to be
argued for.
The hand-wringing over the delayed response from the West in
preventing the genocide is also problematic. It is entirely disempowering to
portray the West as the benevolent hero in a tale of African savagery. Here
again we can see the narrative of the ‘White man’s burden’ being to civilize
the colonies. We can also see the same conceptual error as we did with the
Holocaust: that the Rwandan genocide was anti-Western, caused by tribal
barbarity. In reality, the unspeakable horror of Rwanda was entirely a
production of Western imperialism.
Hutus and Tutsis existed as distinct groups long before colonization by
Europe, a process which began in earnest in 1890 when Germany was
granted the region. Belgium also had an early influence in Rwanda due to
the lack of clarity over borders until 1900. Although the different ethnic
groups existed and there were tensions between the minority Tutsis and
majority Hutus, the Europeans institutionalized and racialized these
differences into solid absolutes that meant a person’s tribe determined their
role in the colony. Missionaries began this process, with one of the first
schools being opened in 1905 by Father Classe, who explained that the
purpose was to ‘turn the Tutsi, the “born rulers” of Rwanda into an elite
“capable of understanding and implementing progress”’ .71 The school was
solely for Tutsis and if a stray Hutu was educated their instruction was in
Swahili rather than the supposedly more civilized French. Once the
Belgians took over the colony in 1916 they fully implemented a system of
division that included forced labour for Hutus and a regime in which the
highest local administrator was always a Tutsi chief. The 1933–4 census
cemented the institutionalization of this policy by categorizing the
population as either Tutsi, Hutu or Twa (another ethnic group in the region).
It was not an arbitrary decision to elevate the Tutsi over the Hutu in
Rwanda, but one rooted in racist ideas that the Belgians institutionalized.
To explain the scientific superiority of Africa historically, European
scholars had to create racial mythologies. Burning books or Whitewashing
the names of scholars would only go so far. Hegel is famous for drawing a
distinction between European Africa and Africa Proper, but there is a long
history of that idea. We should reject the term sub-Saharan Africa out of
hand because it is built on the premise that proper Africa is where the
savage Black people live and the north is inhabited by a different, more
civilized race. This belief was etched onto Rwandan society by way of the
Tutsis tending to be taller and lighter-skinned that the Hutus, a physical
difference that was seized upon as proof of their superiority. When the
Belgians colonized Rwanda they did so believing the Hamitic myth that a
Tutsi was a ‘European under a black skin’ rather than an African.72
Ham is a biblical character, the son of Noah, who saw his father naked
and drunk. As punishment for embarrassing him in front of his other sons,
Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan to be the ‘servant of servants’. The curse of
Ham was used to justify both the Arab and European enslavement of
Africans because Ham’s descendants were understood to have Black skin
and the curse of servitude became linked to their colour.73 However, the
Hamitic myth takes the same story and turns it on its head. In the version
applied to Rwanda the Tutsis were claimed as the descendants of Ham cast
into the wilderness in order to prove they were superior to real Africans.
Based on anthropological studies, including of course examination of
skulls, it was concluded that all inhabitants of Africa were not created
equally, and the Hamites were identified as Caucasians with black skin. As
academic Mahmood Mamdani explains,

Every sign of ‘progress’ on the Dark Continent was now taken as

evidence of a civilizing influence of an outsider race. This race of
civilizers, it was said, were Caucasians who were black in color
without being Negroid in race.74

Unfortunately, both the Hutu and Tutsi leant into this racialization of their
differences. Tutsis largely accepted the benefits of being the privileged
colonial class and the Hutus built up an anti-Tutsi sentiment based on the
supposedly foreign nature of their ruling class. While creating independence
movements in the 1950s, Hutu nationalism coalesced around the slogan
‘Hutu Power’, whilst the Tutsi leadership attempted to maintain their
colonial position. Colonial borders did not help matters, since the
Hutu/Tutsi split was not contained in the neat parcels of land the Europeans
made into nation states. Neighbouring Burundi was also Tutsi-controlled
and supported Tutsi incursions to gain power in Rwanda. After a raid on the
capital Kigali in 1963, between 5,000 and 20,000 Tutsis were massacred
and a Hutu republic was declared in 1964 that removed all Tutsis from
political office. In Burundi, which had very similar dynamics, 200,000 of
the Hutu majority population were slaughtered to quell unrest. The post-
colonial Hutu (Bantu)/Tutsi (Hamite) division based on race and sealed in
blood was complete.
The 1994 genocide came after a civil war sparked by the Tutsi Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) seizing land in Rwanda. By the time of the genocide
the RPF had made substantial gains and one in seven Hutus from Rwanda
were refugees who had fled from RPF-controlled areas. ‘Hutu Power’ made
a strong comeback in Rwanda due to the war and fears of being dominated
by the Tutsis again. A central part of this project was to restore the Hamitic
myth and confirm that Tutsis were an alien race. By April 1994 a
compromise sharing of power had been agreed and the Hutu republic had to
concede to Tutsi representation. However, on 6 April a plane carrying the
Hutu presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira
Burundi was shot down. This act unleashed the anti-Tutsi sentiment that
had been building up and when news spread the massacres began almost
immediately. Given the scale of the violence, the genocide was well-
planned, with the groundwork being prepared some time in advance. But
the roots of the slaughter were planted almost a century earlier with the
racialization and institutionalization of tribal difference by Europeans. This
is not to excuse the actions of the murderers but to understand their
behaviour in the context that produced it.
There are key similarities to the process of colonial genocide we have
seen elsewhere. We have the idea of different racial groups pitted against
one another and conflict that arises due to the clashes between the groups.
When faced with defeat (in this case, power-sharing) the Hutu extremists
did what all European forces in the colonies did, which was to exterminate
the enemy to eliminate the threat. The history, logic, context and execution
were not alien to the modern world: just as with the Holocaust, the
Rwandan genocide was the product of the colonial logic of Western
imperialism.

Genocide is an essential component of the current political and economic

order. The West was founded upon genocide in the Americas and the
Caribbean and was sustained with colonial slaughter around the globe.
Western prosperity is propped on the countless bodies sacrificed for so-
called development. Instead of engaging with the brutality of the system,
the popular imagination pictures genocides as the product of evil-doers and
savages committing atrocities contrary to Western values of reason and
tolerance. But as we have seen, the roots of genocides such as the Holocaust
and the horrors in Rwanda are a product of the West, which that could only
have occurred in the house built on the violence of Enlightenment thought.
To understand that genocide is a central pillar of the West is to begin to
unpick the myths that sustain the illusions of progress. Just as genocide still
echoes in the present day, so too does the next foundation stone of the West
that we will explore: transatlantic slavery.
 3

Slavery

On 9 February 2018 the Twitter account of Her Majesty’s Treasury posted

the following surprising #FridayFact:

Did you know that in 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of its
national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire? The
amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so
large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living
British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.

Whoever sent out the post seemed to think that the public would be proud
that ‘millions of you’ helped end the slave trade through your taxes. We
have become so accustomed to historical inaccuracies in understanding
transatlantic slavery that we can set aside the lack of any distinction
between the slave trade, abolished in 1807, and slavery itself, which
continued until 1838 and is the subject of the #FridayFact. But the idea that
the public would be happy we have been paying taxes for the ‘freedom’ of
the so-called slaves is so offensive that this tweet should only make sense as
a macabre parody. The revelation that I and generations of family
descended from those enslaved in the Caribbean effectively paid
compensation to slave owners is sickening, not comforting.
Slavery was formally abolished in the British Empire by the Slavery
Abolition Act passed in 1833, which became law in 1834. However, even
though slavery was abolished, the enslaved were forced into what was
called ‘apprenticeship’ for four further years. This meant having to spend
three-quarters of their time working on the former slave plantations, for no
wages. A funny sort of freedom. Perversely, the system was justified on the
basis that the enslaved had to be trained into the ways of wage labour. The
savages obviously could not be expected to understand how to be free. In
defence of apprenticeship, Sir James Carmichael Smyth declared that the
‘transition from the dejected and almost naked slave to the cheerful and
decently clad labourer could only be believed by those who had recently
revisited the colony after an absence of several years’.1 In reality,
apprenticeship did not have the welfare of the formerly enslaved in mind.
The goal was to ensure that the slave owners should not ‘lose … the benefit
to which they were entitled to by contract’ of slavery.2 Therefore the
enslaved had to pay for their own freedom by continuing to work for free, a
key part of history oddly missing from the Treasury’s fun #FridayFact. The
other essential ingredient absent from their tweet was from who exactly the
British taxpayer bought the freedom of the enslaved. Just as with
apprenticeship, the money went to compensate slave owners for their loss
of wealth.
In a shock development, the news that we have been paying slave owners
with our tax money was not something the public widely celebrated.
Especially considering that millions of us are descendants of the very
enslaved who were not only never compensated but were also forced to
work off their ‘debt’ to their masters. This incident speaks to the truth of
slavery and Britain, but also the fantasy version of history that operates in
the dominant historical narrative. Britain should, apparently, be proud of
ending slavery but not feel guilty about profiting from it.
The reparation payment for slave owners is of an unprecedented scale in
British history. Twenty million pounds represented 40 per cent of the entire
expenditure of the British government in 1833. In today’s money the
payment would be the equivalent to £17 billion.3 But £20 million
represented around 5 per cent of GDP in 1833, which would be over £100
billion in 2020. Whichever number you prefer, it is clearly a massive
transfer of wealth by the government. The only government pay-out in
history that was larger was the one made to bail out the banks after the 2008
financial crisis, which cost £200 billion. However, that was a series of loans
that have supposedly been paid back since. There simply is no other
example of the equivalent of over £100 billion to compensate for private
individual losses, an amount of money so overwhelming that the
government had to take a loan from the Bank of England that was so large it
took 182 years to pay back. The fact the government invested so much
money in this bailout demonstrates just how essential the plantation system
was to the economy.
Transatlantic slavery was the fuel that powered Western development. It
was the massive wealth derived from the system that allowed the West to
catch up with and then overtake the rest of the world. Slavery was not new:
Europe developed on the back of the Arab slave trade that was hundreds of
years old when Columbus sailed back from Hispaniola with indigenous
Americans to sell into slavery. But the transatlantic trade was a unique
development, reducing Africans to subhuman commodities who became the
major currency for Western progress. By 1833, however, the system had
begun to fray.
The Haitian revolution in 1804 had been a major factor in Britain
abandoning the trade from Africa: the British were terrified of Africans who
would revolt in the Caribbean. Between 1831 and 1832 the Christmas
Rebellion of the enslaved in Jamaica led by Sam Sharpe also shook the
British commitment to slavery.4 Over 20,000 enslaved Africans took part
and more than 300 were executed in the aftermath. Rebellion and resistance
had made the system dangerous and less profitable. Sugar, which was the
primary product in the British Caribbean, was also becoming cheaper and
faced competition from new producers in places like India, who could pay
close to slave-labour rates without the same risks. The plantation economies
were in danger of collapse, which would have ruined the wider British
economy.
Britain was not alone. The entire Western economic system depended on
the wealth from slavery. That wealth remains with us to this day, as does the
poverty created through the brutal system. We think of slavery as belonging
to the distant past, but the world we live in remains created in its image.

LEGACIES OF SLAVERY
Britain was by no means the only country to engage in the slave system, nor
to give reparations to its slave owners at abolition. Denmark, the
Netherlands and Spain all paid out compensation, and as I will discuss in
more depth later, France forced Haiti to pay over 150 million francs for
having the audacity to successfully revolt against slavery. After claiming its
independence from Britain, the United States rose to become one of the
primary nations reliant on slavery. Lincoln authorized compensation for
slave owners in order to achieve emancipation in Virginia in 1862. Every
enslaved African freed merited a payment of $100, over $2,500 in today’s
money, and the largest individual pay-out was $18,000, the equivalent of
almost $500,000.5 Compensation was not widespread in the United States;
in fact after the Civil War General Sherman confiscated slave owners’ land
and promised each emancipated African 40 acres and the use of a mule to
tend the land, in reparation for their toil and suffering. But this order was
reversed by President Andrew Johnson, who compensated the slave owners
for their losses by returning the land taken from the defeated Confederacy.6
Britain is unique, however, in that it holds a comprehensive record of
where the slave reparations went, thanks to the Legacies of British Slave
Ownership project at University College London (UCL). The project has
documented the 47,000 recipients of payments to try to establish where the
money ended up.7 What is abundantly clear from these records is just how
widespread slave ownership was. The church, politicians, banks and
thousands of individuals had personal stakes in slavery; and all were
compensated at abolition. Among the notable people with links to slavery
reparations are former prime minister David Cameron and his wife, who
both have beneficiaries in their families. Samantha Cameron is descended
from William Jolliffe, who received the equivalent of £3 million for his
holding of 164 enslaved Africans. Slave-owning members of David
Cameron’s family include Sir James Duff, who also received the equivalent
of £3 million for his 202 enslaved Africans in Jamaica. Cameron is not the
only British prime minister with links to the slave trade. William
Gladstone’s father received £83 million in today’s money to compensate for
his loss of the labour of the 2,508 enslaved Africans he owned across a
number of Caribbean plantations. The news of Cameron’s links to slave-
owner reparations was particularly egregious given that he famously told
the Jamaican parliament in 2015 that their demands for reparations for
being the victims of slavery were falling on deaf ears and that it was time to
‘move on’.8
 Researchers at UCL were also keen to follow this money into
investments in British industry. They found that the money was invested
across society, including in the railways, industry and philanthropy.
Financial services were particularly implicated in slavery: the Bank of
England has recently acknowledged that many of the Bank’s directors in the
eighteenth century were slave-owners or their descendants. The practice of
banks using the enslaved as security for loans also ‘permeated banking’.9
Insurance brokers were central to the slave system, underwriting the
hazardous journeys of slave ships and also the plantations in the Americas
and Caribbean, and slave owners were constant features on the boards of
insurance companies. Two of the first five presidents of what is now Royal
Sun Alliance, one of the biggest insurance firms today, were slave owners,
and the group grew by incorporating slave-owner dominated companies.
Accounting was no different: two of the largest firms in the world today,
Deloitte and Price Waterhouse Coopers, were founded by families enriched
by profits from slavery. By accounting for the slave compensation money,
the UCL project demonstrated just some of the afterlives of slavery. But the
extent to which Britain, and the West as a whole, engorged itself on slavery
cannot be captured solely in the money from slave-owner compensation.
As we have already seen, the ‘discovery’ of the Americas was the starting
point of the West. Expansion across the Atlantic marked the shift from the
limits of Europe to the endless possibilities of the so-called New World.
Resources and labour were two of the elements that were essential to
unlocking the wealth across the Atlantic, and slavery became central to both
for over three centuries. Minerals such as gold, and other commodities that
powered the industrial development of products like tobacco, sugar and
cotton were all produced across the Atlantic, providing the fuel for Western
expansion. In the first instance the natives were put to work, but genocide
meant there were not enough workers to sustain production. European
indentured labourers, conscripted as serfs to toil on the plantations for a
limited number of years, were favoured by Britain into the seventeenth
century. But when demand grew the nation enthusiastically embraced slave
labour, in which the Spanish and Portuguese had been pre-eminent from the
fifteenth century. Enslaving Africans to be put to work in the Americas and
Caribbean became the basis of production in the Atlantic system, which was
‘the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the
machine which sets every wheel in motion’ for the development of the
West.10
Eric Williams’ classic Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944,
remains the go-to book for the case that slavery provided the fuel for British
development. He painstakingly outlined how central slave labour and
produce was to British industry and the development of capital. A chilling
example is the case of Lloyd’s of London, which is now one of Britain’s
largest companies, with assets in excess of £50 billion. In 2014 I remember
watching an executive on BBC Breakfast News celebrating the company’s
325th anniversary and being proud of their roots in ‘insuring the merchant
trade’. What she neglected to mention was that what Lloyd’s cut their teeth
on insuring was the slave trade. But Lloyd’s commitment to slavery pre-
dated its involvement in the trade, as Williams explains:

In the early years, when Lloyd’s was a coffee house and nothing
more, many advertisements in the London Gazette about runaway
slaves listed Lloyd’s as the place where they should be returned.11

Following the global protests after the murder of George Floyd, Lloyd’s
apologized for its sordid past and committed to ‘invest in positive
programmes to attract, retain and develop black and minority ethnic talent’
and offer ‘financial support to charities and organizations promoting
opportunity and inclusion for black and minority ethnic groups’.12 The fact
this stomach-churning PR move was dubbed ‘reparations’ in the press tells
us how little we understand the centrality of slavery to today’s conditions.
There is nothing that a company that gorged on the flesh of enslaved
Africans to amass its wealth could do to atone short of liquidating its assets
and turning them over to Black communities.
Lloyd’s was sued by the descendants of enslaved Africans, led by
Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, in the United States in 2002 along with a slew
of major companies and the US government. One of the US firms included
in the suit was Aetna, among the nation’s largest health insurance
companies, founded in 1853. The company issued a public apology in 2000
for selling insurance policies for the enslaved on US plantations, after
Farmer-Paellmann’s activism had revealed their links to slavery. In 1853
Aetna New Orleans were selling policies for $17.53 per year, which would
yield $600 if the enslaved African died. Such policies were not rare. There
was a major industry of insuring the enslaved, with prices being cheaper for
children than for those who were older.13
The involvement of insurance companies, accounting firms and banks is
central to the argument that slavery fuelled development because of how
important the finance sector was to Western industry. Credit and capital
were absolute prerequisites for industrial development, and for the majority
of the eighteenth century there were few better placed than slave owners or
cotton brokers to invest in industry.
Plantations were hugely profitable, which is why so much money was
paid out in reparations to slave owners to secure abolition. Barbados was
Britain’s richest slave colony in the seventeenth century, off the back of
sugar production. The island had been producing tobacco by using White
indentured labourers, but switched to sugar and primarily slave labour in
1640.14 The transformation in the fortunes of the island were swift. Half a
plot of 5,000 acres which had been purchased for £400 in 1640 was valued
at £7,000 by 1648.15 For an example of how much money could be made,
Colonel Thomas Moyford emigrated to Barbados in 1647 and just three
years later was boasting he had made a hundred times his initial £1,000
investment. James Parker, who found his fortune on the island, wrote a year
earlier that ‘a man with about 200 odd pounds … might quickly gaine an
estate by sugar’.16 Sugar became a highly profitable commodity as
consumption ballooned in Britain and across Europe. Between 1650 and
1800 British sugar consumption increased 2,500 per cent, all of it produced
by slave labour.17 These profits from sugar and other slave-produced
commodities were ploughed back into the nation, reaping untold collective
dividends.
One of the many lies we like to tell about British development is that the
Industrial Revolution was the product of scientific ingenuity and hard work.
But what is often omitted from the story is how it also depended on the
financing and resources from slavery and colonialism. James Watt and
Matthew Boulton have for all intents and purposes been elevated to the
status of saints in my hometown of Birmingham because of their input into
the city. The story of the steam engine has an almost mythical quality,
produced by the divine inspiration of our city’s patrons. But Watt expressed
eternal ‘gratitude’ to slave owners in the Caribbean because it was their
finance that allowed him to realize his design and ambitions for the steam
engine, and plantations were some of the first places to benefit from
industrial mechanization, to refine sugar.18 By 1808 the Spanish colony of
Cuba already had twenty-five steam engines supplied by Fawcett and
Preston, based in Liverpool.19
Cotton was also indispensable to the Industrial Revolution, both in terms
of mechanization and development. Contrary to the misguided belief that
industrial development replaced the need for slave labour, the relationship
was the inverse. When Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin in 1793, he
unleashed the potential for the fabric to be used in mass production. The
separation of seeds from fibres in the plants is essential to make fabric but
before the cotton gin this process was done manually and was extremely
time-consuming. Prior to the cotton gin’s invention slave labour was not
generally applied to cotton because the time invested in the separation
process made it unprofitable. But the invention gave a ‘terrible second
wind’ to cotton produced on slave plantations and led to the major boom of
the plantation economy, particularly in the United States.20 So fundamental
was this transformation that cotton plantations became the new centre of
American slavery in the nineteenth century and cotton came to represent
half of all US exports. Enslaved Africans were sold into the deep South,
where cotton could be grown more easily than in the more northern
plantations, to cash in on the cotton boom.
The boom in US cotton production also provided a major boost for the
British economy. By the time of the abolition of slavery in the British
colonies, cotton had become the dominant British industry. Between 1785
and 1830 cotton exports had grown from £1 million to £30 million in value.
Between 1788 and just 1806 the amount of people employed in the cotton
industry in Britain leapt from 350,000 to 800,000, and off the back of this
production the population of Manchester grew six-fold between 1773 and
1824. Cotton was king, but the enterprise was based on the import of raw
cotton, which grew from £11 million to £283 million between 1784 and
1832.21 Cotton does not grow in Britain, and at this point the majority of
the raw material was being imported from the United States, procured, of
course, by slave labour. After Britain abolished slavery in 1833, its imports
of slave-produced cotton from the US South continued to grow, until the
emancipation of the enslaved in America in 1865. From 1790 to 1860 the
enslaved population of the United States grew from around 790,000 to over
4 million, and it was this growth that fed the cotton boom on both sides of
the Atlantic. It is no exaggeration to say that slave labour built the north of
England and that its beloved cotton mills, such a fixture in literary and
historical imagination of the nation, are just as steeped in the history of
slavery as the plantations in the Americas. The same is true for northern
cities in the United States like Boston and New York, which were just as
reliant on the wealth produced from the horrors of slavery.

THE TRIANGULAR TRADE

In the face of the insurmountable evidence of the importance of slavery to
the development of Britain and the United States, various scholars have
tried to downplay its significance for industrial development. A parade of
academics in economics journals have apparently tested the idea that the
slave trade was indispensable to British industry, their conclusion being to
reassure everyone that Britain would have developed just fine without the
horrendous trade in human flesh. Walter Rodney, the prominent Guyanese
scholar, chided that ‘this kind of argument is worth noting more as an
example of the distortions of which White bourgeois scholarship is capable
than as something requiring serious consideration’.22 But this is not simply
an academic debate that we can ignore, since these ideas frame how poorly
society understands the centrality of slavery to the present day. My A-level
teacher’s, and the textbooks’, off-hand dismissal of transatlantic slavery as a
factor in the Industrial Revolution is a direct result of academic work. It is
the same source which allows us to ignore massive global inequality today,
since we believe the West deserves its riches and conveniently ignore the
reality of oppression that produces them.
Not much surprises me any more about the lengths to which White
scholarship (this includes a lot written by authors of colour) will go to try to
minimize the centrality of racism to their current position of privilege. But
even I raised an eyebrow when reading supposedly ‘scientific’ analyses
diminishing the importance of slavery to the development of the British
economy. It is worth exploring the acrobatic contortions such ‘scholarship’
has to go through to bend the abundance of evidence to support its dubious
case. The principal device for doing this is by reducing the argument that
the profits from slavery powered British industrial development, by
counting solely the profits made from the voyages of slave ships.23
It has been widely recognized that the business of trading the enslaved
was a dangerous task.24 Voyages took months at sea, and from the time the
ships landed on the African coast to when they left the Caribbean and
Americas the crews had to deal with the resistance and revolt of their
captured bounty. Conditions on slave ships were notoriously horrendous
and the spread of disease was common. The death toll for those working on
the ships was high, and was even higher for the enslaved Africans, a
significant number of whom died in transit. Nations also tried to establish
monopolies over the importation of the enslaved. Britain abandoned the
approach of having one slave-trading Royal African Company for the logic
of free trade in the ‘market’ in 1698.25 But British companies were legally
forbidden from trading with foreign-owned plantations, thereby limiting the
trade. The profits from slave-trading voyages varied but it is not difficult to
see how the trade itself would not be the most lucrative part of the system.
However, it is absurd to overstate the case. Focusing on only the voyages
from Africa also ignores the internal trade, where the enslaved were sold
within the plantation system across the Americas often for huge profits.
Given that the slave ships would often sell Africans to brokers in markets in
the ports who would then trade with plantations, the trade was far larger
than the voyages to Africa.
In a paper published in a peer-reviewed and respected academic journal it
is argued that the ‘direct participants in trade’ did not profit ‘because the
price of a slave was too low’.26 Reading this literature the focus and
language of the research is as striking as it is disturbing. They reduced their
scope of enquiry to ‘logbooks’, calculating expenses for transporting human
cargo. This is like studying the Holocaust by a cost–benefit analysis of gas
chambers.27 Leaving aside the callous, inhuman way that these scholars
discuss enslaved Africans, the basis of their conclusion is the definition of
so-called ‘voodoo’ economics. They try to argue that African slave catchers
were the greatest beneficiaries of the trade because they had more control
over ‘supply’ and therefore the costs they could charge for Africans. This is
done in a desperate attempt to minimize the importance of slavery to the
economics of the West and at the same time to argue that Africa actually
profited from it. These twisted arguments are used to reject the idea of
reparations for slavery, by asserting that the West never actually made any
money from it. You do not need to have more than a superficial
understanding of the slave trade to see through this nonsense.
It is often called the triangular trade, because ships would leave from
Europe, laden with goods to trade for the enslaved in Africa, then transport
their human cargo to the Americas before returning to Europe with the
products of slave labour from the plantations. There is no doubt that
rewards on the African side of the transactions were far less valuable than
the human capacity being traded away.
The goods that Europeans traded included guns and textiles produced in
Europe. Wool was a key commodity that Africans desired, along with cotton
fabrics. But these were finished products imported into Africa and not
capital-producing, like the labour of the enslaved. The textiles and guns
traded in Africa were a key outlet for exports that benefited Western
economies. An argument could be made that guns were valuable in terms of
acquiring land, but often these were purchased in order to defend against
slave raiders or other groups who also had guns.28 In return for millions of
labourers who would produce untold wealth through commodity
production, African enslavers received nothing that would stimulate any
economic development. In addition, the risks to the enslavers on the
continent were far greater than those for the Europeans involved. Journeys
from the interior of the continent could take eight months, with up to 40 per
cent of those enslaved dying on the way.29 The risk of mutiny and attack
was extremely high and the reward for all of this was relatively minimal.
The truth is that slavery devastated the African political and economic
system. To suggest that this is where the profits of the trade ended up goes
beyond delusion into the realm of racist propaganda.
Reducing the impact of slavery to the profits of individual voyages is a
fallacy, but so too is limiting the contribution of the slave trade only to its
profit margin. Slaving voyages required a whole range of other industries to
carry on the horrendous trade. Ships needed to be built and maintained,
meaning a boom in the timber and shipbuilding trades. The ports involved
also needed to develop, and these became focal points for commerce, labour
and population. Bristol dominated the British slave trade in the early
eighteenth century. Between 1721 and 1730 British ships in total carried
100,000 enslaved, but from 1728 to 1732 ships launched from Bristol alone
carried the same number.30 Bristol developed a trade that was bigger than
the entire Dutch system and by 1790 40 per cent of the city’s income came
from the trade.31 Slavery literally built Bristol. The hallmarks of this
history remain across the city, most notably with the monuments and public
commemoration of one of Bristol’s famous sons, Edward Colston. His only
notable accomplishment was profiting from the trade in human flesh. He is
deified in the city because he used some of the money he earned to invest in
local philanthropy. In the wave of Black Lives Matters protests a statue of
him in the city was toppled after years of activism from #ColstonMustFall.
But in a macabre way it is perfectly sensible to celebrate Colston, given that
his trade is responsible for building the city, and Bristol is certainly not
alone in owing its development to slavery.
By the late eighteenth century Liverpool had overtaken Bristol as the
primary slave port in Britain, accounting for over 60 per cent of the nation’s
slave trafficking and more than 40 per cent of Europe’s. Slave trading also
sparked a population surge, with an increase from 5,000 inhabitants in 1700
to 34,000 by 1773. The rise in trade triggered an exponential growth in
customs duties, from an average of £51,000 between 1750 and 1757, to
£648,000 in 1785.32 The slave trade brought money and people flooding
into Liverpool, without which it could not have developed into the city it is
today. None of this was lost on Liverpudlians at the time. There was fierce
resistance to the abolition of the slave trade. James Penny, a principal owner
of dozens of Liverpool slaving ventures, remarked in 1788,

Should this trade be abolished, it would not only affect the

Commercial Interest, but also the Landed Property of the County of
Lancaster, and more particularly the Town of Liverpool, whose fall,
in that case, would be as rapid as its Rise has been astounding.33

London similarly benefited from being a port for slave ships, and – in case
you were worried this was solely an English endeavour – after the Act of
Union in 1707 Glasgow became a major player in the slave trade, providing
another Atlantic port. Tobacco and in particular sugar were essential to
Glasgow’s economy – as important as slave-produced sugar was to Bristol’s
economy. By the late eighteenth century Glasgow had eighty sugar
refineries compared to Bristol’s twenty, marking just how important the
industry was to the city.34 Make no mistake: this was a collective effort,
and the trade impacted all corners of the nation.
 Industrial cities away from the coast also saw an enormous boost to their
income as a consequence of the development of the slave trade. To
complete the trade triangle, the ships needed to be stocked with
commodities to trade for human flesh. The wool industry boomed by
providing the necessary currencies, and the same is true for cotton
manufacturers, who turned the raw material from slave labour into fabrics
that were used to purchase more of the enslaved. Manchester was a key
beneficiary that depended heavily on the trade for its development.
Liverpool becoming a centre for the trade led directly to the growth of
Manchester through the cotton boom. In 1772 a canal was built linking the
site of production with the port and it was this that led to the explosion of
Manchester. By 1788 the city was exporting £200,000 worth of goods to
Africa, the production of which employed 180,000 people.35
Even further inland the impacts of the trade were being felt. It was
remarked that ‘the price of a negro was one Birmingham gun’, and the city
was exporting between 100,000 and 150,000 guns a year by the nineteenth
century, largely to support the trade.36 Birmingham also produced the
manacles and chains that were essential to enslave people. Unsurprisingly
the city came out against the abolition of the trade, declaring that it ‘was
dependent on the slave trade to a considerable extent … Abolition would
ruin the town and impoverish many of its inhabitants’.37 In order to make
these guns and shackles, huge quantities of iron were needed, boosting
British ironworks in places like Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.
London’s benefits from the trade extended beyond just being a port city.
As we saw when tracing the legacies of slave ownership, insurance,
accounting and banking all profited immensely from slavery. One of the
factors that made the trade itself less profitable was its dangerous nature,
and insurance took advantage of this by underwriting the voyages. While
the cost of insurance premiums may have dented the profits of the ships,
these were accrued by the insuring companies. The same is true for debt
repayments for financing the loans. In fact, if you look at where all the
money that reduced the profits of slave ship voyages went, the vast majority
was dispersed throughout the British economy. To focus on solely the profit
of individual slave voyages is to wilfully misrepresent how central slavery
was to Britain as a whole. Untold sums of money were ploughed into the
key industries that powered development, generated by the trade of
enslaved Africans. But impact-of-slavery-deniers are correct about one
thing: the trade itself was not the most significant aspect in terms of
impacting Britain. It was the entire Atlantic system of production that could
not have existed without the trade.
Another device to minimize the importance of slavery is to solely focus
on the sugar produced by slave labour in the Caribbean, which although
highly profitable was a consumer good that was popular but not strictly
necessary. By isolating sugar, the idea is to claim that Britain could have
done without it. Comparing the size of the sugar business to other
contributors to the economy, the conclusion is drawn that industries like
‘banking, insurance, horse-breeding, canals, hospitality, construction, wheat
farming, fishing, and the manufacture of wooden implements’ were equally,
if not more, important to the British economy.38 Hopefully, you can see
through the distortions of this kind of thinking by this point in the book.
The majority of the industries thought of as being separate from sugar were
either dependent on or heavily involved in slavery. Banking and insurance
were necessary to finance and underwrite the trade. Canals were essential to
connect the ports to the manufacturing centres. Hospitality would have at
least in part been built up around slave ports to serve their wealthy
beneficiaries. Whole cities developed out of their role in slavery, thereby
boosting construction. No doubt wheat, fishing and wooden implements
supported either the system directly or along the supply chain. Elsewhere in
this kind of supposed scholarship we see comparisons to cotton, wool and
iron again ignoring the obvious links to slavery (though how this is possible
with cotton is beyond me). If anything, these academic delusions are a
reminder of just how important slavery was, because it permeated the
majority of British industry at the time.
Yet all the evidence is distorted and misused to draw the conclusion
(without any proof offered but their own certainty) that it was the Industrial
Revolution itself that led to the increase in British industry. Apparently it is
reasonable to believe that British ingenuity is so all-powerful that not only
could it create the finance needed to bring about mass production, it could
also create the markets necessary to sell its produce. This is the Immaculate
Conception narrative of British industry, sparked into being by divine
British genius. The truth is that the slave system produced the wealth,
resources and markets that powered industrial progress.
The Atlantic system was the key to unlocking Western progress in
general, and the British Industrial Revolution in particular. Commodities
like tobacco, sugar and cotton generated wealth and commerce that fed
back into the nation. Even impact-of-slavery-deniers recognize that the key
advantage was that an abundance of ‘suitable virgin land’ was available in
the Americas for free in order to cultivate the commodities necessary for
industry.39 What they fail to acknowledge is that this was because of the
genocide of the indigenous people that I covered in the last chapter. Racism
is the continuous underpinning logic of the West, and to solve the problem
of labour in the Garden of Eden, Western powers enslaved millions of
Africans. Without this labour the bounty of the Americas would have stayed
locked away, unable to enrich Europe. That is the true value of the slave
trade, which is impossible to calculate. You cannot isolate any one aspect
because the enslavement of Africans made the whole system possible. Even
if the trade itself was less profitable its contribution to economic
development was indispensable. So while it may be possible that British
industry would have developed without slavery, that is speculation best left
for a science-fiction novel about alternative realities. In the timeline that we
are in, slavery cannot be untangled from the development of either
capitalism or industry.

THE WESTERN SYSTEM

The Atlantic system represents the dawn of the West, the founding logic
based on the interdependent exploitation of the rest of the world by those of
European descent. Columbus, an Italian sailing under the banner of the
Spanish, is the perfect symbol because his voyages represent the beginning
of the new system of global conquest that came out of Europe.40 Although
there was fierce rivalry between European powers for domination of the
system, it could not have prospered without their collaboration.
The Portuguese and the Dutch dominated the slave trade in the
seventeenth century. Portugal had the benefit of the enormous colony of
Brazil to supply with enslaved Africans. In fact, the largest number of
enslaved Africans anywhere toiled on Brazilian plantations, accounting for
between 38 per cent and half of all those stolen from Africa.41 Between
1721 and 1730 alone, nearly 150,000 Africans were taken to Brazil.42
Portugal’s demand for slave labour was so high that the Portuguese held a
near-monopoly of the slave trade in places like Angola, from where over 70
per cent of those enslaved ended up in Brazil.43 Enslaved Africans in
Brazil were forced to work mining for gold and diamonds as well as
producing sugar, but the demand for labour was so great that it outstripped
the Portuguese supply. Brazilian colonists relied on enslaved Africans from
other slaving nations to make up the difference, particularly Holland in the
seventeenth century.
The Dutch held their own colonies, most notably Surinam, but rose to
prominence off the back of the slave trade rather than the plantations.
Despite military losses in the region that meant ceding plantations, in the
1650s Amsterdam was the centre of the commercial world because it
‘dominated the market’ of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.44 The Dutch
West India Company was founded in 1621 to hold a monopoly over the
Dutch involvement and was extremely successful in its terrible trade. The
Dutch did not possess a large number of colonies, which meant that the
company was free to trade African flesh to other European empires because
they were not in direct competition for labour. They used the small
Caribbean island of Curaçao not as a plantation, but as a docking station for
their human cargo. In just one example of the company’s flexibility, when
they were forced out of Brazil by a rebellion of Portuguese colonists, they
took the opportunity to begin to trade with the British in Barbados.45
From the very beginning the Dutch West India Company was a model of
collaboration between European powers. When it was set up in 1621, the
Dutch proposed to the Danes and the French that they incorporate similar
companies and embark on collective expeditions. The Dutch were central to
Britain’s early involvement in the slave system, not only supplying the
enslaved but working together to break up Spain’s monopoly in the
Caribbean.46 Without this facilitation and cooperation the system could not
have fully developed in the seventeenth century. The same is true of the
naval technological innovations which improved the speed and longevity of
ships, which were essential in facilitating the trafficking of millions across
the Atlantic. The Dutch developed the work of the Portuguese and Spanish,
and ultimately Britain built on the advances of the Dutch and became pre-
eminent.47
When Britain and France came to dominate the trade in the eighteenth
century, we could view this period as one marked more by intense rivalry
than collusion. Both nations were fierce enemies and their plantations were
in direct competition. Nantes, Marseilles and Bordeaux at various times
rivalled Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow as slave ports. Nantes began
trading in the enslaved in 1666 and by 1789 the city’s merchants were
investing 50 million francs annually into the Caribbean.48 During the
eighteenth century the Caribbean accounted for a fifth of France’s external
trade,49 and the vast majority of French industries had links to either Africa
or the Americas and the Caribbean.50 Haiti was the jewel in the crown of
French slavery. In 1759, 1,587 ships docked in Haiti, more than in
Marseilles, a port that was used for more than the triangular trade. Haiti was
a huge success for France – by the middle of the eighteenth century
Bordeaux alone was refining 10,000 tons of raw sugar from the colony –
and it was one shared across Europe. Bordeaux became a hub of Flemish,
Dutch, Irish and even rival English traders keen to make money out of the
booming industry. Haiti’s produce was sold all across Europe, with profit
being made across the region. In the early eighteenth century Hamburg was
a major centre for refining sugar even though Germany was only a small
player in the direct buying, selling and enslaving of Africans. The wealth
from the Atlantic system created a new world order where Europe gorged
on the fruits of empire, regardless of which nation state owned the various
colonies.
Alongside France, Britain also fed this market, providing raw materials
and produce for the networks of capital. British slaving interests depended
on other nations both for markets to sell produce and also for the raw
materials necessary for slavery. Timber for the ships needed to be sourced
as did the steel needed for Birmingham to manufacture the guns and
shackles. Sweden was a major supplier of iron for the slave trade and
enriched itself greatly from the Atlantic system.51 We often see Sweden
and Scandinavia as some kind of bastion of equality, but the region is just as
tied up with the history of slavery as anywhere else. Both Sweden and
Denmark got their hands soaked in the blood of the trade. Denmark was
more successful, having a foothold in Guinea for 200 years and trafficking
as many as 4,000 enslaved Africans per year.52 St Croix, now part of the
US Virgin Islands, was a Danish colony from 1672 to 1917, prompting the
Danish Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen to admit that the country
had ‘exploited the slaves in the West Indian Islands during 250 years and
made good money on them’, during a public commemoration of the 75th
anniversary of passing the colony to the Americans in 1992.53 No corner of
Western Europe is untouched by the history of slavery.
As well as collaborating in the European economic network infused by
their slave colonies, Britain and France also directly collaborated with each
other in the trade. This seems counterintuitive, given that they were fierce
rivals and both had to invest heavily in defence to ensure that their colonial
treasures were not captured by the other power. Britain was jealous of Haiti
and the revenues it was generating for its rival, but the reality was that
Haiti, and all of French slavery, was only as successful as it was because of
the British slave trade. By the start of the eighteenth century Britain had
given up on the Dutch model of creating a monopoly company to run the
British trade and had given into the logic of the free market. Although it
was technically forbidden, traders made a fortune selling to whoever would
buy. As a result, half of all the Africans trafficked onto French plantations
came from the British slave trade.54 So during the time that Britain and
France were in direct competition and even conflict, French slavery was
kept afloat by British merchants. This was particularly the case in Haiti,
where around two-thirds of the enslaved were African born when the
revolution broke out in 1791.
Conditions on Haitian plantations were so harsh that the enslaved were
mostly worked to death like disposable beasts of burden, due to the cold
calculation that it was cheaper to replace Africans than to raise them.55
When William Pitt the Younger, prime minister of Britain, realized that the
British trade was enabling the success of their bitter rival he enlisted a
certain William Wilberforce to begin a campaign to end the slave trade in
1786.56 The campaign was dressed up as a moral crusade but was driven
by the calculation that British colonies had trafficked enough Africans to
maintain the plantations for ever, whereas French plantations would be
permanently damaged by losing their supply of enslaved Africans. This
explains why a supposedly moral campaign did not attempt to end slavery
itself and only focused on the trafficking of Africans. Even after the trade
was officially abolished in the Empire, British merchants continued to
supply those foreign colonies which continued to trade, and British
companies carried on purchasing slave-produced commodities.
One of the hallmarks of Western economies is the domination of private
interests over the state, and the Atlantic system is where we can see this
emerge. Business interests colluded across national boundaries until they
convinced the nation states to change their approach. Pitt’s campaign is a
reminder that whilst the state may well have wanted to maintain national
supremacy and conflict, the market would not allow it. The abolition of the
slave trade took over twenty years from his intervention and was mostly
successful not because of the edicts of the nation state but because of
resistance from the enslaved. After the trade ended the birth rate on the
plantations plummeted as enslaved African women refused to breed the
next batch of the enslaved.57 Those invested in slavery were also terrified
by the Haitian revolution. In 1804 the Haitians completed history’s only
recorded successful slave revolution, declaring their independence from
France. The revolution took over a decade to complete, sparked by a Vodou
ceremony at Bwa Kayiman in 1791 led by the enslaved Boukman Dutty and
Cécile Fatiman. In a reminder of the collusion at the heart of the system,
Boukman was originally enslaved in the British colony of Jamaica but sold
to a Haitian plantation. The rebellion spread across the island, eventually
uniting the enslaved and the far smaller number of free Black people, whose
numbers included a class of ‘Creoles’ who were mixed heritage as a
consequence of sexual abuse by plantation owners. Efforts were made by
the French, Spanish and British to take back the island and break the revolt,
but the revolutionaries stood firm. As already mentioned, one of the major
causes of the revolution was that around two-thirds of the enslaved were
African born. Not only were they born free, many were warriors sold into
slavery as prisoners of a civil war in Congo. The direct linkages to Africa,
and African traditions like Vodou, struck fear in the heart of the slave
owners, and Britain decided it did not want to risk importing revolution into
its plantations. Britain’s firms calculated they had enough home-grown
cattle to toil in their fields.
Spain was the empire that tried the hardest to maintain its national
monopoly, to the detriment of its plantation holdings. In Cuba, the Spanish
Crown refused to allow the importation of enslaved Africans by other
nations until 1789. It was likely the British colonization of Cuba in 1762
that changed Spanish thinking on this issue. During their brief occupation
the British opened the island to the full economic opportunities of the
Atlantic trade. Prior to the British presence only six ships a year docked;
eighteen years later the number had increased to over 200. The result was
that plantation slavery also greatly increased. Between 1512 and 1761
around 60,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Cuba, but from 1762 to 1838
that number was over 400,000.58 Although the Spanish Crown objected, its
colonies had relied on foreign sales of the enslaved as far back as the
seventeenth century from the Dutch. In fact, in 1692 Britain gave Jamaica
and Barbados not only the freedom to trade the enslaved to the Spanish but
also to provide protection to Spanish merchants during business. One of
Spain’s greatest losses in the Caribbean was Jamaica, which was captured
by the British; but it may actually have proved beneficial in the long run
because the presence of a large British slave colony meant there was a
steady flow of enslaved Africans to purchase.59
In the Western imagination slavery often starts with the ships – the
horrendous middle passage – and then follows on to plantation labour. It is
this narrative that leads even contemporary Black scholars to mistakenly
assume that a focus on slavery, or the ‘middle passage epistemology’,60
excludes the experience of people in Africa. Slavery happened to Africa as
much as it did to those who arrived in the Americas. It is as if we have
forgotten that the people stolen in chains were African and left behind
families, communities and societies. The loss of millions of people had a
devastating impact from which Africa still has not recovered. If the
population explosion in Europe is credited as a major factor leading to the
Industrial Revolution then imagine the negative impact on economic
development that the removal of millions of working or soon to be
working-age people would have.
The lower end of estimates is that 12 million Africans arrived in chains in
the Americas and the Caribbean. But this does not account for those who
were smuggled illegally, nor for the loss of life that occurred during the
process of enslavement. As noted earlier, up to 40 per cent of those captured
and transported from the interior of Africa to the coast died, though it is
impossible to fully account for the scale of human loss. When they arrived
at the coast the European traders would often house the enslaved in forts
like the notorious Elmina in Ghana. Conditions in these prisons were
appalling, with the enslaved often imprisoned underground in what they
called the ‘slave hole’, which was a ‘massive airless cellar’.61 After these
became too risky, because of attacks from the natives and competitors,
Europeans took to mooring their slave ships off the coast and as captives
arrived, keeping them in the holds of the ships, potentially for months until
the vessel was full. Death was not uncommon, mostly due to disease; those
who perished were dumped on the shore.
I will not regale you with tales of just how harrowing the middle passage
was. Rest assured, being kept cramped in the hold, bound together in chains
and packed in so tightly that there was barely room to move, was not
conducive to good health. So appalling were the conditions that some slave
ships had a death rate of 50 per cent. It was not only disease that killed the
enslaved: mutiny was common, as was suicide. So terrible was the situation
that many would rather throw themselves overboard than continue to
submit to the degradation. Given that the enslaved represented bounty and
profits for the enslavers you might think that they would have had more
concern for the health of those on board. But the price of an African was
such that it was easier to pack them in as tightly as possible and anticipate
that some of the niggers would die off. When all else failed there was
always the option of an insurance write-off. The infamous case of the Zong
slave ship is testament to how little African life was worth during slavery.
In 1781 the ship was in trouble due to running out of water. So the
captain took the, at the time perfectly reasonable, step of throwing 132 of
the Africans overboard so that the remaining water could be saved for the
crew. There was nothing particularly notable about the act itself; the
disposal of cargo in times of necessity was commonplace and covered by
insurance. The case became prominent solely because of a dispute over
whether the insurance claim made by the Liverpool-based Gregson
Company should be paid out. Abolitionists later popularized the story by
using it as an example of the inhumanity of the system, and the fact remains
that it is probably the most infamous insurance case in history. In his ruling
in favour of the insurers, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield made abundantly
clear that the enslaved were ‘property to be treated by the parties concerned
as no different from any other animate chattel’.62 It is not an exaggeration
to say that the bottom of the Atlantic became a tomb, an unmarked grave for
countless Africans who perished crossing the ocean in chains. Accounting
for the entire loss of population to Africa due to slavery is impossible but
the lower end of the estimates is at least 24 million.63
It was not only the loss of population that changed the continent. In order
to procure millions of enslaved Africans for the Atlantic system an
infrastructure had to be put in place: ports, slave castles and trafficking
routes from the interior. African populations and communities were
decimated and had to retreat from coastal areas and set up defensive
mechanisms to avoid being stolen into the trade. The impact was the
emergence of a way of life that dealt with the brutal reality of slavery. The
changing state of African societies is the perfect example of the geopolitical
shifts caused by the European trade. The historical record is somewhat
cloudy as to the emergence of the Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. It
conquered part of what is now Nigeria in the early eighteenth century, either
to end the slave trade in the region or to gain access to the slave markets on
the coast.64 What is indisputable is that the Dahomey Empire grew out of
the chaos that slavery brought to the region and gained prominence from its
role in supplying Africans for the trade. The same can be said to differing
extents of the Asante and Oyo empires in Ghana and Nigeria respectively.
While slavery was outlawed within both nations, they colluded with the
European traders to supply those from other ethnic groups, either through
raids or by selling those defeated in wars. There is no doubt at all that
slavery was facilitated by collaboration with Africans, but that does not
mean it was not a Western system.
African collusion, and particularly the narrative that the involvement of
Africans somehow mitigates the West’s responsibility for the system, is
nonsense for a number of reasons. Most simply, there were countless
numbers of Jewish collaborators with Hitler’s regime and this of course
does not absolve the Nazis of responsibility. People respond to the
situations that they find themselves in and slavery dominated the
infrastructure of the continent. Make no mistake, this was a Western system
from the outset: a range of European nations were involved in establishing
the framework that some Africans collaborated in. By the end of the
seventeenth century, Dutch, English, Danes and Germans were all present
on the West African ‘Gold Coast’, creating the outposts to supply the
Atlantic system.
Violence was the underpinning logic of the framework, with Western
superiority being embedded by the barrel of the gun. In this system
collusion and resistance often blurred together in the impossible situation
that the barbaric trade created. For instance, people were given the
opportunity to free their relatives from the trade by exchanging two other
Africans they had captured. People were traded for guns, with the express
purpose of the weapons being to defend their communities from the trade.
One of the driving forces for the collaboration of kingdoms like Dahomey
or Asante was that by colluding with the enslavers they would preserve
their own people from being ravaged by slavery. There was also the obvious
allure of making a living out of trading in human flesh. None of this
mitigates the European involvement and we should never lose sight of the
fact that slavery was not something that was beneficial to Africa. The loss
of population and reorganization of social life, either to avoid or to collude
in the trade, devastated the African political and economic system – and all
for guns, textiles and trinkets produced in Europe.
In contrast to the Western system of slavery, we also need to recognize
that Africans were not a unified political or economic entity at the time.
There were different empires, nations and ethnic groups competing for land
and commerce. The idea of African betrayal in this paradigm is clearly
nonsensical because the disparate groups did not feel a particular affinity to
each other. Europeans exploited these differences and rivalries to the fullest
extent. To defend their own communities, Africans were enlisted to enslave
others on the continent. Europeans used the lack of an organized African
polity to exploit the continent, something that, as we will see, became a
common tactic for Western domination of the globe.
Alongside African involvement in slavery being used to mitigate Western
guilt, the existence of slavery on the continent prior to the European trade is
also often mobilized. It is important to dismiss the notion of so-called
African slavery from the start. What is often referred to as slavery in Africa
is more like serfdom, where people were tied to a lord for a fixed period of
time and enjoyed basic human rights. Africans in this position of servitude
could rise from their position and eventually take full part in civic life.
Given the differences between European and African ‘slavery’ (so stark it
make no sense to use the same word), it is likely that Africans had little
knowledge of what exactly they were selling people into. They would have
witnessed the enslaved being transported to the coast and had some
knowledge of the slave castles. But once on the slave ships, slavery was out
of sight of those in Africa, and the abuses of the middle passage and on the
plantation may as well have taken place in an alternate universe.
It is noteworthy that there were no plantations in Africa, although cotton
and sugar could have been cultivated on the continent. Resistance from
Africans is likely a major reason, given how much fortification Europeans
had to invest in to prevent the natives rebelling. There were forts for a
reason, because Africans would not tolerate plantation slavery on the
continent, despite attempts to establish the system by Europeans. There was
a stand-off in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans did
not have the capacity to conquer the mainland but Africans were unable to
reclaim the coast.65 It took Europe time to develop enough military
superiority to conquer and fully colonize Africa, with the devastation that
the system of slavery left being a key contributing factor to that eventuality.
European slavery decimated the continent but the West did not start the
mass enslavement of African people. As with most ideas, the West did not
originate the concept but took what existed before and developed it to new,
unparalleled heights.
Long before Europe had the idea to turn to Africa for a slave labour
force, Arabs who invaded North Africa in the seventh century had
established a system of slavery on the continent. Over a span of more than
1,250 years around 6 to 7 million Africans were forcibly trafficked across
the Sahara Desert.66 It was, in fact, the Arab system that gave Europeans
the idea and early access to African flesh. When Columbus enslaved the
500 indigenous Americans it was the Arab slave markets that he sold them
into. Europe did not even invent the idea of Africans being inferior, as I
explained in the last chapter. Ibn Khaldun, one of the most influential
scholars in the fourteenth century (who is rarely recognized because he was
Tunisian and not from the West), thought that Africans were submissive to
slavery because ‘they have little [that is essentially] human and have
attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals’.67 Even though
Europe essentially plagiarized Arab racial thinking and Arab slavery lasted
far longer, it is the Western system that had the most damaging impact on
Africa and reaped the greatest rewards for the enslavers. Racial thinking
was prevalent in the Arab world. But the West took those ideas and built
them into the fabric of the political and economic system in order to exploit
the globe and build the modern world.
Whilst racial constructs certainly informed the Arab trade, the role that
Africans played in the system was not based solely on racism. Europeans
were prominent features of slave markets. In fact, the word ‘slave’ derives
from ‘Slav’ because of their prominence in the trade. Notwithstanding the
diversity of those enslaved, there was an anti-Black hierarchy in the system.
The Arabic work mamluk referred to a high-status slave of White European
stock, whereas enslaved Africans called abd were cheaper and consigned to
more menial tasks.68 But, even so, the dehumanization that was an
unremitting feature of European slavery was not always present. The story
of Bilal ibn Rabah, at least in the Sunni view, is a case in point for the
complexities of the relationship of the enslaved to society. An African born
into slavery, Bilal was prevented from reaching the highest positions in
Arab society, but he was one of the Prophet Mohammed’s most trusted
companions who was given the responsibility of leading the call to prayer.
We should not romanticize the Arab slave trade: it was a brutal system
that killed countless Africans. The average life expectancy for the enslaved
was only seven years and they were subject to savage mistreatment and
abuse.69 The slave caravans that took Africans from the interior and
crossed the Sahara were deadly and those who could not make it were left
to die where they fell. Just as with European slavery, the impact on African
society was devastating. Major Dixon Denham, a British traveller to Sudan
in 1823, witnessed how ‘villages were raided, the young women and
children enslaved, the surplus men who had not escaped massacred, and the
old, the lame and the sick killed off or left to die on the roadside’.70 We
cannot overestimate the damage that this scene, reproduced on an industrial
scale, had on the continent and we must acknowledge the central role that
the Arab system had in creating the European trade that followed. But there
is a major difference that distinguishes the Arab trade from the Atlantic
system, which goes to the core argument presented in this book: African
slavery was endemic in the Arab world but it was not essential to the
political and economic development of that region.
The Atlantic system lasted for over 300 years, with a peak during the
eighteenth century. The Arab trade existed over four times as long but
enslaved around half the number of people. But it is not just the size of the
trade that is important, we also have to look at the nature of the two
systems. Around two-thirds of those captured in Arab slavery were women,
and the two main employments of the enslaved were sexual labour and
domestic work. The enslaved were luxuries of the elite, largely used for
pleasure and as house servants. This is in complete contrast to the Atlantic
system where around 80 per cent of those enslaved on British ships were
men and the desire for slave labour was to produce commodities on
plantations and to power the development of capitalism.71 As we have
seen, European slavery produced untold wealth which fired industrial
development and formed the bedrock of European advancement. In
contrast, the profits were in Arab trade, not in slave ownership. As
profitable as the Arab slave trade was, there are tales of slave traders in the
medieval period with nowhere to spend their fortunes.72 The West is built
in large part off the wealth of slavery, whereas the same cannot be said of
the Arab world. This does not make Arab slavery less barbaric or
objectionable but it is important to separate out the legacies of the two
trades. The Atlantic slave trade is still with us, in both the wealth and
poverty caused by the murderous industry.

REPARATIONS NOW
Photographs of slave markets in Libya, in 2017, sparked international
protests against the treatment of Black Africans in the country. Under
Colonial Gaddafi the African population was given protection and
prominence, but after the US-led regime change in 2011 the forces of anti-
Blackness were unleashed in the nation. We should not be at all surprised,
given how central anti-Black racism has been in the region since the Arab
invasion of North Africa in the seventh century. The crisis in Sudan that
sparked the creation of the new state of South Sudan was also a reminder of
the significant tensions that continue to exist. The Arab slave trade is the
most obvious example of the history of conflict and brutality towards
African people, and the scenes in Libya were a reminder of that painful
legacy. It is clear that the practice has not ended, though it is now usually
forced underground and called human trafficking. But as reprehensible as
the events in Libya are, we must not fall into the trap of conflating Arab
slavery with the European trade; that is perhaps the worst way to discuss the
legacy of the system.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been at a Black History
Month event and a discussion about Atlantic slavery has ended with a
speaker talking about the need to end so-called ‘modern-day slavery’.
Google ‘slavery’ right now and you will find some video claiming the need
to end modern-day slavery with a link to the history of the transatlantic
trade. But not only is this completely nonsensical, it actually prevents us
from looking at the work that actually needs to be done to repair the
damage of the Atlantic system. Human trafficking is an outrage to human
decency and must end, but it has no relation to the transatlantic slave trade,
which was a perfectly legal system of chattel slavery that produced the
modern world. It may make those in the West feel better to embrace a
narrative that places Britain at the centre of abolishing the evils of slavery
and at the forefront of trying to end modern-day practices in backward parts
of the world. But the legacies of slavery are all around us, in the very same
political and economic system from which we generate money for charity in
order to combat the ills of human trafficking. Please do not just take it from
me. Britain’s favourite White supremacist, Winston Churchill,
acknowledged as much when he explained

Our possession of the West Indies, like that of India … gave us the
strength, the support, but especially the capital … to come through
the great struggles of the Napoleonic wars, the keen competition of
commerce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and enabled us
not only to acquire the appendage of possessions which we have,
but also to lay the foundations of that commercial and financial
leadership which … enabled us to make our great position in the
world.73

As the wealth of Britain, and the wider Western world, was built on the
back of slavery it therefore follows that a debt is owed to those descendants
of the enslaved. I started this chapter by exploring the payment of
reparations to slave owners, so large they created a debt so enormous that it
was only paid off by the twenty-first century taxpayer. It is perverse that
those who laboured and suffered received no restitution in any country.
There is plenty of legal precedent for reparations that are based solely on
the experience of oppression. In 1995 New Zealand agreed to pay the
Maoris for historic abuses committed under the British crown dating back
to 1863.74 Germany paid over $90 billion to Jewish victims of the
Holocaust and their descendants, and the United States has made a number
of payments and settlements with indigenous peoples, although these have
been offensively small and little more than token gestures.75 The horrors of
the slave trade are such that a claim based solely on the torture and
inhumanity of it would be worthy of restitution. But in this case we are also
talking about centuries of unpaid labour that needs to be accounted for. If
the slave owners were compensated at the end of slavery there can be no
justifiable reason for denying reparations to those suffering the legacies of
the system. There have been many campaigns for reparations across the
diaspora.
The Nation of Islam and the Republic of New Afrika in the US in the
1960s both called for General Sherman’s post-American Civil War promise
of forty acres and a mule for each enslaved to be honoured by a parcel of
land in the South being turned over to the Black population. The Black
Lives Matter movement is currently campaigning for reparations for the
damage caused and there is a Europe-wide movement for reparatory justice,
the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE). In Britain
there is an annual Stop the Maangamizi march and calls for an all-party
parliamentary commission into the subject. Africa also formed a reparations
movement through the Organization of African Unity in 1990. The
Caribbean nations have joined the reparations case through the Caribbean
Community (CARICOM), demanding restitution for the impact of slavery.
There are now widespread social movements that recognize that the West
was enriched on the back of slavery and also that the poverty we see across
the Black world today is the legacy of the system. Since the killing of
George Floyd we have even seen companies jump on the reparations PR
bandwagon. The problem with reparations, though, is whether they can ever
account for just how important the system of slavery was to the
development of the West.
Various calculations have been done based on damages and loss of
earnings to arrive at an estimate of just how much the West owes. For the
Caribbean alone, one estimate back in 2005 was $7.5 trillion.76 In the
United States the estimates range from $3 to $14 trillion.77 What is clear
from these figures is that if we were able to calculate a figure owed it would
be so large that it would be impossible for the West to pay. The truth is that
the figure is incalculable because of how steeped the West remains in the
wealth from the Atlantic system. It touches every part of the West’s society
and economy and has also impoverished the Black world to a degree that
cannot be overestimated. The West remains built on these foundations and
to transfer the wealth necessary to repair the damage would destroy the
West, not only because of the money involved, but also because if the Black
world had freedom that would mean the end of the Western project.
Reparations are due, and tearing down Western capitalism is an utter
necessity if we are serious about ending racism. But to realize the
revolutionary politics necessary for this transformation we first need to
recognize that the West can never pay full reparations for slavery without
destroying itself.
Slavery may have ended, but the next phase in Western supremacy was
colonialism, built on the same principles of racial hierarchy and
exploitation. The West simply cannot end racism through reparations
because racial hierarchy is the fuel that feeds the system. The end of slavery
dissolved into the colonial era of racial exploitation, which is still very
much alive and well today.
 4

Colonialism

If you want to see colonialism at work today, take a visit to Cadbury World
in Birmingham. The site is still a working factory, the home of the Cadbury
empire, one of Britain’s leading brands with annual revenues exceeding $3
billion.1 From its humble start as a grocery shop in 1824 the company has
become a global juggernaut, selling over 350 million of its signature Dairy
Milk bars every year. Cadbury’s employs more than 45,000 people
worldwide and, including its supply chain, is responsible for keeping
thousands of people in work in the city of Birmingham. Neither the city nor
the company is shy of boasting about the tremendous success of the
business and in 1990 Cadbury World opened on the site of its Bournville
factory, attracting visitors to learn about the history and future plans of the
company. They have added different attractions over the years but the
central structure of the place has remained the same. A tour through
Cadbury World takes you from the first European encounter with chocolate
right through to its present-day production. While the aim is to celebrate the
success of the company, walking through the space is the perfect tour of
neo-colonialism, providing all the ingredients to explain why the West
remains just as built on racism today as it ever was.
Aztec civilization greets you when you first step into the exhibition. Well,
a plastic replica of jungle replete with smiling cocoa beans and wax figures.
There is at least a recognition here that Europeans did not invent or
‘discover’ chocolate, which was introduced to the continent when the
Spanish brought it back from South America. In fairness to the curators,
they give a nod to some of the violence committed by the Spanish, and
reference the Aztec ruler Montezuma being killed by the forces of Cortés in
the sixteenth century. But, typical of how this period is remembered, the
genocide we have already explored is breezily skipped over. I suppose
recounting the murder of tens of millions in a children’s attraction would be
bad for business.
After you learn about the origins of chocolate the story moves to
Birmingham, and the founding of the original shop by John Cadbury in
1824. We hear about his ingenuity and hard work, and how he came up with
the magic formula for the incredibly popular Dairy Milk. In these
foundation stories we are told about cocoa and milk, but conspicuous in its
absence is any reference to the other main ingredient, which is of course
sugar. As we saw in the last chapter, sugar was one of the main slave-
produced commodities. When Cadbury’s began as a small shop, slavery was
still fully functioning in the British Empire, and slave-produced sugar
would have made it into the country until at least 1888, when Brazil
abolished the system. Cadbury’s became a huge commercial success in the
latter part of the nineteenth century after building the Bournville factory in
1878, so is often not seen as having ties to slavery. But this misses the point
for two main reasons. Firstly, Cadbury’s was able to open Bournville due to
the wealth it had generated from using slave-produced sugar. As we have
already seen, wealth produced from slavery was used after abolition to
continue development. More importantly, the ending of slavery did not stop
the exploitative relationship between the Caribbean (or the rest of the
Empire) and Britain. Caribbean colonies continued to produce sugar, often
in dire conditions and certainly for pay that was not too far removed from
the realities of enslavement. Sugar production was a system created by
slavery, with a workforce descended from those stolen in chains and
indentured labourers from other parts of the Empire. There was nothing
clean about the sugar that went into building Cadbury’s.
Instead of focusing on the exploitation at the heart of Cadbury’s, the
exhibition is a celebration of the entrepreneurial and philanthropic spirit of
the Cadbury family. Not only did the family build the factory, they also
secured a 120-acre site and on it created the village of Bournville. We are
told that George Cadbury ‘was a housing reformer interested in improving
the living conditions of working people in addition to advancing working
practices’.2 Bournville was a model village for workers in the factory, with
swimming pools and parks. Workers also received far better treatment than
was usual in Victorian times, with the Cadburys seen as ‘pioneering
employee welfare’.3 In fact, the housing and development of Bournville
was so attractive that it is now one of the most expensive places to live in
the city. The irony of celebrating the success of Cadbury’s in supporting the
working classes when they have long since been priced out of the area
seems entirely lost. Being serenaded with tales of how wonderful an
employer the Cadburys were in Birmingham is also telling for what, or
more particularly who, is absent in the story.
Only once, and very briefly, do we see the workers in Ghana picking the
key ingredient for Cadbury’s product: cocoa. I wish I were joking, but sadly
not. In a grainy black-and-white film narrated by an exceedingly posh
gentleman, who is actually wearing the white pith helmet we associate with
colonialism, we see the smiling natives happily chopping down the cocoa
and loading it into vans for export to Britain. There is no mention of the
conditions they faced either historically or in the present day. But when the
president of the World Cocoa Foundation declared in 2018 that ‘our first
and most important target is to raise farmers above the extreme poverty
line’ of $1.90 a day,4 you can imagine just how appalling the situation is
still for those harvesting the base ingredient for a multibillion dollar empire.
The complete lack of care by the Cadburys, or consideration by Cadbury
World, for workers outside Britain is the perfect demonstration of how
gains for workers in the West are built on the back of exploitation of those
in the global South.
By the end of the tour we are introduced to the innovations in advertising
and the array of different products that Cadbury’s now produces. The
impression given is very much that the company is a local and national
success: the best of British as it were. But Cadbury World were honest, the
tour would end with the singing of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as staff
pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Cadbury’s has not been a British
company for over a decade now, having been bought by American giant
Kraft Foods in a hostile takeover in 2010. As testament to just how
successful Cadbury’s neo-colonial business model is, the company cost
them $18.9 billion. The US takeover also tells us much about what
colonialism looks like in the present day. The old colonial regimes are no
longer leading the charge. America is now setting the tone for Western
imperialism.

NO SUCH THING AS FAIR TRADE

To understand the continued exploitation of the developing world by the
West, we can start by undoing the fallacy of the idea of fair trade. Cadbury
World again provides a good starting point for this discussion. In their
exhibition they quite openly describe the process of raw cocoa leaving
Ghana and being shipped to a processing plant in Britain before ending up
in the Bournville factory. As part of the tour you get to witness the
production process and see the finished commercial products (they are even
nice enough to give you a discount at the gift shop). There is no recognition
of the exploitation at the heart of this relationship. A resource from Africa is
taken out of the continent at an extremely low cost, processed into a luxury
good in Europe and sold for a huge profit, often back into Africa. It is the
European company that makes all the money off an African resource.
Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, said this reality had an
‘Alice in Wonderland craziness’ about it.5
In the context of trade relationships like this, companies like Cadbury’s
partnering with the Fairtrade Partnership may mean that farmers get a few
more pennies a day, but the notion that there can ever be fair trade is as
offensive as it is absurd. Cocoa farmers receive only 6 per cent of the
money made from the product they labour over.6 The nations which
produce raw materials like cocoa receive a pittance for their resources,
while Western corporations make a fortune exploiting resources that they
otherwise would have no access to. As we saw in the first two chapters, the
expansion of the West was necessary for both the resources and the labour
needed for modern industrial progress.
The thread that unites Western development since 1492 is the
exploitation by those of European descent of the rest of the world. We
incorrectly think of the horrors of Western empire as separate, disconnected
historical events. First, genocide in the Americas, then transatlantic slavery
and finally colonialism. But in reality they are overlapping manifestations
of White supremacy that cannot be separated from each other and which
bleed into the current forms of colonial domination. In the Caribbean, for
instance, colonialism did not follow on after slavery. The islands were slave
colonies, taken by deadly force from the natives who were wiped out in a
genocide. Colonialism is often understood in its dictionary definition of
direct rule over a subject people by a foreign power, but this is an
inadequate way to view the process.
Africa provides the perfect example of the far more widespread talons of
colonialism. Most of the continent was under direct rule by European
powers for a period less than a hundred years. But it would be wrong to
think that a colonial relationship only existed for that short period of time.
Ever since the West dug its claws into Africa it has been building and then
sustaining its exploitative hold over the continent. As we saw in Chapter 2,
the transatlantic slave trade fundamentally transformed the politics,
economies and organization of the continent. As well as looting the
continent for slave labour, Europe also plundered resources like gold from
it. Before formally taking control of any part of the continent, Europe had
already begun to ‘underdevelop’ Africa.7
In Walter Rodney’s classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa he lays
out with supreme clarity the damage done to the continent. The book
explains the global economic contradiction that ‘many parts of the world
that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in
wealth of soil and sub-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living’.8
Slavery powered Western development to the point that one of the main
problems since the late ninetieth century has been finding the resources to
feed into its industrial machine. The wealth from the Atlantic system
enabled European powers to colonize large parts of Asia and replace slave
labour with the inhumane wages we still see in the world. So the focus on
Africa shifted from seeing it as a source of cheap labour to the rush to milk
the continent for its resources. Centuries of slavery enabled this by
devastating both the political and economic system of Africa and its ability
to resist.
By the end of the nineteenth century almost the entire continent was
under colonial rule. ‘Underdevelopment’ is used to describe Europe’s
involvement because when Europeans took control of the continent they
halted any African progress in order to enrich their respective mother
countries.
At a time when Africa needed to be developing industrial farming
techniques to provide food and resources for the continent, precisely the
opposite was occurring. From the nineteenth century to the present day
many African economies have depended on cash crops from small-scale
farmers. It is these barely-above-subsistence-level farmers who provide
much of the cocoa for Cadbury’s factories. Individual farmers selling their
wares to a trader are extremely easy for large corporations to exploit
financially, which is one of the main reasons why the price of most
commodities is so low. This method of procuring crops has been doubly
cheap for the West, which did not have to invest in heavy machinery or
even worry about transporting the crops to the depot. Under colonial rule,
infrastructure was only ever developed to the extent it was necessary to take
commodities out of Africa, with ‘all roads and railways leading to the
sea’.9 One result of this underdevelopment was that people, mostly women,
were forced to trek miles on foot to deliver the cash crops to the depots.10
Cotton, rubber, oil palm, cocoa, coffee and more were procured to be
exploited away from Africa, with huge profits going to European
companies.
Under formal colonial rule Africans were often forced to work cultivating
particular crops for their colonial masters and accept whatever price they
were given. Conditions were particularly harsh during economic crises like
the Depression, or the World Wars, when the colonies were expected to
support the war effort. One of the most extreme examples of forced labour
was the building of the Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire railway in Congo from
1921 to 1933. Every year 100,000 Africans were forced to work at the site
in conditions so appalling that ‘25% died annually from starvation and
disease’.11
In 1938 Britain established the West African Produce Control Board to
regulate prices for commodities. As evidence of just how lucrative this
system was for European companies, in 1946 the control board paid £16.15
to African suppliers for a ton of oil palm, and this same ton then sold for
£95 in Britain. For groundnuts the purchase price was £15 and the sale price
£110. This does not even consider what the British company then received
after processing the product and selling it on.12 Whilst Africa may no
longer be under colonial rule, and subject to direct physical oppression, it is
abundantly clear that this economic relationship remains unchanged.
One of Britain’s largest companies is so successful that its £44.68 billion
turnover for 2018 represented a ‘dip’ in its performance due to ‘challenging
market conditions’.13 Spare a thought for its shareholders who had to take
a dividend of merely £8.6 billion for the year. Unilever is a global giant that
makes all manner of soaps meant to clean everything from your skin to your
floor. Much like Cadbury’s, the company has its roots in nineteenth-century
Britain when the Lever brothers began manufacturing and selling soap. Like
the Cadburys they procured the main ingredient for their product from
Africa, in this case oil palm. Lever Brothers sourced this from Nigeria,
Sierra Leone and Liberia, forming the United African Company to manage
its procurement. Oil palm has a lot of uses, and the company expanded into
foods, making margarines and oils, eventually merging with a Dutch
company, Margarine Uni, in 1929. The growth of the company was based
on its success in European markets but Unilever acknowledged the source
of its prosperity. In 1920 the Information Division of the company
recognized that

Unilever’s centre of gravity is Europe, but far and away its largest
member (the UAC) is almost wholly dependent for its livelihood
(represented by a turnover of £300 million) on the well-being of
Africa.14

In a pattern we see repeated again and again, a Western corporation grew

extraordinarily rich by exploiting the resources of a colony. Nothing has
changed today, except that the countries are now formally free. Unilever
still depends on oil palm for its success, a crop that is becoming
increasingly important as an alternative fuel source. It is no coincidence that
the same crops that were so important to development during colonialism
are powering the global economy today. From 2000 to 2013 the space that
sugar-cane plantations took up across the globe grew from 19 to 26 million
hectares; rubber from 7 to 10 million; and oil palm from 10 to 18 million.15
It is realities like this that make a nonsense of the Western navel-gazing
concern with the apparent ‘rise of the robots’, which I will cover in more
depth in Chapter 7. Millions of poor people in the underdeveloped world
find themselves trapped in work and working conditions similar to those
under colonial rule. Most oil palm production is now located outside Africa,
with Indonesia and Malaysia producing over 80 per cent of the global
market.16 Sadly, this is not a sign of progress, just a continuation of the
same neo-colonial relations that mark the African story.
 Indonesia accounts for the bulk of oil palm production and farming in
Malaysia is often done by Indonesian migrant workers. Dutch colonization
of Indonesia goes back to 1602, with the Portuguese involved in the region
prior to that. By 1823 the Netherlands East India Association, the successor
to the much-reviled Dutch East India Company, was reliant on coffee
produced in Java for 77 per cent of its export revenue. Forced labour was
the norm in the colony and it is estimated that in 1840 30 per cent of
Indonesian families were toiling against their will.17 Thousands of people
were forced into what were effectively work camps in the nineteenth
century because they would not voluntarily accept the low wages on offer.
Oil palm did not develop as a crop in the region until 1930, and in a nod
to just how global the colonial network was, the first workers were
indentured labours from China. These workers had been in Indonesia before
oil palm was, working under inhuman conditions. Known as ‘contract
Coolies’ they were ruled by a set of ordinances which meant they were
subject to whippings, prison and execution if they did not show enough
deference to their masters, put in enough effort, or if they tried to escape
their plight.18
Today, such conditions no longer exist. However, there is a reason that
most oil palm is produced in Indonesia, or by Indonesian labourers, and it is
because Indonesians are cheap to employ. The majority of workers are not
employed on a permanent basis, making them even more insecure. There
has been much hand-wringing over the need to improve the wages and
conditions of oil palm workers but Wilmar International, one of the largest
global oil palm corporations, openly admits that on some of its plantations
only 5 to 10 per cent of the workers are on permanent contracts.19

CORRUPT ‘DEVELOPMENT’
Africa became less attractive as a producer of cash crops like oil palm for a
number of reasons. Demographics is the simplest explanation. Labour is
cheaper in East Asia because there is an abundance of workers. India and
China both have more inhabitants than the entire African continent. Slavery
is the most important reason behind the lack of population in Africa, the
only underpopulated part of the world. But after slavery ended, the logic of
underdevelopment ensured that Africa’s population would remain low. The
genocidal tendencies of the West spread into Africa. Leopold’s murder of 10
million in Congo stands out, but countless Africans were killed across the
continent to exert colonial control by all the major European powers. But it
was not only direct slaughter that culled the African population. Under
colonial rule the continent was only developed to the extent that it benefited
the European powers, and this did not include supporting the welfare of the
native population.
On taking over as president of Ghana in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah
inherited a state that had only thirty-seven hospitals for 4 million
Ghanaians.20 This was no different to the rest of the continent. In
neighbouring Nigeria in the 1930s under colonialism, the 4,000 British
immigrants (let’s not dignify them by the term ‘ex-pats’) had the use of two
modern hospitals while the 40 million Nigerians had to share fifty-two.21
Facilities like medical care or sanitation were reserved mainly for the White
population, meaning that when so-called independence came, African
countries were sorely lacking in the infrastructure they needed to take good
care of their populations. Europe had not only stolen their wealth but had
also prevented the development necessary for them to prosper. This put
African governments in an almost impossible position because their
economies needed mass investment but remained under economic
oppression from the West. Taking over the government offices did not mean
removing the claws of the West, which dug so deep and extracted so much.
Under colonial rule Europe made huge profits, with investments making
25 per cent more in the colonies than in Britain. Profits being leached from
Benin by French investors represented half of the colony’s GDP.22 The US-
based Firestone Company, which extracted rubber from Liberia, made so
much money that in 1951, even after it had paid tax to the Liberian
government the company still made three times the amount of the total
income of the state.23 By 1955 Africa was contributing £1.446 billion
annually to British gold and dollar reserves – over half of the total. Belgium
and France extracted so much wealth from their colonies that they did not
need to take out loans to pay for their war efforts.24 The West literally
drained the financial, human and mineral resources out of Africa and
continues to exploit the continent using the same economic tools.
France continues to use hard power, a ‘coercive neo-colonialism’25 that
locks its African colonies into a currency union based around the West
African CFA franc. As part of the West African Economic and Monetary
Union, which covers Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau,
Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, France can still veto monetary policy. This
currency dependency also encourages the nations to remain over-reliant on
French imports of goods manufactured from the former colonies’ raw
materials. Britain and other Western powers take a more indirect approach,
through international trade and bodies such as the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank, but the result is the same.
There were varying models for running colonies in Africa. In places like
Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, there was a far larger presence of British citizens
than in countries like Nigeria. Even when indirect rule was chosen as the
model, a very limited native elite was trained to administer colonialism.
This meant there was a strong presence of European civil servants across
Africa who worked above the native administrators. For example in 1930s
Ghana, European civil servants were paid £40 per month, while Africans
received only £4 for the same hours of work. There was no need to educate
the locals because they were deemed unworthy of rising into the intellectual
ranks that could lead the country. In 1959 Britain ‘spent £11 per African
pupil, £38 per Indian and £186 per European’ in Uganda for their
schooling.26 On independence Kenya had only thirty-five schools for 5.5
million young people.27 In 1950 the student body of the University of
Sakar, established for all those in the West African French colonies, was 50
per cent White.28 This lack of educational provision was not only meant to
convey the idea that Africans could not think, but created a reality where
the native population did not have the skills (particularly in literacy) to
administer their countries. The select few who were given the opportunity
for education received the most Eurocentric indoctrination imaginable,
having to travel to the mother country to be taught in the ways of
Whiteness.
The purpose of educating Africans was to create a class who could
administer European colonialism as a proxy for Europeans. It brings to
mind Malcolm X’s description of the Uncle Tom figure from the slave
plantation:

The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well, and fed him well,
and even gave him a little education – a little education; gave him a
long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him.
 Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used
in those days is used today. He takes a Negro, a so-called Negro,
and makes him prominent, builds him up, publicizes him, makes
him a celebrity. And then he becomes a spokesman for Negroes.29

Replace ‘Negro’ with ‘African’, and ‘celebrity’ with ‘administrator’ and you
have the exact relationship of the colonial period. On independence it was
these anointed ones who were trusted to ‘lead’ their countries. Given that all
the leaders who emerged from the continent went through different varieties
of this process, the surprise is that so many of them rejected their masters’
ideas. The movement to unite and liberate the continent from European
control emerged in Britain and America and was spearheaded by Africans
educated by their respective mother countries. It is also true that ultimately
too many of the leaders betrayed the radical promise of continental unity in
favour of the individual status and wealth gained from leading their nations
further into the bowels of the West. But revolutionary leaders like Kwame
Nkrumah in Ghana, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea and Patrice Lumumba in
Congo were also educated in the West. The problem is that they were never
given the chance to implement their revolutionary programmes because the
West made sure to dispose of them and support puppets in their place who
had taken to the Western training they had received.
Patrice Lumumba’s assassination is the perfect case study in the
corruption the West embedded into Africa, post-independence. Lumumba
was the first prime minister of independent Congo, who sought to
Africanize the government and administer state-led economic development,
using the resources of the nation for the benefit of its people. Congo was
(and remains) far too important to the West to allow this to happen, being
one of the most mineral-rich parts of the world. Rather than allow the
people of Congo to decide their destiny the West, including the Belgians
and the CIA, supported his rival, the reactionary Moise Tshombe. Malcom
X devoted a lot of time speaking about the situation in Congo, condemning
the United States’ role in supporting Tshombe, the ‘Uncle Tom’ leader who
was a puppet for Western interests. In 1961 the Lumumba problem was
taken care of when he was killed in what has been dubbed the ‘most
important assassination of the twentieth century’.30
Tshombe’s leadership led to the dictatorial reign of Mobuto Sese Seko,
which lasted from 1965 to 1997, and which devastated Congo, opening up
the nation to Western interests and impoverishing it further. He also
personally looted billions of dollars. The civil wars sparked after his
departure claimed more lives than any other conflict since the Second
World War. Congo is just one example of what has happened across Africa
and the rest of the underdeveloped world when leaders threaten the interests
of the West: regimes are changed to install pro-Western governments. It is
the political and economic system that is corrupt in Africa, and the puppet
‘Uncle Tom’ leaders who syphon off money into Western bank accounts are
a by-product of that central problem. Just as there is no such thing as free
trade, so-called good governance is a nonsense in this system.

THE DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION OF INDIA

The British Empire was vast, by 1900 covering a quarter of the globe and
ruling over 372 million subjects. This scene from Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee in 1897 demonstrates the extent of her dominions:

50,000 troops from every corner of the empire – Camel Corps and
Gurkhas, Canadian hussars and Jamaicans in white gaiters, the
procession led by the loftiest officer in the army, 6-foot-8 Captain
Ames of the Horse Guards – had marched or trotted through London
to celebrate.31

India was Britain’s largest colony and Britain did not just underdevelop
India, it actively de-industrialized the region. When Britain colonized India
in the late eighteenth century, it was a rich nation that accounted for 25 per
cent of the world’s trade. By the time Britain’s rule collapsed in 1947, India
only held a 3 per cent share. Before British colonialism the standard of
living in India was on a par with what would become the mother country.
Afterwards, levels of absolute poverty no longer seen in Britain plagued the
nation.32 During the initial eastern expansion of their Empire the British
did not seize what they wanted at the barrel of a gun. Europeans used gifts
and signed treaties to gain access to societies in the East. It was only in the
eighteenth century that attitudes towards India began to change, and rather
than being seen as people worthy of trade, Indians were viewed as brutes to
be dominated.33
 That is not to say that in the beginning there was none of the underlying
White supremacy we saw at work in the Atlantic system. Although the
westward expansion of empire was important, the move into the East was
just as indispensable to the emergence of the West, and equally brutal.
Vasco da Gama is less celebrated than his Italian counterpart Columbus, but
his opening up of India to the Portuguese in 1497–9 was as pivotal as
Columbus’s so-called discovery, and he wrought a similar campaign of
terror. The year 1492 marked the expulsion of the Muslim conquerors from
Spain, but they maintained power in the East. Europeans set about
destroying ports and strongholds in the Muslim world on their travels
eastward, and da Gama showed no mercy, as this tale of how he dealt with a
ship full of Muslim pilgrims returning to India shows:

he ordered the ship to be set on fire … Women held up their

jewellery to beg for mercy from the flames or from the water, while
others held up their infants to try to protect them. Da Gama watched
impassively, ‘cruelly and without pity’ as every last passenger and
crew member drowned before his eyes.34

Dehumanizing ideas about those from the ‘East’ have a long history in the
European imagination. The battle of East versus West has been played out
in the Greek and Roman Empires, in the Crusades from the eleventh
century, the battles against the occupation of Spain by the Moors, wars with
the Ottoman Empire, and into the present day with the supposed ‘clash of
civilizations’ between the West and the Islamic world that is shaping much
of the West’s policy agenda.35
The long history of the West viewing the East through a lens of the exotic
and inferior is dubbed ‘Orientalism’ by scholar Edward Said, who defines
the idea as a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient’.36 Importantly, he argues that European culture
gained strength and identity by setting itself ‘against the Orient as a sort of
surrogate and even underground self’.37 In other words, the West’s self-
belief in its superiority, given supposedly scientific legitimacy in the
Enlightenment, was in part bolstered by the supposed inferiority of the
people and cultures it encountered in the East. But for all of Europe’s
aggrandizing ideas, the reality was that Westerners were not superior to
those they encountered in the East, and they had no choice but to ingratiate
themselves in order to trade.
In the fifteenth century Europe was emerging from its Dark Age and
lagged behind the East. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the West
was able to begin to assert its dominance. In fact, the same was true in
Africa, where, although the first instinct may have been to conquer,
Europeans found this impossible given the strength of the societies they
encountered. There is a reason that Europe never directly colonized Africa
until much later, and kept its forts and presence for the most part limited to
the coast. White supremacy had to be established. It was not a divine right.
Britain had to wait for its opportunity to fulfil its ambition to conquer
India, which came with the decline of the Mughal Empire in the mid
eighteenth century. The Mughals ruled a vast area in India from the
sixteenth to well into the seventeenth century – a centralized power that the
British could not displace. But the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707
tipped the Empire into a series of wars to decide who would succeed as
ruler. Within fifty years the Mughal regime had collapsed in on itself,
unable to keep control of its sprawling dominions. Britain seized on the
chaos caused by the fall of the Mughals, and through the East India
Company (EIC) embarked on colonization. By 1857 the EIC had an army
of 260,000 troops and dominion over 200 million subjects.38 Echoing
present-day US imperialism driven by private corporations, the EIC was a
business, set up with a monopoly over British interests in India.
The British government provided loans and support to establish the
company and individuals made massive profits from its endeavours. There
was no surer investment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than EIC
stock, and its directors amassed fortunes from exploiting the people and
resources of India. Between 1765 and 1815 Indians paid over £18 million a
year to the EIC in taxes alone. The word ‘loot’ comes from Hindi, and
directly from the pillaging of India, incorporated into English by the same
people who robbed it. Robert Clive ‘of India’, military general, first
governor of Bengal and director of the EIC, amassed a personal fortune in
excess of £40 million in today’s money. The seizure of Calcutta in 1757 was
a large source of this wealth. After claiming the region, the employees of
the EIC shared the tax take of £2 million – billions in current money –
between themselves. As the EIC was gorging itself on the locals’ taxes, the
first Bengal famine struck, killing millions of people – up to a third of the
region’s population – but the British ‘had thought only of enriching
themselves as the local population starved to death’.39 Such callous
disregard for lives that are not White in the face of profit has been the
defining feature of Western development.
The abuses by the EIC were such that eventually even the British
government had to step in. It took a rebellion of the Indian population in
1857 to spur the government into action and to disband the EIC. The last
thing the country needed was restless natives in one of its most important
colonies. India was hugely important for British trade and industry,
particularly after the end of the transatlantic slave system. In fact the price
of labour there was so cheap that it rivalled the economy of slavery even
when the system was ongoing.40 Commodities like cotton and sugar were
increasingly derived from cheap labour on Indian plantations and therefore
Britain had to maintain order over the colony. But, in the same way as when
Belgium took over Congo from Leopold, when the British government
ruled India as a colony the relationship established by the private
corporation did not change. Through violent subjugation India continued to
be milked of its resources by Britain.
In 1901, the salary for the Secretary of State of India brought in the same
amount of income that 90,000 Indians survived on. By the 1920s 7,500
British civil servants in India were taking a total of £20 million annually in
pensions. The British Indian army was also paid for out of Indian taxes,
sustaining a standing army of over 325,000 troops by the late nineteenth
century.41 But robbing India through taxation was not the only way that
Britain de-industrialized the nation.
In keeping with the logic of Western imperialism, the sheer brutality of
British colonialism did major demographic damage to India. This included
the kind of genocide to conquer the natives we have seen in other parts of
the world. Disease was also a major killer, where outbreaks such as cholera
epidemics claimed the lives of millions. Cholera had existed in India before
the arrival of the British but troop invasions into India were associated with
outbreaks, as they carried the disease across the region. Cholera was also a
massive killer during famines, intersecting with starvation to deadly
effect.42 It was these famines in India that accounted for the majority of
those killed by British colonialism. I have already briefly discussed the first
famine in the nation in 1770, but these tragedies continued to beset colonial
India even after the British government had taken the reins from the EIC.
As Shashi Tharoor explains in his book Inglorious Empire,

in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5

million people had died in all the wars around the world combined,
whereas in just ten years 1891–1900, 19 million had died in India in
famines alone.43

In total over 35 million Indians died in famines under British colonial rule.
The most infamous is perhaps the second Bengal famine in 1943 which
took the lives of 3 million people before Britain mobilized an appropriate
response. This particular famine has had more public attention because of
the involvement of British wartime hero Winston Churchill.
Prime minister at the time, Churchill took the decision to divert grain
away from India and actually import grain from the famine-hit country into
Britain, so that it could be stockpiled for the war effort. He did so with full
knowledge of the scale of the crisis. Worse still, Britain prohibited Indian
ships from sailing to get food, or using their currency reserves to buy it.
Churchill’s defence was to blame the Indians for ‘breeding like rabbits’; in
any case they would soon replenish their number. He had such a total
disregard for the Indian people that the Secretary of India at the time Leo
Amery (hardly an avowed anti-racist) once told him that in terms of his
views of Indians, he could not see ‘much difference between his outlook
and Hitler’s’.44 This ghastly episode is a reminder of the disposability of
Indian life in the Empire, but Churchill was just carrying on a well-
established tradition. Viceroy Lord Lytton had banned any price reductions
during famines in the nineteenth century and when colonial administrators
imported rice to feed the hungry during the Orissa famine in 1866, The
Economist magazine chastised them for sending the message to the Indians
that it was ‘the duty of the Government to keep them alive’.45
Such disregard for life was even seen when Britain left India. Labour’s
Attlee government wanted a quick exit from the colony after the War, and
Britain hastily drew up plans to leave. Divisions between the Hindu
majority and Muslim minority had been stoked by Britain, divide and rule
being one of the best forms of maintaining control. The Muslim League,
under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was campaigning for a
separate state for the large Muslim population. Lord Mountbatten was put in
charge of the process and came up with the plan to partition India, creating
the new state of Pakistan. You may know him as ‘Uncle Dickie’ in the
Netflix series The Crown, although in keeping with the idealization of such
figures you are much less likely to have heard about the significant amount
of blood on his hands from the catastrophe of Indian Partition.
Despite warnings of the carnage and upheaval that would be unleashed
by creating a religious national divide overnight, the British went ahead
and, following colonial tradition, arbitrarily drew a new boundary. On
Independence the result was as expected: more than 14 million people
became refugees, fleeing for the safety of their appointed homelands.
During the ethnic violence that was then unleashed, over 1 million people
lost their lives. British hands may not have been directly involved in the
slaughter, but they were by no means clean: they had callously created the
conditions that allowed India to become a bloodbath.
Under British rule India went from being one of the richest places on
earth to one of the most underdeveloped. The textile industry was purposely
prevented from competing with Britain. Cities shrank as work disappeared.
Indian shipping and steel production were also destroyed by the Empire to
create British supremacy. By the time the British left in 1947 poverty and
illiteracy had become the norm. It was only after Independence that the
country began to grow and prosper, and today India is one of the fastest-
growing economies on the planet and expected to be in the top three in
terms of size in the coming years.
Extreme poverty has been slashed in India: according to the World Bank
only 5 per cent of the population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2018,
compared to a quarter in 2011. On Independence the literacy rate in the
country was only 18 per cent, which improved to 80 per cent by 2017, the
same year that Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash
Javadekar announced a ‘guarantee that within next five years, it will be 100
per cent’.46 In a seeming reversal of the economics of empire, India once
again manufactures the clothes for Britain and much of the world. Even the
steel sector is booming: in a sign of the apparently post-colonial times an
Indian company, Tata, in 2007 took over what once was British Steel. Part
of the pitch of those pushing for Britain to leave the EU was so that they
could forge independent trade deals with countries like India. You could be
mistaken for looking at India and claiming a success story; empire
happened, but that is all in the past. That would be to mistake a mirage for a
waterhole.
Of all these prosperous figures, GDP is the most misleading. India is the
second largest country by population, by some distance. Only China also
has more than a billion inhabitants, and the third largest country is the
United States with over 300 million people. GDP measures the product of
the population and more people should lead to a higher output; India is
supposed to have a large economy. Britain has a comparable GDP to India
but a population of only 66 million. If we look at GDP per capita (person),
India only ranks 139th in the world. In other words, poverty is still rife.
Extreme poverty may well have declined in recent years, but hundreds of
millions of Indians live in conditions unimaginable in the West. Wealth is
not being equally distributed across the country. While claiming back textile
production sounds like a success, it is actually the opposite. Manufacturing
jobs moved to places like India because poverty made it cheaper to pay
workers in the underdeveloped world a pittance in sweatshops, rather than
pay a decent minimum wage in the West. Indian labour is being exploited
by multinationals in exactly the same relationship as we saw under
colonialism. We can celebrate the boom in the service sector in India, but
just consider the economics of having people thousands of miles away
working in call centres for Western countries. It is only cheaper to offshore
this kind of work because the standard of living in India is so much lower
than the West. If conditions improved and wages rose enough to provide the
Western lifestyle that we are so comfortable with, then the jobs that are
underpinning the so-called success of India would quickly be moved to a
poorer part of the world. It is a strange sort of prosperity that depends on
millions of your people being poor.
Such poverty has dire consequences. Neo-colonial India may have dealt
with the problem of famines, which were so widespread under British rule,
but in 2018 almost a million children died in India before their fifth
birthday because they were poor.47 India is making as much progress as
any nation of a billion Brown people can in a racist world order. We only
accept the poverty and appalling conditions because they are imposed on
those who are not White. Doing the dirty work so that we in the West do not
have to is exactly what they are worth, these disposable bodies propping up
the West.
 AMERICAN EMPIRE
The updated system of Western imperialism needs to be understood in the
context of supposedly post-colonial nations like India, but also in the shift
of the centre of power from Europe to the United States. One of the main
lies America tells itself is that it was a victim of colonial oppression which
freed itself from the tyranny of the British. While it is true that the original
thirteen states were colonies of the British Empire, the Pilgrims were the
first ex-pats, pioneers bravely taking their religion and so-called civilization
to the New World. Opening the American frontier was the essential first
step to building the West. American settlers are not just implicated in but
directly benefited from the founding genocide. The nation was then built on
the back of slave labour from Africa. The United States is a settler colony
where we can see the logic of the West play out in its clearest, most
undiluted form.
When the newly United States broke away from their British overlords,
this did not mark a break in the progress of the West but a necessary
evolution. Losing the colony ended up being of benefit to Britain. Trade
with the United States increased after independence in 1783. After the
abolition of slavery in Britain, when the country was basking in its moral
superiority to the United States, it was perfectly happy to import the
products of US slave plantations. During the US Civil War in the early
1860s, when the North blockaded Southern ships, there was a cotton famine
in Britain that led to a steep decline in the industry, with many factories
closing down and people out of work. The impact was to raise pro-slavery
sentiment and support for the South in Britain, particularly in places
dependent on slave-produced cotton.
During the war Liverpool was a stronghold of Confederacy support, with
three out of the four local papers on the side of the South. The city even
held a Confederate Bazaar in 1864 to raise money for Southern prisoners of
war. The bazaar was held in the grand St George’s Hall and was attended by
prominent businesspeople, aristocrats and the local member of parliament.
The Liverpool Daily Courier called the event a ‘triumphant success’ as it
raised £20,000 (more than £2.5 million today) and was attended by
thousands of people.48
By 1850, 40 per cent of British exports were finished cotton goods and at
least three-quarters, and in some years 95 per cent, of the raw material
imported into the Liverpool docks was from US plantations.49 New
Orleans hosted the biggest market in enslaved Africans because of its
centrality in connecting US cotton plantations to factories in the north of
England. The United States was also a key market for British industry, and
a destination for capital finance, making it more important than any part of
Britain’s actual empire. In the long term Britain has maintained a special
relationship with its former colony, basking in the reflected glory of the new
centre of Western imperialism.
As well as being a settler colony, the United States has been and remains
a colonial force in the classic sense of the word. At different times Puerto
Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guam and
Samoa have been US colonies. Hawaii has since been incorporated into the
nation, Puerto Rico has a unique status as not quite colony or state, and the
US Virgin Islands remain a colony to this very day. The United States even
took the very European step of establishing a colony in Africa.
Liberia was founded in 1847 with the intention of solving the supposed
race problem that would result from having millions of formerly enslaved
people running free in the United States. The idea was to repatriate the
Black population to Liberia, thereby cleansing the nation.50 Liberia was
formally a free state led by African Americans who, with support from the
US military, subjugated the natives of the area in order to establish their
new homeland. In reality, Liberia was a colony of the United States, entirely
dependent on the mother country for resources, military support and trade.
In keeping with the pattern across the rest of the continent, Liberia was
developed only insofar as this benefited the mother country and was set up
to strip the new nation of its resources. US companies flocked to Liberia to
make their fortunes and underdevelopment was an essential element of this
process. If Liberia had industrialized it would have challenged Western
dominance on the continent.51 As well as using the colony to enrich the
mother country, Liberia was also a tool in wider US interests in the region.
One of the main reasons that a more revolutionary approach to African
unity never occurred after most countries gained their independence was
that a group of them, including Nigeria, Ethiopia and most of francophone
Africa, were fundamentally opposed to truly unifying the continent. Instead
they sought the trappings of nation-state sovereignty and maintaining close
links to their paymasters in the West. It is no coincidence that this group
were dubbed the ‘Monrovia bloc’, after the capital of Liberia, holding their
first meeting there in 1961.52 Given the importance of Africa in terms of
resources, the United States and the rest of the West were terrified of a
radical vision of African political unity. Liberian president William Tubman
spearheaded the successful efforts to block radical proposals for change,
and the country went much further in doing its colonial master’s bidding.
In 1975 President William Tolbert ignored the ban imposed by the
Organization of African Unity and hosted South African apartheid prime
minister John Vorster. The meeting of the leaders of two of America’s client
states in Africa was more than just symbolic. Liberia was also used as a
base for CIA operations in Chad in support of warlord Hissène Habré in
1982, and more recently for US efforts to oust Gaddafi in Libya.53
America’s use of Liberia as a military outpost is just part of a much larger
aspect of US colonial foreign policy. To solidify its power across the globe
the US has over 800 military bases in more than seventy countries. Africa is
no exception: there are at least thirty-four US bases on the continent.54 In
2007 the United States announced its intentions in Africa by launching its
Africa Command, known as Africom. President George W. Bush explained
that the aim was to ‘enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the
people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health,
education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa’.55 The neo-colonial
intent of the operation is embedded in the quote, from the paternalism of
wanting to ‘bring peace and security’ to the continent, to the list of
aspirations that the mission wants to fulfil. Africom stands out from other
US commands because of its largely non-military objectives. The official
rhetoric makes it sound more like an aid agency than an army. The fact that
the United States believes it needs the might of its military power to ‘bring’
prosperity to the continent should be no surprise.
Colonial civilizing missions were always done at the barrel of a gun. We
should also be sceptical of these noble intentions. Africa is a key resource
for oil and other minerals and Africom’s presence appears aimed at securing
the safety of the extraction of these rather than promoting authentic
continental supremacy. It should also be noted that even the reactionary
African leaders that run the continent today are wary of Africom. No
country has accepted US overtures to host the headquarters of the
command, which runs out of Stuttgart in Germany. A US military command
for Africa, run from Germany, should give all the symbolic clues to its
nature that we need.
A major part of US imperialism is the power it wields as the dedicated
police force of the world. The establishment of Africom is meant to further
those networks and allow the US to strike across the globe. We have already
seen the use of US hard power, with Africom leading the coalition of
Western forces to topple Gaddafi, military action that went expressly
against the wishes of the African Union (which replaced the Organization of
African Unity).
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the most blatant neo-colonial
expression of hard power of the twenty-first century. A key source of oil
and a strategic defence against Iran, Iraq has been a major piece in Western
dominance of the Middle East. Saddam Hussein was once a key ally of the
West; in fact, I grew up driving past the Saddam Hussein Mosque in
Birmingham, built in the dictator’s honour. Not long after the Second Gulf
War the name of the mosque was changed as Britain tried to create a new
narrative around its involvement in the region. Whether we view the war as
legal or moral are important questions, but what is indisputable is that it
reflected the entitlement of the West, led by the United States, to enforce its
will on other parts of the world. There was no global mandate for invasion –
there was not even agreement across the West – but it occurred,
nonetheless. The result was the destabilization of Iraq and the rise of the
Islamic State, which quickly became the new bogeyman for the West. In the
same way that the United States had not tried to create al-Qaeda as a
terrorist group that would kill thousands of people in New York, neither was
it a conscious act to create its descendants. But as damaging as both groups
have been in the West, they have perversely served the expansion of the
militarist US-led empire.
Before the Iraq War the invasion of Afghanistan was supported by the
Western world in order to bring down the Taliban regime that harboured al-
Qaeda. Iraq was never implicated in 9/11 and therefore a different pretext
was needed to expand the mission. But without the initial presence in
Afghanistan it is very unlikely that the Iraq invasion would have happened,
no matter how many weapons of mass destruction the United States
imagined Saddam Hussein was stockpiling. Al-Qaeda provided the pretext
for a reshaping of relations in the Middle East, one of the most important
regions for the US Empire, which invested heavily in its neo-colonial
adventure. The United States may have spent as much as $3 trillion on Iraq
alone,56 not to mention the vast sums of money allies like Britain ploughed
into the invasion. Part of this gigantic outlay was because of neo-colonial
arrogance – the idea that these puny countries in the desert would quickly
bow to Western military might.
The sight of George Bush the younger landing in a fighter jet on the USS
Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on 1 May 2003, to unveil a ‘mission
accomplished’ banner is the most obvious symbol of the hubris of the US
Empire. The war would not actually end for more than eight years and there
is still chaos in the region. As has been true for anywhere there has been
colonialism, there was also resistance, and the United States and its allies
were trapped for years in conflict that claimed the lives of thousands of
Western troops. But the blood and treasure were worth it. The invasion
renewed Western control over resources in the region and solidified a new
frontier in the US Empire.
The bombing of the World Trade Center led directly to the signing of the
Patriot Act in October 2001, which has been much criticized for trampling
on domestic civil liberties. But the Patriot Act, and other laws passed in the
aftermath of 9/11, allowed the United States to make more gains for its
global empire. Following the attacks the US government froze the assets of
any group suspected of funding terror abroad. Sanctions were imposed
without the need for trial or much evidence. The ban was widespread and
covered all ‘aspects of financial support including food and medical aid’.57
As a result the assets of a number of Islamic charities were frozen,
irrespective of whether they were actually funding terrorism. The impact of
these decisions was felt not only by those in need of aid but may also have
contributed directly to financial crisis in Somalia.
As many underdeveloped countries do, Somalia relies on remittances
from its diaspora. A large proportion of these were handled by Al-Barakaat,
a Muslim money-transfer company which the United States financially
ruined ‘despite lack of evidence, trial or conviction’.58 The collapse of the
company sent Somalia into an economic tailspin. The economic attacks of
the US Empire were the softer side of the wider offensive.
Alongside massive military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
United States also increased its militarization of the entire region, and
beyond. Extraordinary rendition of subjects to black sites, beyond the
jurisdiction of international law, where they were subsequently tortured,
became the norm. Almost 800 people were imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay,
including British citizens. The majority were eventually released without
charge. Despite President Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo Bay
within a year of his coming to office in 2009, at the time of writing there are
still people imprisoned in the camp. The CIA has ramped up its activity
around the world and legitimized the use of drone strikes to kill terror
suspects without the need for anything like arrest and trial. The US security
apparatus has extended across the globe and set precedents for the use of
force that are reminiscent of old colonial days. It has been estimated that
since the start of the ‘War on Terror’ between 244,124 and 266,427 civilians
have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, the three main targets of
the US mission. In addition, over 100,000 members of the local armies and
police forces have lost their lives.59 Not all of these deaths were the direct
consequence of US armed forces pulling the trigger or dropping a bomb,
but they are a consequence of their neo-colonial agenda in the region. The
callous disregard for life that is not White can be seen in the drone strikes
targeting ‘terror’ suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Between 8,858 and 16,901 people have been killed by remote control from
the sky, including up to 2,200 civilians, of which as many as 454 have been
children.60 US imperialism has industrialized and legitimated the killing of
Brown civilians, including children, in pursuit of its goals.
A key feature of the expansion of the US Empire is one reminiscent from
older forms of colonialism: of the fortune that the United States spent on the
invasion of Iraq, a third was spent employing private military contractors,
often ex-soldiers paid by a private company to wage war. As such, there is
far less scrutiny of and accountability for their actions. The biggest force in
Iraq apart from the US army was the private militia, paid for by US tax
dollars. Iraq is just one example of the global trend. Private militias operate
in more than ninety countries, amassing budgets of over $100 billion.61
Not only did they make a financial killing from the conflict in Iraq, they
also profited mightily in the reconstruction effort. Contracts worth at least
$138 billion were handed out to private firms to rebuild the damage caused
by the US-inflicted war. Most controversially, a company previously run by
the then Vice President Dick Cheney was the most rewarded from this
privatization of state rebuilding, receiving contracts worth $39.5 billion.62
Capitalism, from Columbus’s voyages to slave-owning companies, to
outsourced colonial corporations, to hedge-fund managers today, has been
based on the state setting the table for private interests to fill their bellies.
Western empires have facilitated the ransacking of various parts of the
world, underdeveloping supposedly backward nations so that the West can
continue to profit. The myth of the risk-taking entrepreneur is central to
justifying the staggering inequality the system produces, but it is also rooted
in colonial logic. In fact, the notion is central to Enlightenment ideals of
progress, which identify the rational, individual White man as he who
ploughs the way for capitalist progress. Ignored in this is the role various
states have played in tilting the playing field so far in their favour that you
would be forgiven for believing that it is natural for wealth to fall into the
hands of the West. The current version of the US Empire is simply the
latest, most efficient way of delivering Western imperialism.
 5

Dawn of a New Age

After the Second World War the initial version of Western imperialism
could no longer continue to function in the same way it had during the
previous centuries. Competition between European nation states vying to
dominate the globe led to the loss of millions of lives and bankrupted these
seats of empire. The great European powers simply no longer had the
resources to directly control and maintain their colonies. Worse still, both
World Wars were truly global and the natives who had fought in their
millions for the mother countries were restless. They demanded freedom
and had the experience of armed warfare to achieve it. The fifth Pan-
African Congress, which brought together leaders of resistance movements
across Africa and the diaspora took place in Manchester in 1945. For the
first time in the movement’s forty-five year history the delegates from
Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas proclaimed their demands for the
full independence of Africa from European rule.
The writing was on the wall, and the empires that had defined the world
were in danger of collapse. In fact, in the popular imagination this is exactly
what is thought to have happened. Europe had to, either in response to
armed resistance by the natives or through a supposedly benevolent process,
eventually grant independence to its colonies. The old logic of racial
domination melted away, leading to the globalized world we inhabit today.
 Unfortunately, that version of history is an utter myth. Rather than
marking the beginning of the end of Western imperialism, the Second World
War instead led to a system update that changed the delivery of a racist,
unjust social order, but maintained all of its logic. By rebooting the system
it was able to continue, in many ways more successfully than in the first,
outdated version. In the deluded world-view of historians like Niall
Ferguson, the brutal forms of colonial oppression in the earlier version of
Western imperialism did more good than harm, representing a sort of
‘liberal imperialism’ that brought light to the backward parts of the world.1
These arguments are distorted, dangerous and wrong-headed, as any reader
of the previous chapters will understand. Inadvertently, however, Ferguson
stumbles upon the perfect phrase to capture the updated form of the system
that emerged after the Second World War: liberal imperialism. The current
incarnation of Western empire is one that presents itself as working for the
good of humanity, while maintaining the colonial logic upon which it was
founded.
Before the Second World War had even ended, plans were being made to
update the imperial system. After the carnage of the First World War and the
subsequent Great Depression it was becoming clear that the system was
unstable even prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. In order to move to a more
sustainable system of imperialism the West realized that it had to go beyond
the nation state-led format that had until this point been its dominant
feature. Collaboration between Western powers was always a central feature
of the emergence of the current racial order. European nation states simply
could not have dominated the globe without cooperation and systematic
coordination. But this was still done under the banner of nation statehood,
with competition and wars an unrelenting reality. Given this history, the
outbreak of neither the First nor the Second World War came as a great
surprise.
After the Germans lost in 1918 their colonies were divided up between
the Allies, and this became a key source of national frustration that
contributed to the rise of such a virulent, racist nationalism in the form of
Nazism. Western nation states at war with each other was bad for the
business of exploiting the world and therefore a more substantive form of
unity was necessary. The League of Nations, founded in 1920, was the first
attempt. It was ultimately doomed to failure because, although President
Woodrow Wilson was a key proponent of the League, the United States
never joined due to opposition in Congress. The fact that the United States
was essential to making the alliance work also marks a key shift in the
centre of Western imperialism. By 1920, although Europe still controlled
most of the world, the stage was set for the United States to become the
heart of the Western empire. The wealth and power of the United States
were the definition of colonial logic and European collaboration. It was a
nation formed in genocide, built by slave labour to offer a new frontier for
peoples from across Europe. The US was engorged by wealth accrued from
the first stage of Western imperialism and was ready to lead the transition
into the new world order.
When the United States decided to end its isolationist stance and take its
place on the world stage, it did so on the basis of the same grand vision that
remains largely intact today. While the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
was the act of aggression that ultimately tipped the United States into the
Second World War, the stage had been set earlier. In August 1941 Churchill
and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter, which was not a treaty or
binding document but rather a pledge of the principles that would govern
world affairs after the Nazis had been defeated. The eight principles of the
Charter were designed to create lasting peace and even included the
‘abandonment of the use of force’, which, given the empire that Britain
ruled over at the time, would have been a remarkable new principle, had
they ever intended it to apply to the colonies.2 In fact the entire Charter
reads like an anti-colonial manifesto, promising that ‘countries seek no
aggrandizement, territorial or other’; ‘no territorial changes that do not
accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’; and ‘the
right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will
live’. Whether Britain liked it or not, once professed, the principles
enshrined in these documents became used by decolonial freedom
movements in both the colonies and the mother countries. When Malcolm
X founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964 he explained
that they were partly ‘inspired by’ the Atlantic Charter in their quest for
self-determination.3
As well as inspiring liberation movements, the Charter became the
foundation of the United Nations (UN), created in 1945 in order to meet the
aims of national cooperation, global peace and security. By maintaining the
nation-state framework the UN has been able to convince countries to sign
up and agree to general principles of collaboration. As each member has
one vote the UN has been seen as a site where the global majority, i.e. those
countries not in the West, can have its say. As an organization the UN has
certainly done some good in the underdeveloped world, spearheading
development programmes and working to reduce ills like infant mortality.
But don’t be fooled by the façade of internationalism. It is no coincidence
that the UN was originally conceived by the British and Americans, nor that
its headquarters are in New York. The principal function of the UN has
always been to aid the transition from the old system of imperialism to the
new. Nothing could be stronger evidence of this than the make-up of the
real decision-making body in the UN.
The General Assembly, with its one-country-one-vote, may well be a
perfect space for grand speeches denouncing colonialism, but all the real
power lies with the Security Council, which is made up of five permanent
members: France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United
States and China; plus a further ten nations elected to two-year terms. At the
time that the UN was founded, Russia was technically not in the West; at
that point it was the major state in the Soviet Union and the foundation of
the Communist bloc. The USSR was undoubtedly a major power, and since
the Soviets had been pivotal in defeating the Nazis, they could not be
excluded. And, of course, Communism’s difference to the West on the
fundamental issue of the global racial order is a matter only of degree.
China stands out as the only non-White country on the council, but it was
also a key ally in the War and has been entirely complicit in racial
capitalism in order to develop itself. Not being White has never
automatically meant being opposed to the colonial logic of White
supremacy.
Permanent Security Council members have the right of veto over
substantive resolutions, which is why the Iraq War was never declared
illegal by the UN. That ultimate power means that the five permanent
members shape the decision-making of the organization. As neither Russia
nor China remain Communist in any meaningful sense, the domination of
Western interests in the UN is now indisputable. The UN is the global
institution with the best reputation in the world but it is inextricably bound
up with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, whose
names evoke fear across the underdeveloped world. In fact, article five of
the Atlantic Charter speaks of the ‘desire to bring about the fullest
collaboration between all nations in the economic field’, which became the
most important frontier for the updated global system of Western
imperialism.
In 1944 the seeds were planted for the IMF, World Bank and World Trade
Organization at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire. They
were later dubbed an ‘unholy trinity’ that developed a ‘regime’ of financial
control over the world.4 Just as with the UN, Britain and the United States
took the lead in establishing both the meeting and the ensuing global
institutions. Bretton Woods’ express purpose was to reshape the global
order after the War. In keeping with tradition, the headquarters of the IMF
and the World Bank are in the United States, both in Washington, DC. The
special relationship across the Atlantic was more than just symbolic. It
represented a passing of the torch from the former centre of Western
imperialism to the new one. Britain and the United States spent two years
designing the framework of the new world order prior to Bretton Woods,
and the purpose of the meeting was simply to ratify this. To maintain the
appearance of a global agreement, forty-four countries attended; but only
fifteen sent their finance ministers. Demonstrating just how central their
role in the process was, Guatemala sent a postgraduate economics student.
In testament to the attitudes of the architects of the new system, John
Maynard Keynes, the British economist who was instrumental in Bretton
Woods, had made an effort to restrict the participation of countries other
than the United States and Britain ‘fearing that a “great monkey house”
would result if all of the wartime allies were invited’.5 The financial
regime ratified at Bretton Woods therefore represented US economic
priorities, slightly steered by Britain, rather than any unified global
alliance.6
American dominance should not come as a shock given the context.
Europe was bankrupt and depleted after years of war, whereas the United
States’ economy was buoyant. The US used the opportunity to establish its
place at the head of the table in the post-war period, notably giving the
equivalent of $100 billion in aid to Western European countries impacted by
the War, in the Marshall Plan of 1948. As well as providing aid directly to
Europe, the US also supplied the bulk of funding to establish the new global
economic institutions.
The IMF began operating in 1947 and its principal initial purpose was to
provide loans to stabilize Western economies and promote collaboration
between countries. France was the first country to borrow from the IMF and
between 1947 and 1971 Britain drew down $7.25 billion.7 There were five
original shareholders: the United States, Britain, France, Germany and
Japan. Voting rights depended on the amount of money a nation put in, and
the size of the United States’ share in 1947 meant that it had an effective
veto over the fund. The United States was willing to invest so much money
in stabilizing the Western powers because it was in its economic interests to
do so and shifted the centre of the global economy across the Atlantic. It
was also in its economic and political interests to fight the spread of
Communism. If Europe had become infected by the Red menace, the
economic system that the United States had inherited leadership of could
have come to an end.
After 1971 the role of the IMF changed significantly. At this point
Western economies had largely recovered from the War but there was a new
problem. The West has always depended on the exploitation of the
underdeveloped world, but by the seventies most of the former colonies
were ruling themselves. There was a major fear that they would turn to
Communism, which would also have ended Western economic dominance,
given its dependence on the logic of empire. We should not pretend that the
old forms of coercion were not attempted in this more liberal period of
imperialism. Many countries had to win their freedom through armed
struggle, and in places like Mozambique and Angola the death throes of
direct colonization were brutal for the natives. Radical leaders were
assassinated in order to install corrupt puppet regimes. The United States
also began violent campaigns to prevent the spread of Communism, taking
colonial-era violence to places like Vietnam and Korea. But for the most
part the methods of control in the new age of empire were financial, and the
IMF played a pivotal role.
Colonialism had left the newly independent countries underdeveloped.
They lacked basic infrastructure and were impoverished by colonial
exploitation. After so-called independence neo-colonial trade practices
ensured that even if they were rich in resources, like most African countries,
their wealth was in the hands of foreign multinationals. Independence was
gained by individual nation states that were too small to wield any influence
on the world stage. Most of the underdeveloped nations found themselves
in steep debt not long after the mirage of their liberation, and the IMF was
only too willing to oblige them with loans. Unlike lending to Western
countries, in the underdeveloped world these loans had strong conditions;
they came with strings attached. The prevailing assumption was that the
nations had got themselves in debt by acting economically inappropriately.
For their economies to prosper and therefore pay back the loans they would
have to make structural adjustments to their economic life. The orthodoxy
of what apparently makes for a successful economy includes abolishing
controls on imports, imposing austerity to reduce the size of the state,
devaluing the currency and opening the doors to foreign private investors.8
Countries in desperate need of support continue to voluntarily submit to
these conditions because they have no place else to turn.
What on the surface was an economic bailout was in reality direct
interference in the political decision-making of underdeveloped countries.
Reducing public spending is a euphemism for cutting jobs and privatizing
services, making them more expensive, in the poorest countries in the
world. Consequently, IMF policies have caused strikes and riots across the
underdeveloped world. In 1976 protests erupted in Argentina after
government wages were frozen. A 1981 general strike occurred in Mexico
after government subsidies on food were removed. The removal of
subsidies on petrol brought unrest to Nigeria in 1988. Riots broke out in
Egypt in 1997 and Indonesia in 1998 after food subsidies were removed or
reduced. Decisions to make the poor even poorer are made with the
coldness that only a global bureaucracy could produce.
The evidence shows that IMF involvement in underdeveloped countries
is a net negative. A study of 135 recipient countries found that accepting
money from the IMF significantly increased income inequality.9 Structural
adjustment has a negative effect on women’s employment.10 IMF loans
lead to higher suicide rates in countries that accept them.11 IMF policies
also reduce human rights in a recipient country, specifically increasing the
incidence of torture and extra-judicial killings.12 The whole purpose of
IMF intervention is meant to be to save struggling economies, but financial
crises are a continuing feature for IMF recipients.13
‘Structural adjustment’ is a term often associated with Latin America,
where a debt crisis in the eighties sparked an economic shock across the
continent. The root of the problem was that, particularly due to a steep rise
in oil prices, in order to balance their budgets Latin American countries had
been borrowing money from Western banks and governments, and were
unable to service their foreign debts. For instance, by 1982 Bolivia was
spending 15 per cent of its gross national product (GNP) on debt
repayments, a clearly unsustainable position to be in. But Bolivia was not
treated as harshly by the IMF for reasons that reveal the true motives for
Western financial intervention.
Although Bolivia had one of the worst debt ratios of any country, because
it was a small and poor country its absolute debt was relatively low: it owed
only $44 million to Western banks. Argentina, on the other hand, was
spending 4.5 per cent of its GNP on debt repayments, but as a richer and
larger country had a total debt of $45 billion.14 It seems obvious that the
two economies were vastly different and would not require the same
prescription, but the IMF mercilessly and harshly imposed structural
adjustment on Argentina in any case. The purpose of these policies was not
to solve the problems of the recipient economies but to secure Western
interests. Argentina owed vastly more money to the West and needed to be
squeezed to ensure this was paid back.
Another reason for the blanket application of the IMF prescriptions is
that by devaluing the currency, privatizing utilities and opening up the
economy to foreign direct investment, structural adjustment makes the
receiving nations ripe for takeover by Western interests. Global capital has
been aided in its expansion across the world, looting whole economies to
fill the coffers of Western financial capitals.15 The eighties are referred to
as the ‘lost decade’ in Latin America for a reason: triple-digit inflation,
enforced austerity and poverty had a devastating impact on the region.
Mexico was one of the countries hardest hit by the debt crisis and the
international financial regime: the impact was so severe that the economy
had not fully recovered two decades later, remaining 30 per cent below
where it should have been.16
The idea that organizations like the IMF act solely on the basis of sound
economic principles is a fairytale. The organization is based in Washington
and funded by Western governments, on whose say the amount of money to
be invested depends. Bolivia’s more favourable treatment by the IMF
exposes the political incentives behind the actions of the Western financial
regime. The United States is the dominant source of funding, and the
priorities of the IMF align with the holders of the purse strings. In the 1980s
the US pursued a ‘war on drugs’ in Central and South America, even though
attacking the coca-leaf producers decimated the lives of the quarter of a
million farmers and their families who depended on the crop.17 Bolivia
was a key ally in this war, and as a reward for its fealty to American
interests, received a somewhat more lenient ride with the IMF. This was
also the case with the monstrous Pinochet regime in Chile, which received
preferential treatment in negotiations with the IMF, after taking power
following a CIA-backed coup d’état against socialist leader Salvador
Allende in 1973.18 It is always worth remembering the dictators and
despots whose politics have aligned so well with the West.
The history of the IMF as a political tool is by no means restricted to
Latin America: preferential negotiations were used to try and prevent
Pakistan from arming itself with nuclear weapons as well as to induce
Turkey’s support for the Gulf War.19 Countries in the underdeveloped
world who vote more often with the United States in the UN also get a
better deal from the IMF.20 The new age of empire functions on the basis
of this financial intervention regime, one that plunders the economies of the
underdeveloped world to support the interests of the West.
It might be tempting to argue that the IMF takes its actions in good, but
ill-conceived, faith. That the countries are in debt because their economies
are badly run and they need support to make the correct adjustments on
their way to becoming highly developed capitalist utopias. But the West is
not rich because of its genius, democracy and capitalism. It is affluent
because it has expropriated wealth from the underdeveloped word: the Rest
is poor because the West is rich. Newly independent nations were always
going to end up struggling and having to take loans from Western interests,
who only had the resources to lend because they were plundered from the
Rest. Third World debt is obscene at every level. It’s as if I stole your
money and then, when you failed to make ends meet, offered you a payday
loan at extortionate interest rates, all the while berating you for being bad at
running your personal finances, and then forcing you to spend the money in
the way that benefited me the most. The West can never be the solution to
global poverty because it is the cause of it. The places in the
underdeveloped world that have made the biggest strides forward since the
dawn of the new age of empire are those that have had the least support
from the West.
Prior to the late nineties, East Asia was seen as a miracle of economic
development. Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia had
experienced three decades of economic growth and poverty reduction.
Contrary to Western economic wisdom, this had not been achieved because
they followed the dictates of the Washington consensus but because they
had not.21 In particular, in these countries the state had been heavily
involved in their economic transformation, and economic liberalization and
privatization were happening only slowly.
At the end of the Korean War in 1953 South Korea was poorer than India,
but by 1990 it was so ‘successful’ it was a member of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a pool of largely
Western countries tasked with stimulating economic trade and so-called
global progress. All of this was done with little foreign direct investment,
although it did rely on loans from Western banks. We should never forget
that the so-called progress of nations like South Korea is built on their
integration into the mechanism of Western imperialism. Alongside
including steep inequalities within their borders, this also means feeding off
the bounty of global White supremacy. Dealing with the devil has its
consequences, as many of the nations in East Asia found out at the end of
the nineties.
In 1997 currency speculators drove down the value of the Thai baht,
which caused an economic crisis that spread across the region. In stepped
the saviour, in the form of the IMF, who managed to only make the problem
worse. The IMF provided $95 billion in loans, which was in effect a bailout
for the Western banks the nations were having difficulty repaying. As
always, the money had strings attached that included austerity, tax increases
on the poor and neoliberal structural reforms. The results were disastrous.
GDP collapsed across the region and unemployment increased four-fold in
Korea and three-fold in Indonesia. In Korean cities a quarter of the
population fell into poverty. Austerity made the situation far worse than it
could have been, and reductions in food and fuel subsidies for the poor led
to riots in Indonesia. The IMF may not have started the crisis but their
actions deepened it, and placed a heavy burden on the poor. As economist
Joseph Stiglitz explains, the impact was so negative in the region that
‘history is dated “before” and “after” the IMF, just as countries that are
devastated by an earthquake or some other natural disaster date events
“before” or “after” the earthquake’.22
As an example of the absurdity of IMF orthodoxy, Stiglitz offers Ethiopia
in 1997. The IMF refused to loan Ethiopia money in the midst of an
economic crisis because they argued that foreign aid was too big a
proportion of the country’s economy. They genuinely suggested that
Ethiopia would be better served by paying foreign aid into the nation’s
reserves, rather than spending the money on schools and hospitals. Stiglitz
uses this example to make the case that the World Bank was a more
benevolent organization, since it had workers on the ground trying to
engage with and support the poor. But the World Bank was created by the
same people and for the same purpose as the IMF. As a former director and
chief economist of the World Bank, we should take Stiglitz’s
pronouncements about the organization as little more than company PR.

THE ‘WHITE MAN’S BURDEN’

Unlike the IMF, the World Bank sees itself as a development agency. It
aims to end extreme poverty and it was primarily set up to provide support
for the underdeveloped world so that countries would not fall for the
charms of the Soviets. Just as with the IMF, the organization is financed
largely by Western governments and the United States is the biggest donor.
Also like the IMF, the World Bank is used as a political tool, so it should be
no surprise that its programme benefits wealthier nations, whilst supposedly
supporting the underdeveloped world.23 While Stiglitz has been more
critical of the economic orthodoxy of Western financial intervention, the
World Bank generally has not. It has embraced the same conditionality to
its loans as the IMF, and the two names are often used interchangeably
because of the collective destruction they have wrought on underdeveloped
economies. John Williamson, whose tenure at the World Bank spanned over
a decade, said in 2004, ‘we argue the desirability of completing rather than
reversing the liberalizing reforms of the Washington Consensus.’24
Rather than challenging the cartel of Western intervention, the World
Bank has been happy to enforce neoliberalism on the nations it is supposed
to be helping. When the World Bank was considering the impact of
charging people for healthcare in Peru in order to shrink public debt they
came to the conclusion that ‘the introduction of user fees at public health
facilities will have only a small effect on the rural poor because they tend
not to visit health facilities.’25 The fact that the poor do not have access to
healthcare somehow became a reason to introduce charges. The callous
disregard for life outside the West is one of the key features that has been
maintained in the updated system of racial oppression. To borrow from
Stiglitz, ‘from one’s luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about
which one would think twice if one knew the people whose lives one was
destroying.’26
The intentions of the World Bank may genuinely be positive. They are a
resource of information on global poverty and invest billions of dollars in
the underdeveloped world. But the road to neo-colonialism is paved with
good intentions. Believing that you are doing good while inflicting damage
is not a new feature of Western imperialism. Even during the horrific
violence of its first iteration, colonialists imagined that they were doing the
savages good by dragging them into civilization. Kipling said it was the
‘White man’s burden’ to lift the world out of its state of nature. We can see
this rhetoric at work in the new centre of empire when in 1901 Vice
President Theodore Roosevelt declared the need to annex the Philippines,
explaining that ‘it is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see
that they are freed from their chains.’27 In the development agenda
weapons are not used to save the savages. Instead aid is sent, and expertise
is granted, to help pull up the underdeveloped world.
In exactly the same way that the notion the underdeveloped world should
be indebted to the developed world is absurd, so is the idea that aid could be
of any serious benefit. We are trapped in a similar paradox to the
reparations debate, where the wealth necessary to repair the damage would
destroy the entire Western economic system. The West enriches itself off the
Rest, and therefore donating an extremely small amount of that money back
through aid is clearly not going to solve the problem. While the absolute
numbers in terms of aid sound high, they are actually relatively small. By
the early 2000s the West had spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid.28 But when
you consider that Britain’s GDP in 2017 alone was $2.6 trillion you can
begin to understand the scale of the problem. It should be no surprise then
that the record of foreign aid is not encouraging. For instance, $2 billion has
been invested in Tanzania’s roads, but they show little improvement.29
There have been strides made in the underdeveloped world but most of the
countries that have done well received relatively little development aid.
In 2000 the United Nations committed to a series of Millennium
Development Goals that it hoped the world could achieve by 2015. Progress
was made in most areas and many of the targets were hit, including more
than halving the number of people living in extreme poverty across the
globe to 14 per cent.30 The proportion of undernourished children also fell
by almost half, more children were in education, including girls, and the
number of people in the global working middle class grew significantly. All
this apparent progress is accompanied by a host of cheerleaders promising
us that we are well on the path to a better world.
Psychologist Steven Pinker assures us not only that the Enlightenment
has ‘worked’ but that its ideals are ‘stirring, inspiring, noble’ and nothing
short of a ‘reason to live’.31 Bill Gates, perhaps the embodiment of the
White saviour complex, called Pinker’s ode to the Enlightenment his
‘favourite book of all time’. Sam Harris, self-described neuroscientist (but
in reality pop psychologist), is so convinced of the power of so-called
science he believes it will ultimately determine correct moral values.32
Having endured an undergraduate degree in psychology, it is no shock to
me that authors steeped in the subject have so fully drunk the progress-
narrative Kool-Aid. Psychology is trying to make its presence known,
having been promoted to the premier league of pseudo-sciences, vying for
position with stalwarts such as economics, politics and some versions of
sociology. But wherever you look you can find plenty of academics waving
pom-poms in support of progress. Development studies was basically
designed to lead the PR campaign for Enlightenment ideals, and Hans
Rosling, with his captivating TED talks, colourful charts and accessible
books, is the leader of the cheer squad.33 But before we get lured by the
allure of the future dead White men we only need to take a closer look at all
these so-called gains to see through the mirage.
In terms of the poverty indicators, China accounted for the vast majority
of improvements. This is the same China that received very little aid and
has a planned economy run by its central Communist Party machinery.
Though the numbers of people living in extreme poverty fell in Africa, this
did not happen to anything like the same extent. In fact, by 2015, 36 per
cent of people in work in Africa lived in extreme poverty. The World Bank
figures report that half of people living in extreme poverty are in so-called
sub-Saharan Africa, and that figure will be nine in ten by 2030.34 As we
have already explored, anti-Blackness is a feature of Western empire, so we
should have been prepared for the news that progress is far slower in Africa.
But we should not get carried away by how much life has changed for most
of the world’s poor.
The UN Millennium Development Goals report admits that ‘almost half
of global workers are still working in vulnerable conditions, rarely enjoying
the benefits associated with decent work’,35 while the World Bank
estimates that half the world lives on less than $5.50 a day. To qualify for
the working middle class you only need to earn more than $4 a day, and
over 80 per cent of people in the world live on less than $13 daily. The
development agenda has never been about equality, but has been tailored to
remove the harshest edges of suffering from the global system of
oppression. In a 1977 speech to the World Bank, Robert McNamara, its fifth
president, gave the game away when he explained that

closing the gap [between the developed and underdeveloped worlds]

was never a realistic objective in the first place. Given the immense
differences in the capital and technological base of the industrialized
nations as compared with that of the developing countries, it was
simply not a feasible goal. Nor is it one today.36

The same is true now. The UN goals are all worthy. Reducing extreme
poverty, educating children and tackling health emergencies like HIV are
imperative to alleviate human suffering. But this is not the same as
addressing global inequality. The fact that people earning $4 a day are
labelled ‘working middle class’ should be proof of the obscenity of this
paradigm. Conditions that we would never accept in the West are marked as
progress in the Rest. Whereas we may have accepted that killing and
enslaving the natives is wrong, we have normalized poverty for the Black
and Brown because in the new world order our lives matter, just a lot less.
In many ways this is the fulfilment of Kant’s universal reason, rooted in his
‘ moral geography’. We have a supranational body (the UN) working to
ensure that the savages are not murdered or deposed by colonial troops, but
are given just enough to subsist on so that the West is free to carry on
exploiting them through colonial logic, with no twinges of its conscience.
The UN’s complete ignorance of race can only be understood in the
context of Enlightenment reason, which imagines civilization rebooted in
Europe in the eighteenth century (after a long hiatus following the fall of
the Romans). Cheerleaders like Pinker and Rosling point to the data
supporting the idea that progress is being made in areas like infant mortality
and absolute poverty around the world. This is the world-view that allows
the UN to claim victory in its millennium goals. Conveniently ignored is
that we are measuring progress since the destruction wrought by Western
imperialism. It is perverse to celebrate marginal gains in the
underdeveloped world after genocide, slavery and colonialism produced the
racially unjust social order. The number one cause of global poverty is
racism, with nations so desperate to improve their condition because of the
lived reality of White supremacy.
It would be charitable to see this foreign-aid industrial complex as a
benevolent form of imperialism, where at least people’s hearts are in the
right place. In just one example, a UN-funded Millennium Villages project
in Uganda trained farmers in techniques to provide a higher crop yield. The
result was a bumper harvest, but there was no market for the goods and they
ended up rotting, with the famers losing out even further because of their
increased costs of production.37 Maybe we should forgive such misguided
errors and the well-to-do bumbling of do-gooders. But when we look at
how the money is spent it is very hard not to see a purposeful campaign to
maintain the dispossession of the underdeveloped world. It is even more
difficult to avoid this conclusion when the British Minister for International
Development openly declares that she wants to use her budget to ‘tear down
the barriers to free trade’, as Priti Patel did in 2017.38
The Conservatives are not typically seen as a party that supports foreign
aid. In both classical and neoliberal versions of Western economics the idea
of giving handouts is a terrible distortion of the sanctity of the market.
There is a whole body of economic thought, typified by Milton Friedman,
that believes global inequality is caused in part because the underdeveloped
world is ‘receiving unwarranted assistance’.39 But since gaining power in
2010 the Conservatives have been keen to champion their foreign aid
credentials. On his last day in office, after crashing his premiership on the
rocks of Brexit, David Cameron claimed that his government’s commitment
to spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid was one of his ‘proudest
achievements’.40 The aid spending was particularly significant for a
government that pursued the severest austerity agenda in British history,
and they weren’t forced into it by the IMF either. The Department for
International Development saw its budget increase by 24 per cent from
2010/11 to 2015/16 at a time when cuts to other departments were 28 per
cent.41
Given how the aid budget is actually being spent, however, it becomes
far less surprising that the Conservatives have been so keen to invest.
Before the Cameron government came to power, in 2009, the Tories
published a Green Paper extolling the virtues of ‘capitalism and
development’ as ‘Britain’s gift to the world’.42 Once in power the
Conservatives set about changing the law so that they could use the aid
budget to support the interests of global capitalism and British business in
particular.43 A perfect example of such worthwhile spending was to grant
£450 million to Adam Smith International (ASI), a free-market London-
based consultancy – more than the government spent in total on human
rights and women’s equality, and double the amount given to combat the
spread of HIV and AIDS.44 One of the roles of the ASI is to advise
countries to liberalize (meaning privatize) whatever they can. Since 2005
the ASI has led a £99 million project to advise Nigeria’s government on
reforming infrastructure in order to benefit the poorest. Its main
achievement has been the privatization of the electricity sector, which is
seen as a success because it is so total it would be almost impossible to
reverse. The result of this ‘progress’ is that electricity prices have been
hiked by up to 45 per cent; over half the country remains without any
power; and the service cuts out so regularly that even those with electricity
have to rely on back-up generators. The only beneficiaries of the UK aid
were the ASI and the private companies feasting on Nigeria.
Another form of creative accounting in the UK aid budget is the dispersal
of £1.5 billion over five years into the university sector. Announced as part
of the comprehensive spending review of the coalition government in 2015,
the Global Challenges Research Fund aims to ‘harness the expertise of the
UK’s world-leading researchers’ in the cause of saving the underdeveloped
world.45 I work in the sector so I do not want to totally undermine the
validity of my profession, but the idea of transferring £1.5 billion of a
budget meant to save lives to academics is obscene. This is even more so
the case when we dig into how this money is being allocated.
I first found out about it in a meeting at work where it was revealed that
as part of our core research funding the university had been given a slice of
the development budget without even having to request it. The university
higher-ups then managed to retroactively find some activity that we could
pass off as ‘development’ focused. In this meeting we were discussing how
we could find projects to justify keeping our grant from the fund. Not all the
money has just been dished out to UK universities. For most of it there are
rigorous controls, and applications have to be sent through funding bodies.
UK Research and Innovation has a website where you can see the various
countries and research projects that have been funded.46 The sheer volume
tells you just how much money is being invested in the scheme. Some very
interesting projects on issues ranging from social policy to health and
violence prevention have been funded. But identifying Western universities
as a conduit for development creates the paradox of offering a ‘new White
Man’s Burden to clean up the mess left behind by the old White Man’s
Burden’.47
The Eurocentric knowledge that is vitally important to maintaining the
unjust racial order was produced in universities. That is no different today,
with the dreaded Washington consensus, the name given to the economic
policies supported by the IMF and World Bank, and by a wealth of
academics. In fact, the workforce of the Western financial intervention
regime is an army of graduates trained in development orthodoxy. It is
through the façade of pseudo-scientific technical expertise presented by the
World Bank and the IMF that their looting of economies in the
underdeveloped world is justified. If we accept that the development
industry is just another mechanism to continue Western imperialism, then
universities are one of the foundation stones of that agenda. One of the key
mechanisms of neo-colonialism is the training of thousands of students
from the underdeveloped world who are sent back home with all the tools to
continue letting the West ransack their economies. Giving development aid
to universities only makes sense if the purpose is to continue to produce
knowledge that entrenches global racial inequality.
Syphoning money from the aid budget in order to support British private
enterprise is a longstanding problem and so it makes perfect sense that
funding is now being diverted to universities. Since the reforms of 2017
British universities have almost fully completed their transition into private
companies. We charge fees, operate in a marketplace and treat students as
customers. Pumping in £300 million of the aid budget each year for half a
decade is essentially a public investment in the private sector. As is the
same with any non-governmental aid agency, the majority of costs go on
employing staff in the West. It would be revealing to see just how much of
the money ended up paying staff, overheads, travel and catering expenses in
British universities. We are essentially using foreign aid to pay the elite
(academics) to take on the burden of pulling the underdeveloped world out
of its barbarism. The difference between sending administrators to the
colonies, the Adam Smith International consultants, and universities
producing expert solutions is one of degree.
Britain is not alone in using its foreign aid budget to support its own
companies or national interest. USAID (the United States Agency for
International Development) is as much a brand that bolsters the progressive
credentials of the United States as it is a development agency. In the recent
past the United States has been guilty of the most brazen forms of using
foreign aid to further its agenda. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the perfect
example of how, when necessary, the United States has embraced ‘the
violence, brutality, and barbarity befitting any European imperialist
power’.48 After the carnage and devastation of Iraq, the rebuilding of the
country provided an opportunity for USAID to loot an underdeveloped
economy through ‘aid’. The United States prosecuted the war under the
guise of ‘advancing freedom’ in the Middle East.
Almost two years after the invasion President Bush delivered a live
prime-time speech at the military base of Fort Bragg in North Carolina
where he uttered the word ‘freedom’ twenty-one times to emphasize the
civilizing mission of America.49 The freedom he was referring to was not
what most would understand by the word. Rather than freedom from
tyranny, want or fear, Bush really meant unleashing the forces of the free
market in Iraq. Once President Saddam was toppled, the US-led Coalition
set about regime change, installing the fundamental principles of Western
financial intervention. The Coalition’s first acts, through USAID, included
making half a million soldiers and public officials unemployed, removing
barriers to foreign direct investment and privatizing 200 state industries. To
put icing on the neoliberal cake they also contracted an affiliate of the
leading international services firm KPMG to construct a free market from
the ground zero the invasion had created.50 Iraq became a breeding ground
for profiteering from nation-building.
To truly understand the problematic nature of the foreign-aid industrial
complex we need to look no further than the recipient of the highest amount
of US aid dollars. Rather than pouring money into one of the poorest
countries in the world, one in terrible need of infrastructure spending, the
United States has donated around a fifth of its aid to Israel, a relatively rich
country not considered a developing nation.51 In 2016 the United States
signed a military aid package for Israel worth $38 billion over ten years.52
Not only does Israel receive the most aid from the United States, it does so
under the most favourable conditions: it does not have to account for where
the money is spent like other recipient countries.
The United States has company in using its aid budget to support Israel
and its armed forces. In 2017 Priti Patel had to step down as Minister for
International Development in Britain when it was revealed that she was
having secret meetings with the Israelis and attempting to use her
department’s budget to fund Israel’s military activity.53 Although this
somehow did not prevent her from being appointed Home Secretary less
than two years later. Israel’s subsidy through foreign aid is important not
just because it exposes the contradictions in funding. It also highlights
another fundamental change in the updated version of empire that marked
the new age of empire that emerged after the Second World War.

POST-RACIAL IMPERIALISM
A visceral and overt form of racism underpinned the first iteration of
Western empire. A racial hierarchy was clearly coded and enforced with
racial science, providing the pseudo-intellectual backing for White
supremacy. If the Second World War brought an end to violent competition
between Western powers, as well as ending direct control of their colonies,
it also reframed the racial logic necessary to dominate the world. The
slaughter of 6 million Jewish people in Nazi Germany brought racial logic
home, disturbing the otherwise largely settled consensus. The horror of the
concentration camps upset the social order and it was decided that ‘race’
had to be abandoned to the dustbin of history. A 1950 statement brought
together by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) declared that

National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not

necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of
such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial
 traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed
when the term ‘race’ is used in popular parlance, it would be better
when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and
speak of ethnic groups.54

In other words, the West had used the concept of race to slaughter people
and dominate the globe, and when the horror of that system was brought
home they decided to terminate the idea. On the face of it, abandoning such
a flawed concept of race seems like a noble pursuit. Embracing ethnicity
retains the idea of difference but allows for more complexity. But over sixty
years after the UNESCO statement the world remains ordered around the
logic of race, so this change has clearly only been semantic. This is largely
because ethnicity merely became a stand-in for race, so all the hierarchies
were retained, just with cultural justifications rather than biological ones.
Africans were inferior not because of their genetics but because of their
tribal affiliations and backward way of life.
The main problem with this shift in discourse was that in erasing race it
becomes almost impossible to talk about racism. Black people remain
oppressed because of our race; we just talk about the problem in relation to
ethnicity and then wonder why the inequalities persisted. There is a reason
that the UN makes no mention of racism in its goals: it simply does not
have the language to talk about race. This post-racialism is important to the
system update of Western imperialism because it helps to maintain the
façade of progressivism that is so important when it comes to justifying the
continuing oppression. We tumble into a deluded view of the world where
the West cannot possibly be racist, because they abandoned race and are
investing trillions of dollars in aid.
It is ironic then that one of the responses to the Holocaust was to reify
race and racism, and to engage in older forms of colonial violence. Israel
was founded in 1948 after a longer struggle of Zionism that sought to return
Jewish people to their biblical homeland. Zionism had some support before
the Second World War but it was the Holocaust that spurred action from
Western powers, who became certain of the need for a Jewish homeland.
The only problem of course was that the land where Israel was created had
an established population. With a mindset reminiscent of those who created
the settler colonies that cleared the way for the West, German rabbi Isaac
Rolf declared before the War that
 In our land there is only room for us. We will say to the Arabs:
move, and if they disagree, if they resist by force – we will force
them to move, we will hit them on their heads and force them to
move.55

Before 1948 Palestine was a British-held colonial territory and therefore

directly subject to the logic of empire. Zionists did not appeal to the Arabs
living there but to the British who ruled the territory. Britain had been on
the fence about Zionism but embraced the idea of a Jewish homeland in
1917 when Lord Balfour declared, ‘His Majesty’s Government view with
favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of
this object.’56
Britain had its own reasons for supporting Zionism. The Balfour
Declaration was in part used to legitimize the British invasion of the
territory earlier in the year in an effort to further extend the Empire. Coming
out for Zionism was not an easy decision and was also predicated on the
belief that the global Jewish citizenry were vital to the First World War
effort. There was a genuine belief in the British government that if they won
over American Jews they in turn would use their influence to get the United
States involved in the War. It was also felt that after the Bolshevik
Revolution, Russian Jews would move to take Russia, a key ally, out of the
War and therefore needed to be appeased. In large part it was the fear of the
power of the influence of a global Jewish cabal, a deeply racist trope at the
heart of anti-Semitism, that sparked the Balfour Declaration. Activists were
well aware of this reality. Edgar Suares, a leader in the important
Alexandrian Jewish community, wrote to the Foreign Office in 1916 that
‘England could assure to herself the active support of the Jews all over the
neutral world if only the Jews knew that British policy accorded with their
aspirations in Palestine.’57 The Zionist campaign depended on anti-Semitic
ideas about the power and coordination of Jews worldwide for it to succeed.
Theodor Herzl, a central figure in the early Zionist movement who died
before the Balfour Declaration, argued that anti-Semitism was the ‘chief
asset’ of the movement.58
When the UN recommended the partition to create the Jewish state of
Israel in 1947, they did so as an apparently anti-racist act. Supporting the
Jewish people who had been racialized and slaughtered as an
ethnic/national group in need of a homeland perfectly suited the new post-
racial order. But to establish the new nation the West would have to support
the kind of racist colonial acts it had supposedly left behind. For a start, the
very notion that a state of White settlers could be built with a complete
disregard of the native Brown population is the epitome of colonial logic. In
order to clear the land of the natives, large-scale violence reminiscent of the
previous colonial era was necessary.
At Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, 250 unarmed people were slaughtered, a
number that included 100 women and children, by 120 militiamen from the
Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi.59 Menachem Begin, the leader
of Irgun, praised his troops, declaring ‘as in Deir Yassin, so everywhere …
Oh Lord, Oh Lord you have chosen us for conflict.’60 This kind of violence
was not uncommon and it was meant to terrorize the Palestinians into
fleeing their land. It had the desired effect, with over 700,000 Palestinians
becoming refugees by the time Israel was established in 1948. So traumatic
was this period in history that Palestinians named it the Nakba, which
literally translates as ‘the catastrophe’.
The violence enacted to clear the ground for the Israeli state is eerily
reminiscent of the genocidal frontier campaigns to establish the United
States. This was not lost on Israel’s greatest ally. With the Jewish state
facing threats from Arabs on all sides, in 1967 White House aide John
Roche drew the perfect analogy, explaining, ‘I confess, I look on the Israelis
as Texans’, drawing parallels with those who braved the United States’
frontiers and tamed the threat from Mexicans.61 The United States’ dogged
support for Israel could be in no small part down to recognizing the plight
of a fellow settler colony that needed to rally the wagons in order to defend
itself from the existential threat of the hordes of natives.
The United States’ support for Israel has been questioned on the strategic
front. The sheer amount of financial assistance means there is an economic
burden, but there are other ways that Israel is detrimental to the interests of
the United States. For one, Israel’s actions undoubtedly adversely impact on
the United States’ global image. As a settler colony Israel is one of the few
examples left of the unrestrained brutality of the previous colonial era. For
all the pretence of ethnicity, Israel is a Jewish state with citizenship based
on blood rights.62 Minorities are brutally oppressed and locked out of full
participation in the state: to establish itself, Israel has serially abused the
rights of the Palestinians. It continuously flouts both international law and
United States’ advice by attacking civilians and building illegal settlements
on the West Bank. The situation is so dire that comparisons to apartheid
South Africa are not only common but appropriate. The United States’
embrace of Israel means that it regularly defends abhorrent actions to
protect its ally, particularly blocking the international community in the UN
from taking any action against what is in many ways a rogue state.
Reputational damage is not just about PR but has consequences for the
United States. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has long been a
motivating factor for Islamic extremism, and by being an extension of
Israel, the United States is a prime target for terrorists.
Israel has a dire relationship not only with Palestinians but also with its
neighbouring Arab states, being involved in multiple wars and having
annexed territory from Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Israel’s military policy
frequently consists of ‘unilateral aggressive actions’ that destabilize the
region and could jeopardize the United States’ access to its most valuable
commodity, oil.63 Not to mention Israel is the nuclear power that may be
the likeliest nation to unleash Armageddon. Israel’s existential crisis is
rooted in its precarious position as a settler colony unable to fulfil its
genocidal logic. European settlement into the Americas and Australia was
secured by the almost complete erasure of the native threat. Israel will never
achieve that security surrounded by hostile Arab states, which is why its
reaction to threats is so extreme and disproportionate. It is certainly not too
difficult to imagine Israel pressing the nuclear button in a pique of settler
colonial genocide. Such murderous brutality would fit perfectly into the
logic of Western imperialism. It is because of this existential dread that
Israel is prone to bite the hand that feeds it, frequently spying on the United
States, passing on information and colluding with its benefactor’s
enemies.64
To understand America’s steadfast support for Israel we need to put it in
the context of the new age of empire. Whilst the West rallied to Zionism
after the Second World War, the United States only began the journey
towards wholeheartedly embracing Israel in 1956, and this transition was
not complete until 1967. It was then that the fledgling nation was seen as an
essential strategic interest to block the Soviets from influence in the Middle
East.65 Israel was able to embarrass Egypt’s Soviet-backed President
Nasser with swift victory in the Six Day War in 1967 and has since served
as the battering ram for the United States’ soft power in the region.
Oil was the key commodity underpinning the transition into the new age
of empire and the United States needed to control the area that produced
most of it. Israel is the reminder that, as much as things have changed, they
have stayed the same within this iteration of empire. Aid may be the carrot,
but the stick can be wielded at any time. By offshoring its violence to Israel,
the United States can maintain the pretence of benevolence in world affairs.
Islamic extremism is the new bogeyman raised to justify Israel’s role in the
Middle East. It is the counterweight to Iran and the last bastion preventing
an Islamic caliphate being established. Of course this is nonsense: for all its
protestations about the clash of civilizations between Christianity and
Islam, and moralizing about human rights in the region, the United States’
other major partner in the region is Saudi Arabia. That nation is an Islamic
state that harshly imposes its reading of Sharia law. Israel is useful to the
United States because it can trample on the rights of the Brown natives to
maintain Western imperialism.
Israel is unique because it allows the old forms of imperial brutality to be
continued in plain sight in the new age of empire. Because we have
abandoned race, the Jewish state is defended as a mechanism of ethnic self-
determination and therefore Israel has the ‘right to exist’, regardless of the
consequences for the region or the Palestinians. In fact, because of the
horrors of the Holocaust, to question Israel, Zionism or its steps to defend
itself is to run the risk of being labelled anti-Semitic. Under the widely
adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-
Semitism it is forbidden to claim that the ‘existence of a State of Israel is a
racist endeavour’. But what other conclusion could we draw from looking
at the historical record? And this has nothing to do with being anti-Semitic:
the United States, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and any other settler colony
are all ‘racist endeavours’. More to the point, we could say the same about
the existence of every country in Africa, with their boundaries drawn by
colonial administrators; or India and Pakistan after the horrors of Partition.
But in the new post-racial order we exempt Israel from proper scrutiny and
in doing so legitimize the continuation of Western imperialism, and the key,
brutal role that Israel plays.
Western imperialism did not end after the Second World War, it merely
evolved. The horrors of the Holocaust did away with the notion of race,
which was simply replaced by a version of ethnicity that allowed colonial
logic to continue. Israel is a reminder of the brutality of the older order that
underpins the new. The UN, IMF and World Bank pose as friends to the
underdeveloped world, all whilst creating a framework that continues to
allow the West to leach from the Rest. We live in a time defined by the
dreams of the Enlightenment, universal values that set in stone the unjust
racial order. Aid is offered as the solution to absolve the West of its sins,
whilst it actually works to further oppress the underdeveloped world and
enrich Western interests. But we are so keen to believe we are making
progress that we ignore the uncomfortable truth before us. The starving
children beamed in haunting images onto our TV screens are in dire poverty
because of our excessive wealth. No matter how big your direct debit is to
whichever charity tugged your heart strings, it cannot change the fact the
reason you can afford to donate is because those children have no food. But
we can all comfort ourselves with delusions that we are moving towards a
better, more enlightened world.
So complete and perverse is the new age of empire that it has allowed the
face of Western domination to become increasingly diverse. In order to
maintain the façade it is essential that the only diners at the trough of
empire are no longer just White people. There have always been those in
the underdeveloped world who colluded with the oppressive system to
enrich themselves. One of the more dispiriting features of the new age is
that there is a growing class of Black and Brown faces profiting off the
logic of racial oppression who are, knowingly or not, being used to market
the fairness of the system.
 6

The Non-White West

In 2018 US president Donald Trump launched a trade war against China,

railing against the ‘billions of dollars’ lost to the country each year in
unbalanced trading on his favourite medium, Twitter. In a particularly
alarming social media rant, even for Trump, on 23 August 2019 he declared
that

The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the
United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our
great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start
looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your
companies HOME and making your products in the USA.

Trying to reassert American economic protectionism is one thing, but

believing that he had the power to order private corporations around
displayed a spectacular misunderstanding of both global capital and his own
role. Trump’s concern over China was the substantial trade deficit between
the two countries. In 2018 the United States exported $120 billion worth of
goods but imported over $539 billion worth, making an almost $420 billion
loss in terms of trade.1 To counter this, the substance of Trump’s trade war
was to increase tariffs on Chinese imports so that companies are
disincentivized from doing business in the country. China retaliated,
imposing its own tariffs on American imports, with both countries using
their actions as leverage for a new trade agreement.
Trump’s trade war was sparked by wider fears that globalization is
disadvantaging the West, and in particular working-class communities that
have seen their jobs disappear overseas. The reason for the trade imbalance
is that China is now the workshop of the world, leading the way in
manufacturing goods for sale in the West including the United States.
Nations across the West have experienced the kind of de-industrialization
that has seen factories relocate to the underdeveloped world and large
swathes of people lose their jobs. Trump was elected in large part because
he won in the American ‘rust belt’, the Midwestern states whose
populations lost out when manufacturing moved overseas. The trade war
was a key part of his ‘Make America Great Again’ appeal, taking on foreign
nations who are attacking United States power, and reasserting economic
nationalism. In this version of the new world order the real victims of the
new age are the White formerly working class, left behind by a global
system that now privileges foreign nations.
It is undeniable that the post-war settlement has led to some interesting,
and likely unintended, consequences in the operation of Western
imperialism. Manufacturing was previously the domain of the West.
Producing the goods to sell into newly found markets around the world was
one of the main goals of empire. India’s textile industry was purposely
destroyed so that Britain could lead the way in manufacturing. This
situation has now been completely reversed. Along with China, India is one
of the fastest growing economies and there is a real sense that centres of
power are shifting to the underdeveloped world. China is now seen as the
main threat to the West and there are projections that it will eventually
become the largest economy in the world. It has positive trade deficits with
every major nation and trillions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves.2
The new economic and political order created after the Second World War
has paved the way for the rise of China and other underdeveloped nations.
But if we imagine that the development of non-Western, non-White
countries proves that the racial logic of empire has changed in any
substantive way we are sorely mistaken. China’s rise is instructive,
considering its predicted global dominance has been due to the logic of
Western imperialism, not in spite of it.
 After the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the
nation was a key part of the Communist challenge to the capitalist status
quo. China’s support was central to the defeat of United States forces in
Korea and Vietnam, and China also backed several African liberation
struggles that threatened Western dominance on that continent.3 But the
China that has emerged today is not the revolutionary Communist state that
sought to reshape the economic order. In truth, it is quite the opposite. To
achieve its current status China had to realize that the ‘Western order is hard
to overturn and easy to join’.4
China’s economic rise only began after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976
and the subsequent repudiation of his policies. At that point China was an
extremely poor country which had undergone one of the worst famines in
human history a decade earlier. From 1978 the nation embraced capitalism,
undergoing a series of market reforms, welcoming foreign direct investment
and making exports the basis of its economy.5 This meant opening up
China to the rest of the world and fully engaging with global finance, and it
was an extremely successful approach: the nation pulled 600 million of its
citizens out of extreme poverty between 1978 and 2010. China’s success
could be mistaken as evidence that the new economic system is not
inherently racist, if an underdeveloped country can make such strides. But,
as always, we should not get ahead of ourselves.
China’s emergence has been due to the very reason that Trump started his
trade war: its domination of global manufacturing. ‘Made in China’ has
become so commonplace it is almost a surprise when an item is produced
elsewhere. But this occurred because the cost of labour in China is so low
relative to the West. It is the same problem I discussed in relation to India’s
economic miracle. While there is lots of wealth in China, and many newly
minted billionaires, there is also an abundance of poverty. China may have
the second largest economy in the world, but the important measure is GDP
per capita: the amount of wealth produced per person. By this measure
China is 65th, demonstrating that many people are not feeling the benefits
of the growing economy. China is extremely unequal and government
statistics class anyone earning $295 a month as middle-income, despite the
complaints from those living on that amount that they cannot make ends
meet.6 Because China’s position depends on being the world’s primary
exporter, mass poverty is necessary in order to sustain its economic growth.
Just like India, if the standard of living rises so too do the wages and
manufacturing costs. Soon enough China would find itself in the same
position as the West, offshoring its factory labour to a poorer country. What
Trump has seriously misunderstood in his trade war is that even if increased
costs through tariffs on Chinese goods incentivized manufacturers to move,
they would simply relocate to a different Black or Brown country with
inhumanly low labour costs. There is only one source in the West that can
compete with the wages in the underdeveloped world and that is prison
labour, which no doubt explains why Trump is a supporter of increased
privatization of the sector.
In order to establish itself China has relied on hundreds of millions of its
own citizens living in conditions and taking wages that would be
unacceptable in the West. It’s one of the key principles of Western
imperialism: Black and Brown life is worth less and it is therefore
legitimate to exploit it. But it is not only in exploiting its own citizens that
China has embraced the logic of empire. White supremacy is based on a
hierarchy from White down to Black, with anti-Blackness a specific feature
of the system. In order to establish a secure footing, or to move up the
ladder of supremacy, there is a long history of other racialized groups using
Black populations as a stepping stone. China is no different, as an
examination of the nation’s increasing role in Africa demonstrates.

THE CHINESE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

China’s links to Africa go back centuries, at least as far as the Han dynasty
in 202 BC. (The idea that Europe initiated global trade and connectedness is
one of the many fictions of Whitewashed intellectual history.) The
Communist People’s Republic of China had strong ties to Africa and the
liberation movements to end colonialism. In the global fight against capital,
Mao was keen to support the armed struggle in places like Mozambique and
Angola. China was a key player in the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung
Conference, which sought to create a united non-aligned front to combat the
global power of both the West and the Soviet bloc. China’s credentials in
Africa were well forged and included building a railway line connecting
Zambia to Tanzania in the early 1970s. In return for its support, African
nations backed UN recognition of revolutionary China and supported the
nation’s rise to prominence on the world stage.7
China was influential in the Black radical imagination and was seen by
many ‘as the land where true freedom might be had’.8 The Black Panther
Party initially started fundraising by selling copies of Mao’s ‘Little Red
Book’ to college students,9 and co-founder Huey P. Newton invoked Mao
in his book Revolutionary Suicide when he argued that their revolutionary
commitment was the Panthers’ ‘great leap forward’.10 Numerous Panthers
visited China, including Elaine Brown who would become the party’s
chairperson. Given China’s progressive history with Africa and Black
politics, its increasing influence on the African continent has been
welcomed by many. Indeed, China plays off its historical relationship,
painting itself as an underdeveloped country aiming for a mutually
beneficial relationship with a friend in need.
Although China’s links to Africa are not new, its economic role in the
continent has drastically changed since the start of the new millennium.
From 2000 to 2012 trade between China and Africa grew twenty-fold to
$200 billion.11 Between 2001 and 2010 China’s Export–Import Bank
provided $67.2 billion in loans to so-called sub-Saharan African countries,
$12.5 billion more than the World Bank.12 The West is wary of China’s
rapid expansion in Africa due to the increased competition for resources in
the region and also because Chinese money provides an alternative to the
conditional loans enforcing the dreaded Washington consensus.13 China
does not attach structural adjustment strings to its loans, preferring to stay
out of matters of state and stick to finance. Chinese aid has empowered
African countries to say no to the devilish pacts with the IMF and the World
Bank.
While the West has looted resources and meddled in political and
economic systems, China has been busy building the roads, dams, buildings
and railways that Africa so sorely needs. Not only that, but China has also
invested in the manufacturing sector, to the tune of over $3 billion by the
end of 2012.14 With its history of comradeship, its massive investment, and
the fact it represents an alternative to the hated IMF and World Bank, it is
easy to see why there is some optimism and a view that ‘the Chinese are our
friends’ among many on the continent.15 But we must remember that the
China that holds the revolutionary link to Africa is an historical artefact.
Since China’s economic reforms, the country has embraced the same
political and economic order that oppresses Africa, and in many ways has
legitimized neo-colonialism by posing as a friend.16
To understand China’s neo-colonial role in Africa we need look no
further than the reason for its increased involvement in the first place. After
China embraced the capitalist global order, and its economy grew on the
basis of production, it needed to find fresh sources of raw materials. You
cannot make the goods for the world without their ingredients. China’s
entry into Africa has been driven by the need to acquire resources such as
oil and minerals to secure its place in the global economy. China’s
expansion in Africa also occurred mostly after it joined the World Trade
Organization in 2001 and it therefore operates firmly within the global
economic consensus that is a major part of the continued underdevelopment
of Africa. While Chinese money may not come with the requirement for
structural adjustment, it is a lie to say there are no strings attached. For
China finance is tied to natural resource extraction rather than political
control. China’s interest rates are typically higher than those from Western
financial institutions and it generally takes payment in the form of mining
rights rather than cash. Therefore the vast majority of Chinese assistance
goes to mineral-rich African countries.
In places like Congo, Angola and Zambia, China is providing money to
build infrastructure while stripping the natural resources of the countries. A
classic example of this arrangement, in what was dubbed the ‘deal of the
century’ when it was signed between China and the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC) in 2007, is a $9 billion loan that meant China would commit
to building roads, hospitals and other vital infrastructure projects in return
for almost monopolistic control over the mining of cobalt and copper.17 It
may sound like a good deal for Congo, but consider that the minerals in
question are worth an estimated $87 billion and it is quickly apparent that
China is extracting the materials from Congo for a fraction of what they are
worth.18 The IMF were against the loan because they wanted to offer their
own finance package with the usual conditions. But by avoiding the
Western institutions the DRC has jumped out of the frying pan and into the
fire.
Across the African continent, countries are making the same deals with
China, selling off their most valuable resources on the cheap to get at least
some infrastructure built. It is not hard to see why, when Africa is in dire
need of such spending, with estimates that it requires well over $22 billion
spent annually to address its infrastructure problems.19 But these resources
are precious to the future of Africa, which by rights should be the richest
place on earth thanks to its abundance of natural wealth. By cashing in, the
continent is destroying its future. Natural resources are finite and for Africa
to prosper it should be maximizing the wealth produced from them to truly
transform the continent. Green technology will become the next boom
industry and Africa holds a bounty of the minerals necessary for the shift to
sustainable energy. China, on the other hand, has only accelerated the
exploitation of Africa’s resources.
Worse still, the model used to build this infrastructure is of more benefit
to China than Africa. When signing agreements such as the ‘deal of the
century’ China insists that it provides the majority of the equipment and
labour (usually 70 per cent).20 In effect the vast majority of the ‘aid’ that is
given to a country is spent buying goods from China and paying Chinese
companies and workers to rebuild Africa. China is basically providing a
stimulus to its own economy, dressed up as foreign aid. Not only does the
recipient country have to pay this loan back with interest but China also
reaps massive profits from its preferential access to precious mineral
resources. This model has all of the ‘Alice in Wonderland craziness’ about it
that Kwame Nkrumah described in Western neo-colonialism.21 Even
China’s support for infrastructure spending is not as benevolent as it can
appear.
European colonizers spent massive sums on roads, railways and the like
because they were necessary to extract the wealth out of the continent.
When the Chinese offer to build roads that connect an untapped mine to the
sea, they are not doing so out of their wish to better the economic
circumstances of Africa. China has also built forty-four sports stadiums in
Africa, raising serious questions about the nature and utility of its
infrastructure spending.22 These projects routinely end up as white
elephants, something the rulers can use to show off but which have no long-
term beneficial impact on the economy.
It is abundantly clear that China’s involvement in infrastructure is not a
break with the logic of Western empire. It may be a different model, but it is
one that supports the principles and functioning of the current system. After
all, the Chinese are extracting these resources to make products to be sold,
in large part, to the West. China’s presence in Africa is also not always at
odds with Western interests. There are a number of direct collaborations
between Chinese and Western companies in Africa, who are after all in the
region for the same reasons. The French company Total partnered with a
Chinese oil company to extract oil from the Nigerian seabed,23 and
Chinese companies also enrich themselves by bidding for contracts funded
by Western agencies like the World Bank. Bamako International Airport in
Mali underwent a $181 million upgrade between 2007 and 2012 funded by
the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US aid agency. Regardless of the
fact that China and the United States may be in a struggle for global
dominance, this United States government contract was carried out by
Chinese workers.24
Migrant workers being imported into Africa to rebuild the continent has
created a specific form of tension. It is estimated that there are now over 1
million Chinese people living in Africa, attracted to the continent by the
opportunities there. It should be no surprise that the natives of the poorest
continent in the world are wary. Chinese migrant workers enjoy better pay
and working conditions. This marks a reversal of Chinese people being used
as a cheap and discriminated-against labour force to build the original
version of Western empire. China is now providing the frontier folk,
seeking new opportunities. It is also not difficult to find attitudes
reminiscent of the old European colonizers who went to Africa to make
their fortunes. In journalist Howard French’s book China’s Second
Continent he explains how commonplace colonial-era racism was with the
Chinese migrants he spoke to across Africa. His discussion with Hao, a
migrant to Mozambique, stands out. Hao had migrated with little, had not
learned a local language, and yet managed to acquire 5,000 acres of land,
much to the displeasure of the locals, and planned to grow cash crops to sell
to Western countries. He explained his decision to try his luck in
Mozambique as follows:

Can you imagine if I had gone to America or to Germany first? The

people in those fucking places are too smart. I wouldn’t have gotten
anywhere. I don’t think I could have beaten them. So we had to find
backward countries, poor countries that we can lead.25
Colonial-era attitudes could also be found among those delivering aid
projects. Li Jinjun, head of the Central Agricultural Research Institute in
Liberia, explained that the Chinese would only run the project for a limited
time in order that the locals ‘learn to support themselves’. In classic
civilizing mission language, the Institute was proud that ‘little by little …
can change them in this way.’26 Of course, we cannot generalize these
attitudes to the whole of the Chinese migrant population in Africa but we
also should not be surprised if they are prevalent. They are only important
insofar as they speak to the wider power dynamics of the Chinese neo-
colonial relationship with Africa.
Objections to Chinese migration are not solely down to their colonial
attitudes or denying locals the opportunity to work on infrastructure
projects, but tie into the other major area where China has continued the
work of Western imperialism on the continent. As heralded as the increased
trade between China and Africa has been, it represents the classic
relationship between colonizer and colony. China’s imports from Africa are
comprised of well over 90 per cent oil and other natural resources. At the
same time, Africa’s imports from China are 90 per cent finished
manufactured products. Africa exports its resources well below the value
that they are worth to China, which manufactures goods and sells them back
into Africa, collecting all the profit. As a result China is able to produce
cheap goods and flood African markets at prices that local producers have
no way of competing with. The result has been a de-industrialization of
Africa as local manufacturers are forced out of business.
In 2008 manufacturing made up 12.8 per cent of GDP in Africa, and just
eight years later that figure had fallen to 10.5 per cent. Between 1980 and
2008 Africa’s share of global manufacturing was down from 1.2 per cent to
0.9 per cent.27 In Nigeria the impact of Chinese textile imports has been
devastating to local manufacturing. In the 1980s there were 175 textile
factories in the country, but within twenty-five years that number had
declined to only twenty-five. Even though imported textiles are illegal they
account for over 85 per cent of the market and are valued at $2.2 billion
annually, versus only $40 million for locally produced products.28 The
impact on jobs has been catastrophic, with the number of those working in
Nigeria’s textile industry in 2015 declining to 20,000 from 600,000 in the
1990s.29 The result has been tension and even strikes in Senegal over the
presence of the Chinese in local markets: they have become a feature as
imports have flooded in. There is no doubt that the Chinese who are trading
into Africa are profiting from the underdeveloped state of Africa and taking
advantage of the situation created by Western imperialism. This kind of
opportunism from those whose skin is not White is also nothing new for
Africa. Lebanese traders were dominant as middlemen between the French
and their African colonies and there was a similar relationship between
South Asian communities in East Africa and the British.
The only real difference with the Chinese is that they are not playing the
role of middlemen to European colonizers; instead they represent one of the
strongest emerging neo-colonial forces. China is certainly not a colonial
power in the same way as Britain, France or any of the other European
nations were. There is no invasion, violence and domination of political
affairs. But, as we already know, that is not how the new age of empire
works. Although the former colonial masters may have links and historical
advantages in particular countries (particularly in relation to language),
underdeveloped economies are open to exploitation from any nation or
corporation that has the capital. There is no metropolis, no mother country,
just a racialized political and economic system that allows for such
exploitation.

BUILDING BRICS OF EMPIRE

China is not alone in following Western colonial logic to build its wealth.
The new scramble for Africa features a whole host of underdeveloped
countries vying to make the most of the devastating position that the
continent has been placed in. As underdeveloped nations begin to acquire
more wealth there is celebration of the progress being made. None more so
than in recent years with the rise of the so-called ‘BRICS’: Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa, whose rapid levels of growth have marked
them out as new economic forces in a supposed reshaping of the global
order. In reality, talk of BRICS is disingenuous because South Africa is in a
very, very different situation to the rest of the perceived bloc. If we remove
South Africa, then the BRIC countries increased their foreign direct
investment from less than $10 billion in the 1990s to $147 billion by
2008.30 Much of this ‘investment’ went to Africa in the same exploitative
relationship as China’s investments.
For all the Cold War tension between the capitalists and the Soviets, the
USSR no longer exists and Russia has returned firmly to its historical place
as part of the Western bloc. Putin’s Russia may seem like a menace, but
remember there has always been discord between the various Western
powers. On the fundamental issue of the economic world order Russia is
firmly in step with the West. We should not be shocked to find the logic of
empire alive and well in Mother Russia. But Brazil and India have taken the
same approach as China to fuel their economic growth, using Africa as a
stepping stone.
Along with China, India was one of the main players in the Bandung
Conference in 1955, which pledged allegiance to Afro-Asian solidarity.
India also has a common experience of colonialism with Africa, having
been part of the same British Empire that large chunks of the continent were
occupied by. This shared history means that India has a presence in Africa,
with around a tenth of the Indian diaspora living there, and it has tried to
build on these links to make partnerships. Like China, India needs
resources, and trade with Africa almost trebled between 2007 and 2013.31
India has also been involved in infrastructure projects, and exports finished
products to Africa, but its economy is based more on services than Chinese-
style manufacturing.
A good example of how India offers aid to Africa is the telemedicine
project that was piloted in Ethiopia and then rolled out in fifty-three
countries. India provided finance for Africans to be able to access Indian
doctors through video conferencing software to combat the shortage of
doctors on the continent. Considering that Ethiopia has 0.1 doctors per
1,000 people compared to India’s 0.9 and Britain’s 2.8, the shortage of
doctors is a serious problem.32 Providing access to Indian healthcare on a
short-term basis may be essential, but it does not solve the problem long
term. Africa needs more doctors, and exporting medical care to places like
India only makes the shortage more acute. In typical colonial fashion there
is a built-in dependency, where Africans come to rely on the care provided
over the internet instead of building up their own resources. In Britain we
raise hell when our calls to the bank are diverted to India, and I can only
imagine the outrage if our GP appointments were diverted to a
teleconference with a doctor in Mumbai. But this is seen as acceptable for
Africa because Africans are less valued. Teleconferencing projects are also
seen as aid, and India is following the example of the West by spending
development money on projects that benefit itself.
Indian doctors and technicians are paid out of development funding, in
the same way that a significant proportion of the aid from China is spent on
Chinese labour. In many ways these projects are tools to provide
employment opportunities for the two largest workforces in the world. It is
also necessary to build the infrastructure to support teleconferencing, which
is an area that Indian businesses excel in. Across Africa Indian companies
are building (and owning) the telecommunications that are so vital to the
twenty-first century. On the plus side this has meant that Africa is connected
to the globe, with over 80 per cent of people in ‘Africa proper’ owning a
mobile phone (most likely imported cheaply from China).33 But the
necessary infrastructure and access are foreign-owned, making Africa not
only dependent on outside interests but also locked out of the wealth
created by these industries.
Brazil has a complicated relationship with Africa. At least 38 per cent of
the enslaved people stolen from Africa were taken to Brazil and the nation
has the largest population of African descent of any country other than
Nigeria. Under the more progressive presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva (Lula) between 2003 and 2010, Brazil rhetorically embraced its
African roots and made overtures to the continent, increasing trade with
Africa from $4 billion in 2002 to $27 billion in 2012.34 But Brazil is also
the perfect case study in how wrong-headed our understanding of the racial
nature of global capital is. In reality, there is no reason whatsoever to
assume that Brazil would have any affinity with Africa, other than the
colonial logic that built the country. Brazil is more like the United States
than it is any African country. It was a European settler colony where the
indigenous people were all but wiped out and enslaved African labour was
used to build the economy. There may be a very large population of those of
African descent but Brazil is one of the most racially unequal countries in
the world, in which its Black population is subject to intense discrimination.
In a country where half the population is Black, President Lula’s
appointment of four cabinet members of African descent was seen as a
watershed moment, but this only happened in 2009. Lula’s government was
the exception, not the rule, and the current fascist president, Jair Bolsonaro,
is far more representative of the racial politics of the nation.
 After independence in 1825 Brazil was happy to continue enslaving
Africans legally until 1888, over fifty years after Britain implemented its
so-called abolition, and more than twenty years later than the United States
outlawed the inhumanity. Brazil was also the only underdeveloped nation
that voted against UN resolutions condemning Portugal’s barbaric colonial
regimes in Africa, and for good measure continued to trade with apartheid
South Africa during the embargo.35 Brazil is representative of Latin
America, which is a collection of European settler colony ethno-states
where White supremacy exists in its most virulent form. It is only due to the
poverty of Western political philosophy that we imagine Latin America as a
bastion of ‘people of colour’ who can challenge the Western order.
Make no mistake: there are millions of Black and Brown colonial
subjects in the region, but they are victims of their various states rather than
being represented by them. Latin America features poverty and conditions
that we would not accept in the West, and Western financial institutions,
particularly the IMF, devastated their emerging economies through
structural adjustment. The colonial dependency relationship we have
discussed in relation to Africa also applies to much of Latin America. So the
region is definitely not (yet) in the West, but it is of it and far up the ladder
of global White supremacy in general, which is why a nation like Brazil has
the finances to be investing in Africa. But just as many people in the West
are not of it, the same applies in Latin America and its millions of neo-
colonial subjects. This is not really much different than during slavery,
when Brazil’s population included millions of enslaved Africans, overseen
by a European settler elite. Brazil was technically a colony, so not in the
West, whilst the Portuguese settlers were of the West and the enslaved and
indigenous were the system’s victims. That same relationship continues in
the stark inequalities that exist today.
Brazil may have some of the poorest people in the entire world, but tens
of thousands of Portuguese migrated to Brazil following the global financial
crisis to take advantage of its growing economy.36 As demonstrated by the
hordes of almost exclusively White crowds at the 2014 football World Cup
hosted in Brazil, the descendants of White settlers inhabit a different nation
to those at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. It makes perfect sense that
Brazil’s relationship to Africa follows the same exploitative logic of
Western imperialism.
 Brazilian corporation Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (Vale) is one of the
largest mining companies in the world and has a presence in Guinea,
Zambia, Congo, Angola, Gabon and South Africa. Extracting a range of
resources, it is also involved in the classic colonial relationship of funding
infrastructure projects. To put the size of the company in perspective, its
$34 billion revenue would make it the fifteenth biggest economy in Africa,
with a larger GDP than almost all the countries it extracts resources from.
Brazilian companies have also entered into partnerships similar to those of
China across Africa, and have a tendency to use migrant labour. An area
where Brazil is a world leader is in the production of biofuels and it has
seen the potential for Africa to be a source for the necessary crops.
Alongside mineral wealth Africa holds 60 per cent of the uncultivated
arable farmland on the planet.37 In the new scramble for Africa this
abundance of fertile farmland is one of the key commodities.
The race for farmland is not only taking place in Africa. By 2020 it is
estimated that investors had spent more than ‘one hundred billion dollars
for over 40 million hectares … from Ethiopia to Indonesia’ in order to
acquire land.38 As the Brazil example demonstrates, this is driven by the
rising demand for food for an increasing population, and also for other
commodities like biofuels. Oil palm is a key crop, used in a range of
products from soap to plastics. It has become so popular that by 2040 an
additional area the size of Germany may be necessary to cultivate enough
of it to meet the demand.39 The fires spread in the Amazon rainforest in
2019 are an example of the lengths that people will go to create additional
farmland. With its vast acres of uncultivated land, Africa is a centre of
global land acquisition.
Alongside the West, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Qatar and China have all
been key players in the land grab in Africa. It is estimated that between
2004 and 2009 2.5 million hectares of choice land had been allocated to
foreign entities in Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Sudan.40 In
2007, China acquired rights to 2.7 million hectares in the Democratic
Republic of Congo alone.41 As with all the other examples, we could
welcome the investment that comes with foreign capital, but it is surely
obvious how damaging it is to sell off every commodity that the continent
has to foreign interests for far less than it is worth. The insanity of the land
grab is demonstrated in the reality that the nations suffering the most from
hunger are also those selling off their farmland.42 Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia
and Congo are some of the countries where this contradiction is the
sharpest. Africa is once again being carved up by foreign actors to feed the
updated version of Western imperialism. The only difference now is that
many of the nations leading the way are not led by White people. But
throughout the book I have highlighted non-White collusion in building
Western imperialism.
Without the Arab slave trade, which lasted far longer than the Atlantic
system, it is not clear that the enslavement of Africans would have
occurred. It was Muslim scholars who first codified anti-Black racism,
something later picked up by Europeans, and created the slave-trading
networks that Europe tapped into. To gain access to the riches of the East,
the West used the wealth gained from enslaving Africans. When the
Portuguese and Spanish began mining precious metals in the so-called New
World the wealth generated dispersed across Europe, with countries like
France, Britain and Holland using the commodities to enrich themselves. At
this point the West was not particularly advanced, but access to gold and
silver in the Americas allowed the ‘relatively backward’ European
merchants to tap into Asian markets and eventually monopolize them,
creating conditions under which the West would come to rule.43 It was
demand from China for silver that made the early slave plantations in the
Americas profitable. The Taj Mahal was built with gold mined from slave
labour, since empires in the East were more than happy to accept the wealth
produced by racism. In the new age of empire it is this same relationship
that survives today, with the economies of Asia and Latin America being
boosted by the looting of Africa. There is nothing truly new in this system,
just updated manifestations of the old order.
As an indicator of how embedded India, China and Brazil are in the new
global order, in addition to Africa’s resources, farmland and markets, they
are also keen to gain the continent’s influence in the United Nations. China
achieved its UN recognition largely through African votes. Brazil and India
are both seeking permanent seats on the Security Council, and the continent
with the most countries is not a bad place to garner influence.
If the idea that the emergence of the BRIC countries represents systemic
change is an illusion, then the idea that Africa, led by South Africa, is
achieving some kind of renaissance is a mirage. Whilst there certainly have
been some improvements in terms of health, literacy, poverty and economic
growth rates, Africa remains firmly at the bottom of the global racial
hierarchy.
The illusion of the African renaissance is based on its levels of GDP
growth, which from 2000 until 2015 ranged between 3 and 6 per cent
annually, although they have tapered off since.44 South Africa was seen as
the leader of the continent in growth and economic development, hence its
inclusion in the BRICS. South Africa’s economic boom in the 2000s was
also accompanied by a steady fall in its unemployment rate. After rising to
33 per cent by 2000 the percentage of those out of work fell to 22 per cent
by 2008. In a reminder of how connected African economies are to the
West, the financial crisis caused by sub-prime lending in Europe and the
United States had a devastating effect on the continent. Since 2008, the
joblessness rate has been increasing and in 2019 stood at 28.5 per cent.45
After the end of apartheid there was optimism about the future of the nation
but South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world,
and while the economy has grown in the last twenty years, so has the
poverty rate.46 This same pattern is replicated across the continent. In
Nigeria between 2005 and 2011 the economy grew by 5 per cent a year but
unemployment rose from 15 to 20 per cent, with 60 per cent of young
people out of work.47 None of these figures should be a shock given
everything that we have learnt so far about African so-called development.
Economic growth is entirely the wrong focus if we want to understand
progress. African GDP figures are inflated by the increase in foreign
investment and trade with the formerly underdeveloped world that has
accelerated the stripping of the continent’s resources. All those cut-price
sales of minerals boost GDP but harm progress in Africa. Billions of dollars
in loans from the Chinese to pay Chinese companies and workers to build
infrastructure may inflate the economic balance sheet but offer little work
and few skills for African people. A large part of the supposed growth in
Africa is really just an indication of increased wealth extraction.
The other fallacy of growth is that it is inevitable that African economies
will grow because the population is rising rapidly. In the next thirty years it
is estimated that the majority of the world’s population growth will occur in
Africa, with the number of people living on the continent doubling by
2050.48 By 2100 it is possible that the population will have trebled to 3.5
billion and there will be more people in Africa than in India and China
combined.49 As the population grows, so too does the economy, but since
2015 GDP growth has been smaller than it should be, given the rise in
population.50 In other words, economies that are already struggling to
provide for the people they have are falling further behind their rising
populations. To put the growth figures in context, California has a larger
GDP than the whole of Africa, and yet somehow we are supposed to be
celebrating the rise of the continent.
It is truly terrifying to imagine Africa with treble its current population,
given the track of underdevelopment it remains firmly planted on. By 2100
the majority of its natural resources will have been depleted by foreign
interests and its farmland either overused or in the hands of offshore
investors. On its current trajectory it is impossible to imagine a future that
does not involve the same kind of colonial dependency that has been the
hallmark of Africa’s relationship to Western empire. The fact that some
countries which are not predominantly White will have firmly joined that
system makes no difference.

A CORRUPT SYSTEM
Up to this point I have painted a very bleak picture of life in Africa, but we
should avoid falling into the trap of seeing the continent through the eyes of
Live Aid. Many people have been able to find success, build businesses and
prosper. It is not uncommon to hear about those living in the West migrating
back to Africa to invest in and pursue opportunities that are a distant dream
to Black people living in their former mother countries. There are also
many affluent Africans who travel frequently, settle and are educated in the
West, who have the kind of wealth that is mythical to the majority of White
people in the world. But just as we should not let the images from charity
appeals distort our understanding of life in Africa, we should not allow the
people who have acquired wealth make us fall for the lie that progress is
being achieved.
The proportion of those in the middle class in Africa has actually
declined since 1980 to only 13.4 per cent.51 The reality is that the majority
of Africans are not pot-bellied and covered in flies, but nor do they have the
money to send their children to British private schools. There is a huge
scale of inequality, and unfortunately most people in Africa are towards the
wrong end of it. As with all features of the new order, there is nothing new
about a scale of Black inequality. There have always been those who have
been somewhat better off in the system.
Studying the plight of Africa, it is clear that not all of its problems are to
be located in the foreign interests which have ravaged the continent.
Nothing that we have discussed to this point would be possible without
systemic collaboration in Western imperialism by those who are empowered
to run the continent. In Western development parlance, one of the main
problems in Africa is the lack of ‘good governance’, which is a more polite
way of saying that the disease of corruption is killing the continent. Many
of the conditions tied to Western development aid are related to building
greater transparency in political affairs, with the hope that by shedding the
light of democracy through Africa this will end corrupt practices and allow
the continent to succeed. We can again see the influence of Enlightenment
ideals – that if only the savage parts of the world would embrace Western
values they could be lifted out of their barbarism. Furthermore, billions of
dollars have been spent on so-called good governance initiatives and there
is even a ‘corruption perception index’, which ranks countries.52 Needless
to say, African countries fare poorly, as does most of the underdeveloped
world.
On the Transparency International website, the German-based company
that runs the index represents corruption on a world map with countries
allocated a colour based on where they rank. The deeper the red, the more
corrupt, the lighter the yellow, the less. It may as well be a map of the West
versus the Rest, as the only areas in yellow are Western Europe, North
America, Australia and Japan. The top two most corrupt countries by this
measure are Somalia (in at number one) followed by South Sudan. The
message is abundantly clear that the problem of corruption is something the
West has dealt with and that it is holding the rest of the world back.
There is clearly a problem with corruption across the underdeveloped
world and certainly in Africa. Between 1970 and 2015, thirty African
countries lost $1.8 trillion to capital flight – i.e., the money left those
economies – a figure dwarfing the $497 billion these nations owed in
foreign debt, and representing 65 per cent of their collective GDP in
2015.53 Over $148 billion in capital flight occurs on the continent every
year, with at least 60 per cent of this down to ‘mispricing of resources’, or
in other words, fraud.54 There is no term to describe what many of the
elites are doing in Africa other than looting.
Consider the case of Angola, where between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion
disappeared from the country’s account, which was at the time a figure
larger than the GDP of forty-three African countries.55 Isabel dos Santos is
celebrated as Africa’s richest woman, with a net worth of over $2 billion,
but given that she is the daughter of Angola’s former president José
Eduardo dos Santos we should not be impressed by this wealth. Dos Santos
ran the country for thirty-eight years, during which time he took a personal
stake in the nation’s resources and presided over the looting of billions of
dollars. After 700,000 documents were leaked about how Isabel built her
business empire she now finds herself subject to criminal investigation in
Angola. The documents were damning, showing how numerous Western
interests had enabled her to embezzle a fortune from her ownership stake in
the state-run oil company Sonangol.56 Angola is the perfect model for how
corruption functions in Africa. As well as personally enriching themselves,
dictators like dos Santos use money from foreign investors to prop up their
regimes. One of the poorest countries in the world, Angola ‘spent 1.4 times
as much on defence as it did on health and schools combined’ in 2013.57
Having access to vast amounts of money also helps to win elections when
they are called.
Angola is hardly alone. There is undoubtedly a political elite who are
participating in Africa’s continued underdevelopment so that they can
plunder its resources to fund their own personal wealth. In return they open
up their countries to be exploited by foreign interests with extraordinarily
favourable terms and tax requirements. The result is stark: for instance, the
public purses of Zambia and Congo received only 2.4 and 2.5 per cent of
revenues from their raw materials exported during the commodity price
boom in the early 2000s.58 So it may seem relatively simple: African
corruption is the problem that needs to be solved. But there is nothing
African about this corruption.
Even the slightest glance at this situation demonstrates that it is a
problem created from the outside. Of cross-border corruption, between
‘1995 and 2014, virtually all (99.5 per cent) involved non-African firms’
and all of this money, which is being used to buy off African leaders, is
flowing in from foreign interests.59 In a frankly astounding corruption case
in the Italian courts, oil companies Shell and Eni stand accused of a $1.1
billion bribe for President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria and other
government officials in return for access to oil-drilling rights.60 Worse still,
this money was not a gift from the companies but came out of Nigeria’s
share of the future oil take. When this $1.1 billion was taken offshore the
leaders were stealing money directly from the nation. Western companies
like Shell have had to admit, or been found guilty of, a range of bribery
schemes, with some being so ridiculous they would be funny if not for the
consequences. An instalment of a $5 million kickback in Nigeria from
Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) took up so much space when converted
into Nigerian nairas that it had to be delivered in trucks.61 African leaders
are being corrupted by foreign investment and showered with money so that
the global system can continue to bleed the continent.
Colonialism was a form of corruption, and what we are seeing today is
just an updated version. When the European powers departed they left
behind a local elite who took the place of colonial administrators but whose
power remained limited.62 As long as the remaining elite followed the rules
laid down by the departing powers they could survive, otherwise they
would be deposed.
When leaders like Patrice Lumumba emerged in Congo, pledging to
overturn Western domination of Africa’s resources, they were dealt with. As
already mentioned, Lumumba, the first elected prime minster after
independence, was assassinated in 1961 with the help of the Belgians and
the CIA in order to make way for a more pliable regime.63 The West were
happy to support the brutal military dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko from
1965 until 1997. During his reign Mobutu amassed a personal fortune of
over $5 billion which he used, in part, to build a $400 million palace where
he hosted such luminaries as the Pope, the King of Belgium and the director
of the CIA.64 Like other African kleptocrats he spent lavishly in European
department stores and had a penchant for flying Concorde. After Mobutu
was chased out of office he was replaced by the equally Western-compliant
Laurent Kabila, whose son, Joseph, inherited the presidency when Kabila
senior was assassinated. In case you thought the Kabilas might have turned
away from the colonial methods of running the country, it is estimated that
Kabila Jr was taking $4 million a week from mining companies during his
presidency. He also brutally put down a rebellion in Kilwa, killing over 100
peaceful protestors in 2004.65 But he received full support from the West
until he threatened to ignore his nation’s time limits on the presidency and
illegally stand for re-election after his term expired in 2016.
The framework established by the new age of empire is clear. Leaders
who comply with the prevailing order are supported and lavished with
money to keep them in power and build staggering personal wealth. If you
are still questioning the complicity of the West in this system then just
examine where all this wealth that is fleeing from Africa goes. It is
offshored into the same banks used by hedge-fund managers and
corporations who are seeking to avoid paying taxes at home. It is lavished
in Western department stores and invested in property in places like
London. None of this so-called African corruption would be possible were
it not facilitated by Western interests. As former leader of opposition party
UNITA in Angola, Isaías Samakuva, explained of corrupt African rulers,
‘the only explanation we can find is that they have the blessing of the
international community’.66
Underdeveloped countries jumping on the foreign direct investment
bandwagon have, if anything, made the problem more acute. While, largely
through pressure from media and activism, Western governments and
agencies have become more wary of supporting abusive regimes, China has
avoided moral judgements. During the crisis in Darfur the UN Secretary
General warned of the risks of genocide and the West wanted to isolate the
regime, but China increased its investment, reaching $5.6 billion in 2006.67
The West deserted Guinean military dictator Captain Moussa Dadis Camara
after his troops slaughtered 156 protestors and gang-raped dozens of
women in public in 2009. China, however, continued with a $7 billion
investment package and Dadis used part of the money to buy arms to
solidify his power. It was only his betrayal by his right-hand man, who shot
him in the head, that ended Dadis’s reign of terror.68
Empowering elites in the former colonies is also a continuation of older
colonial logic. To control Africa, Europeans ruled through a system of tribal
chiefs. Where none existed, Europeans created them to rule the people.69
Each chief had only one superior and that was the European advising
him.70 The chiefs collected taxes and enforced labour, doing the bidding of
their colonial masters. The uncomfortable truth is that Europeans simply
could not have run their colonies without the use of indigenous
collaborators. Across their various empires Europeans established systems
of indirect rule to administer colonialism. For example, by 1893 out of the
4,849 officials running India only 898 were British, and in 1885 the 78,000
British troops in the colony were outnumbered more than two to one by
154,000 Indians.71 Those leaders today who are selling out Africa to the
interests of global capital are simply picking up the baton from their
predecessors.
Consider Omar Bongo Ondimba, who ruled Gabon from 1967 until 2009
(his son took over after him and is currently carrying on the family
dynasty). Bongo served in the French army during colonialism and the
French engineered his rise in Gabon following independence. He admired
de Gaulle so much that he wept during the former French president’s
funeral and is on record for declaring ‘his gratitude to the French for their
assistance in the development of his country’.72 Despite being oil and
mineral rich there is widespread poverty in the nation. Gabon actually has
one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa but a third of the population
live below the poverty line and 20 per cent of people are unemployed,
including 35 per cent of young people.73 Bongo’s administration facilitated
foreign control of Gabon’s economy and resources in exactly the same way
you would expect a native chief doing the bidding of a European colonial
agent. It is the system that is corrupt in Africa. The only difference now is
that there are more Black people getting incredibly wealthy from the
exploitation.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the economic darling of the
continent, South Africa. The end of apartheid was meant to herald the birth
of a non-racial democracy that could provide justice and equality for all of
the nation’s citizens. Free and fair elections have been held since 1994, with
South Africa not being beset by the kind of blatant abuses of power at the
ballot box that we have seen in other nations. In terms of transparency,
South African democracy was meant to lead the way for the future of the
continent. But for all the promise of the fledgling state, since the advent of
so-called democracy a Black elite has been created but a number of
corruption scandals have shaken people’s faith in the new politicians. So
rampant has the corruption been that even the former president Jacob Zuma
is set to stand trial for taking bribes related to an arms sale whilst in office,
and no one believes this to be his only offence.
 Given how deeply rooted corruption has become in South Africa, it is
now common to talk about the ‘state capture’ by corrupt forces. There is
even an official Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State
Capture that started holding public hearings in August 2018. Much of this
corruption is linked to the noble desire to boost so-called Black economic
empowerment by ensuring that Black South Africans get access to lucrative
contracts. The system has been open to abuse and has blurred the lines
between politics, business and corruption. The case of the Watson brothers,
two White anti-apartheid heroes, demonstrates that it is not just Black
Africans who have managed to cheat the system. Bosasa, the company they
ran, was supposedly a Black majority-owned company that received
government contracts to run a range of privatized state operations, including
prison catering and IT, worth up to $140 million between 2000 and 2016.74
The Black ownership was a front for the Watson brothers to make money,
allegedly using their contacts in the government, civil service and even the
courts to bribe their way into a fortune.
A Black front for White corruption is the perfect metaphor for the state
capture of South Africa. As the Bosasa case demonstrates, Black economic
empowerment is based on imposing neoliberalism on the post-apartheid
economy. If it is not making money from government contracts it is making
it in deals with multinationals involved in the same colonial relationship as
on the rest of the continent. South Africa’s elite is not a sign of progress,
especially when over half of all Black South Africans live below a poverty
line that we could never imagine in the West.75
South Africa was once a beacon of radical politics on the continent, with
the anti-apartheid struggle committed to land reform that would have put
the wealth of the country into the hands of the people. But like most of
Africa, in order to end apartheid South Africa’s leaders compromised,
accepting the basic political and economic framework that was already in
place. The threat of violence was one of the key drivers of this, with the
apartheid state being one of the most visceral reminders of the brutality of
the West. But the West’s claws were so deep into the country that even if a
revolutionary struggle had succeeded, it would have been difficult to
survive without outside support. The biggest limitation of the revolutionary
movements in Africa was that they each settled on a national struggle,
winning control of the existing levers of power. But this was doomed to
failure because the real power in the system is in the West, with the controls
in Africa mostly being for show. Apartheid was a problem in South Africa
but it was not the problem. Merely changing the colour of some of those at
the wheel of the ship, or sitting on the top decks, was never going to be
enough to change course, because it is a vessel that works by remote
control.

The logic of empire has always depended on a Black and Brown elite to
administer Western domination across the globe. So we should not be
surprised about a growing class filling their bellies from the misery of the
poor in the underdeveloped world. The rise of China and other nations,
somewhat higher up on the ladder of White supremacy, is only causing a
stir because of how badly understood the racial dynamics of the system are.
Anti-Black racism was a lynchpin in the establishment of Western global
dominance, using the profits from the Atlantic system to finance the
exploitation of the East. By using Africa as a stepping stone, countries like
China are employing the codes of colonial logic embedded in the operating
system. The wealth of these emerging economies is also based on the brutal
exploitation of their own poor, whose bodies are sacrificed on the altar of
progress. The West continues to enrich itself by leaching off the Black and
Brown, but can now hide behind the rulers of its former colonies.
The emergence of a non-White elite in the underdeveloped world
collaborating with Western imperialism could be seen as an incentive to
embrace a global politics of class solidarity. The elite can be viewed as the
problem regardless of their colour and there is certainly no shortage of
scholars and activists (mostly in the West) yearning for a politics that unites
the global proletariat against the bourgeois ruling classes. Unfortunately, the
left has always been incapable of coming to terms with both the centrality
of racism to their position in the West and the extent to which the logic of
Western imperialism radiates through their own politics.
 7

Imperial Democracy

Sitting on a plane on the way to São Paolo is not the most guilt-free way to
watch a lecture about the dangers of climate change. But the poor movie
selection had led me to the documentary section where I stumbled across
The Third Industrial Revolution, a filmed lecture and Q&A delivered by the
economist Jeremy Rifkin. Apocalyptic images of flooding and extreme
weather events jarred me enough to keep me awake and feeling bad about
my carbon footprint, if not guilty enough to rethink my next trip. Rifkin’s
message was clear: the world is on the brink of annihilation, the sixth
extinction-level event, due to our pollution of the atmosphere, and a radical
new alternative is essential in order to save it. Thankfully for us all, he had
come to deliver the plan to rescue humanity, embodied in what he called the
third industrial revolution.
According to the lecture, existence has been brought to the brink because
of the previous two industrial revolutions. First, British ingenuity in the
eighteenth century created the technology that became the engine behind
rapid industrial progress, urbanization and factory labour. In the early
twentieth century it was the United States’ turn to be the fulcrum behind
progress with a second industrial revolution based on the exploitation of
electricity, oil and the motor engine. While these revolutions both brought
unprecedented development, they also created the climate crisis by
polluting the air. But, fear not, we are at the cusp of a third industrial
revolution that not only promises to bring even greater bounties than the
first two but to do so in a completely carbon-neutral fashion that will pull
humankind from the edge of the abyss.
The third industrial revolution is based on the digital transformation to
the ‘internet of things’, which opens up possibilities that can transform the
world. For Rifkin, the key is the ‘zero marginal cost’ of producing
innovations that the new interconnected world creates. He argues that in the
future we will be able to sustain our energy needs for relatively little. The
example that makes the most sense is electricity from solar power. The cost
of producing solar power has been rapidly declining over the years and will
shortly be cheaper than fossil fuel energy. If houses and other buildings
were fitted with solar panels they could produce their own energy and, once
connected to a grid, could feed back surpluses into the system. By
connecting across a digital network that would manage the flow of
electricity we could create a free source of power for everyone. Imagine the
grid powering the train system or driverless electric car apps and you are
beginning to imagine the dream that is the third industrial revolution. A
networked, digital, green economy providing untold efficiency and
therefore wealth for all. Given the setting of the plane I wondered if I had
drifted off to sleep, but no, Rifkin had given the technological version of
Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. It was full of all the same
hope and promise but also contained the basic limitations present any time
someone is picturing a fantasy, if not an outright delusion. Rifkin is not the
only one to offer such a revolutionary mirage. A cottage industry has
developed around imagining salvation in the form of Western technological
development, and Rifkin’s lecture contained all the key ingredients.

ENLIGHTENMENT 2.0
Barely distinguishable from Rifkin’s ideas is the notion that we are
currently embarking on a fourth industrial revolution, which will transform
both the political sphere and the very fabric of the economy.1 In this
narrative Britain and the steam engine are still at the foundation of industry
but the second revolution is thought to have taken place between 1867 and
1914, with greater scientific advancements and progress in manufacturing.
Computing is said to mark the third major shift, after the Second World
War. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, is a key
proponent, arguing that this fourth industrial revolution will bring ‘profound
and systemic change’ in global power relations.2 Zero marginal costs mean
that in theory everyone with an internet connection can plug in and benefit
from the new economy. Rifkin actually argues that the underdeveloped
world is at an advantage because of its lack of infrastructural development.
Whereas the West is designed for an earlier system of production and needs
to be retrofitted, the lack of infrastructure in developing countries will make
it cheaper to just equip the nations with the hardware needed to exploit the
next industrial revolution. I am sure those living in grinding poverty feel
reassured.
Both the third and fourth industrial revolutions are ideas generated from
relatively mainstream political centres. Rifkin cites his experience of
working with governments including Germany and China, and companies
like the energy giant EDF and Daimler; and the fourth industrial revolution
has been picked up by policy makers around the world and the United
Nations.3 These are the classic Enlightenment progress narratives: more
science, reason and technology will lead to a fairer, more just world.
But we can also see very similar ideas about saving the world coming
from newer, left-wing voices. Saving the planet from the impending climate
catastrophe has rightly become a central issue in progressive politics. If
drastic action is not taken shortly to reduce emissions there may well be
little of the world left to save. Climate change is also decimating countries
in the underdeveloped world, with extreme weather events set to create
millions of climate refugees whose homelands will be uninhabitable.4 It
seems even the climate has embraced the logic of White supremacy,
punishing those in the Rest for the excesses of the West.
Activists around the globe are protesting, with one of the most notable
mobilizations being the climate strike movement led by children and young
people. The third strike in 2019 spanned 150 countries, with over 4 million
people estimated to have taken part. As valuable as this grassroots activism
is, it remains strictly within the framework of empire. The strike was timed
to coincide with the UN Climate Summit, and as powerful as figures like
climate protestor Greta Thunberg are, they spend their time appealing to the
heads of nation states. Once we locate the system as the problem then it
should be clear that no matter how many Extinction Rebellion protestors
stage nude protests in the British parliament, they will not dismantle the
colonial logic of the world order. The concern for the underdeveloped world
fits firmly within the framework of so-called universal rights, as developed
in the Enlightenment. Sure, they have a right not to be flooded, burnt or
starved out of their homes, but that remains the limit of their humanity.
In fairness, there are attempts to formulate the climate debate in terms of
the need for a transformative political agenda. Naomi Klein has been
dubbed the ‘intellectual godmother’ of the push for a Green New Deal, an
ambitious policy agenda for reducing carbon emissions to zero and
reforming capitalism.5 Klein makes it abundantly clear that reducing
emissions is not enough, and connects the climate struggle to her earlier
work exposing conditions in sweatshops in the underdeveloped world.
Climate goals can only be reached by ending an economy that seeks
constant growth and luxuries, the pursuit of which exploits workers in the
poorest parts of the world.6 The Sunrise Movement, who have been
campaigning for the realization of the Green New Deal, sum up its vision as
being ‘to stop climate change, achieve environmental sustainability, create
millions of good jobs, and realize economic prosperity for all’.7
So successful have the campaigns been that the Green New Deal forced
its way into the political debate. Bernie Sanders put the proposals at the
centre of his presidential campaigns and rising star of the Democratic Party
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped introduce a resolution in Congress to
support this policy agenda. Ocasio-Cortez represents a younger, more
diverse and more progressive slate of politicians in the United States, who
are determined to change the policy agenda. As part of the campaign for the
Green New Deal she voiced a video with The Intercept and Naomi Klein
called ‘A Message from the Future’ that imagines herself looking back at
the world created after achieving the Green New Deal. It is a beautifully
realized utopia where the green economy has created jobs, shifted the
debate on universal healthcare and inspired more women and minorities
into office. Unfortunately, it contains much of the short-sightedness we
should by now be used to.
The Green New Deal takes its name from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
package to counteract the Great Depression of the 1930s. As important as
these reforms were, providing housing, jobs and welfare for millions of
Americans, they did not tackle the problems of racism in the United States.
In fact, the New Deal was racially unjust in its application, particularly in
the extremely segregated housing boom it induced.8 Klein admits that the
Green New Deal metaphor is somewhat limited by its predecessor and that
delivering on climate justice is ‘not a magic cure for racism or misogyny or
homophobia or transphobia’.9 The problem is that nowhere in the agenda is
there any real attempt to address these issues. They remain on the margins
in the classic mode of believing that the economy is somehow separate
from issues of identity. Much of Sanders’ platform sounds like a direct
appeal to the White working classes languishing in the rust belt of the
Midwest, the alleged real victims of globalization, with promises of
American jobs ‘with strong benefits, a living wage, training … and
protecting the right of all workers to form a union’.10 These are all noble
pursuits but they would not deal with racism in the United States and,
crucially for understanding the implications of the new age of empire, they
depend on the exploitation of the underdeveloped world.
Proposals to tax the rich sound progressive, but the rich make their
money from a system that brutally exploits Black and Brown bodies. Using
that wealth to retrofit the West and provide high-quality jobs and healthcare
depends on the very same colonial logic. The left in Britain is no different:
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party represented the resurgence of the left and
embraced the politics of the Green New Deal. Underlying the promise of
these new endeavours is a promise of equality for all; the liberation of
society by technology. But it is telling that on neither side of the Atlantic is
there any real effort to address the problems of global inequality. In keeping
with colonial logic, ‘equality for all’ really means improving the lives of
those in the West, which remain the central concern in the latest version of
Western empire. The uncomfortable reality is that the new intellectual left is
lining up to retrofit the Enlightenment for the present day.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman went viral when he attacked billionaires
for not paying tax at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2019.
He diagnosed the problem of inequality as being about ‘taxes, taxes, taxes.
All the rest is bullshit in my opinion’ – much to the disappointment of the
assembled tax dodgers. But in his book Utopia for Realists Bregman
outlines a vision so deeply steeped in Enlightenment thinking that he argues
that all we need to do is to ‘reclaim the language of progress’ in order to
‘rehoist the sails !’ to a brighter future. The idea of picking up a fallen
mantle is only possible because he somehow believes that ‘historically,
politics was the preserve of the left’.11 As we have seen throughout this
book, the truth is the complete opposite, at least with regard to the West. If
we conceive of the left as broadly about redistributive politics and fighting
for the rights of workers, then the only real period that was the preserve of
the left was the social democratic era after the Second World War. But that
settlement has already melted away in Britain and the United States, and is
fraying even in the more progressive parts of Europe. Even during the
heady days of the welfare state, the period was still characterized by White
supremacy. Racism, sexism and labour exploitation have, in reality, been
the preserve of Western politics.
Bregman’s argument manages to get even more absurd when he names
the historical figures we should look to for inspiration. He lavishes praise
on the sixteenth-century Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas for
advocating equality between the colonial masters and the indigenous people
of the Americas and for attempting to found a colony where everyone
received a comfortable living. Las Casas might ring a bell: in Chapter 2 I
discussed how his ruling on the natives having souls also provided the
justification for the enslavement of Africans, who were deemed incapable
of salvation. John Stuart Mill also gets a shout-out for his belief in the
equality of women. That would be the same Mill we encountered earlier
who justified ‘despotism’ in attempting to improve the ‘barbarians’ in the
colonies. For Bregman, without these ‘wide-eyed dreamers we would all
still be poor, hungry, afraid, stupid and ugly’.12 This is just a more
palatable version of lionizing Hitler for building motorways. Bregman was
invited to the World Economic Forum in the first place, so perhaps it is
unfair to put too much faith in his progressive credentials, but we see this
same kind of thinking across the political spectrum.
Novara Media has become an important source for alternative news for
the left in Britain, with a major online presence. Co-founder Aaron Bastani
has become a key figure on the left but he offers the same basic blueprint
for technological progress freeing humanity. Rather than seeing three or
four industrial revolutions, he acknowledges only two previous so-called
‘disruptions’. First, the emergence of Homo sapiens, who started
agricultural development, and second, the sacred British-led Industrial
Revolution of the eighteenth century. We are supposedly in the midst of a
third disruption that promises all the bounties that we have already spoken
of. If anything, Bastani is even more optimistic, imagining that under ‘fully
luxury automated communism … we will see more of the world than ever
before, eat varieties of food we have never heard of, and lead lives
equivalent – if we so wish – to those of today’s billionaires’. As if sensing
the scepticism of the reader, he declares that ‘our ambitions must be
Promethean because our technology is already making us gods – so we
might as well get it.’13 Such hubris is not just reminiscent of
Enlightenment thinking but lies at the very heart of the Eurocentric
intellectual project.
The greatest lie underpinning the Enlightenment is embedded in its name.
Knowledge did not spread out of Europe to bring light to the uncivilized
parts of the world. In fact, it was the very opposite: Europe took knowledge
produced around the globe and Whitewashed it, pretending it was theirs.
Science has certainly contributed much to the world but to pretend it is the
possession of the West is only possible due to the conceits of Whiteness. A
parallel in all the various progress narratives is that they imagine the
modern world only begins with the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the
eighteenth century. I suppose we should give some credit to Bastani for
locating his first disruption outside the West with the emergence of Homo
sapiens in Africa. But development is then apparently frozen in time until
James Watt came onto the scene with his steam engine. To discount the
thousands of years of history and development around the globe that laid
the foundation for the Western Industrial Revolution is not just short-
sighted but deeply offensive. Worse still is the complete lack of any
acknowledgement of the dark side of the emergence of Western industry.
The whole purpose of this book is to counter the dominant mythology
around the progressive West. By now I hope you are convinced that
genocide, slavery and colonialism were just as important, if not more so, as
the emergence of science and industry to everything that we have today.
You simply do not have the technological advances without the violence
that underpinned them. Reading the new so-called radicals is just a
reminder that the mythology of progressivism is endemic today even in the
circles of the left. In none of the above accounts of history are any of the
atrocities of the West even mentioned, let alone given their rightful strategic
place. If Europeans colonizing almost the entire globe to exploit labour and
resources does not meet the threshold for a disruption then we are in dire
need of a new measuring stick.
 It is by no means a surprising development that the supposed new
radicals are replicating the intellectual exclusions of the Enlightenment; it is
just how they were raised. There is a reason that in 2015 students in Britain
launched the #WhyIsMyCurriculumWhite campaign. Western thought is
still dominated by the notion that knowledge springs forth from the
foundation laid by the supposed founding fathers we are told to revere. It
may be jarring for me to read a whole body of work written in the twenty-
first century that almost exclusively cites White men, but that is just the
currency for those producing ideas today.
We have come to expect too much from the left because we have
neglected to understand that its intellectual heritage is just as rooted in the
progress narratives as neoliberalism’s. Marx remains at the core of radical
Western thought, but he was just as much a product of the Enlightenment as
Kant. Marx saw capitalism as an evil that needed to be overturned, but a
necessary one to bring about communism (even its luxury automated form).
Just as we are seeing with the arguments today, Marx thought that the
technological progress brought about by capitalism was essential to
providing the abundance necessary for human liberation. Ideas of White
supremacy and scientific progress led by the West are absolutely integral to
Marxism and remain its greatest limitation. Marx’s inability to understand
that the underdeveloped world was inhabited by fully human people
capable of struggle led him to completely misidentify the revolutionary
class. He could see no further than the Western industrial worker created by
the contradictions of capital and labour, and theorized that it was from here
that the proletariat would arise to overthrow the unjust system. But history
has shown that those who have embraced Marxism and committed
successfully to revolution have resided almost exclusively in the
underdeveloped world. In Cuba, China, North Korea, Guinea, Grenada,
Mozambique, Angola, North Vietnam, and even in beloved Mother Russia
the revolution was largely led by the peasantry rather than the workers.14
Marx’s principal failing was that he ‘imagined that the industrial
proletariat was the hero of capitalism and had invented a history whose
narrative justified this’.15 It was his roots in the Enlightenment that led him
to this conclusion. If knowledge and progress spread out from Europe then
so must the revolution. Rather than representing a break from intellectual
White supremacy, Marxism is just the flipside of the coin of its logic. It is a
paradox of Marxism that the Western industrial worker never managed to
produce a communist revolution whilst across the underdeveloped world
Marx inspired the overthrow of the state from Cuba to China, via Guinea-
Bissau and many stops in between.16 Marx was so blinded by White
supremacy that he was (and far too many of his disciples remain) unable to
understand that the most oppressed, the true revolutionary class has always
resided outside the West because of the racist nature of capitalism. The new
so-called radicals today are no different, presenting alternative visions of
the future clouded by Whiteness.

WHOSE ECONOMY IS IT ANYWAY?

Faith in technological progress stands out from the various alternative
conceptions of the world because of how the left has typically been resistant
to mechanization due to its impact on the workforce. Since the beginning of
automation, workers have had an inherent fear of being replaced by
machines. The word Luddite, used for someone sceptical of technology,
comes from the followers of Ned Ludd who would break factory machinery
in early nineteenth-century England. One of the strongest narratives shaping
current social policy is the idea that (White) workers in the West are being
left behind because of the disappearance of manufacturing jobs either
overseas or because of the sinister sounding ‘rise of the robots’. There is no
doubt that the economy is changing. Globally, factories employed 163
million people in 2003, but that number is likely to dwindle to ‘a few
million’ in the near future.17
In the West the decimation of the manufacturing base played no small
part in the election of Donald Trump, although it was on the outsourcing of
so-called ‘American’ jobs to foreigners that he laid the blame. Robotics and
artificial intelligence are replacing human labour at an alarming rate. But
this circle can be squared by the promise of abundance that comes with the
third/fourth industrial revolution, which is supposed to be more efficient,
and therefore could provide greater levels of wealth to be distributed in the
economy. Manufacturing output actually increased by 60 per cent between
1997 and 2005 even though 4 million jobs vanished from the sector.18 It is
the promise of abundance that holds the progress narrative together.
The massive infrastructure development needed to complete the
technological revolution when society commits to it will depend on millions
of workers being trained, and paid to lead the charge into the new age.
Robots are not equipped to install solar panels, cables and all the hardware
necessary to network the internet of things together. This promise of
employment is one of the key appeals of the Green New Deal, which will
engage workers in the raft of new industries necessary to decarbonize the
world. It is not that work will disappear, just that it will change. In the
progressive utopia, due to the amount of wealth and efficiency, labour itself
will become obsolete as the robots do all the dirty work, leaving us humans
free to embrace our leisure time. Bregman has a whole section on the
pursuit of leisure, quoting Marx’s desire to be free to ‘hunt in the morning,
fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner’.19
Central to the new left in Britain, underpinning Corbynism’s political
programme, is this desire for leisure time, expressed in the demand to
shorten the working week.
Such faith in technological development to provide is a key feature of the
progress narrative: science will create abundance that frees us all. There are
a myriad of problems with the idea of creating an automated society where
we are freed from the mundane. For one, the dystopia of the Terminator
series of movies hangs over this whole concept, where the artificial
intelligent network created to improve the world decides to eliminate the
human race once it is switched on. Creating a world run by intelligent
machines may actually be the ultimate version of building our own
gravediggers. There’s an ancient South African legend about the evil Za-hu-
Rrellel who created creatures out of the earth, and who did everything for
the people, including transfer the food into their stomachs. The population
got so used to everything being done for them that they got fat and forgot
how to walk or speak, allowing Za-hu-Rrellel to take over the land.20
Despite the nightmarish quality of these visions of the future they both offer
warnings. Terminator is about the unintended consequences of trying to
master technology. The cautionary tale of Za-hu-Rrellel is about how
technology can be used for nefarious purposes by the powerful. This is one
of the principal limitations of the idea of utopia through technology.
While pioneers like Rifkin are keen to point out the free products of the
internet of things, like Wikipedia or open-source software, they are working
with governments and corporations. Hardware for the networks that are
building the future cannot be built for free, or by plucky start-ups.
Governments and corporations are leading the charge and China is one of
the principal forces in developing the third/fourth industrial revolution.
China’s ‘belt and road’ initiative aims to bring the old trade routes into the
new age by building digital hardware and capacity across much of Asia,
Africa and Europe.21 While the nation may clothe itself in the red of
Communism and fond memories of Chairman Mao, it is now a firmly
capitalist country. The only aspect of old-style Communism left is a very
large and authoritarian state. One of the key mechanisms to maintain the
power of the Chinese state is the very same internet of things that Rifkin is
so proud of. For instance, China’s Muslim minorities are under constant
surveillance and attack. Since 2017, more than 1 million have been placed
in detention centres because they have been deemed ‘unsafe’. By
monitoring smartphone use the authorities have built algorithms to detect
‘un-Chinese’ behaviours and flag Muslims, using their Integrated Joint
Operations Platform. China has created a ‘web of surveillance’ with facial
recognition cameras and mobile phone tracking that records the movement
of its ethnic Muslim populations.22 The internet of things has created a
virtual prison for Muslims in China.
Technology in the West has always been used to suppress the population
as much as to free it. The FBI’s counter-intelligence programme
(COINTELPRO) of surveillance, wire-tapping and more mundane activities
such as using spies undid groups like the Black Panthers in the sixties and
seventies. It is terrifying to imagine what the modern-day version of that
programme looks like, with the sheer access to our lives that technology
allows the powerful. Your phone, computer, digital speaker, smart car,
television, the internet, the cameras everywhere, can all be turned against
you to curtail your freedom. The mechanisms of our supposed freedom very
easily become the tools of oppression. Less violent but equally sinister
accusations are already made against the uses of this technology, from
algorithms personally tailored to get you to buy goods you do not need, to
the targeting of fake news to convince you to support a political party that
means you harm.
In terms of employment, the outlook is potentially just as bleak. For all
the talk of changing the nature of work, the reality is that there is a steep
class divide in who has benefited from automation. Those in middle-class
professions, which are less easy to mechanize, have prospered, whilst
unemployment has befallen millions of those with low or no skills who
could previously have worked in manufacturing. Digitization has also led to
worsening conditions for low-wage workers, who are subject to monitoring
and targets.
On a different plane journey (carbon footprint alert !) I was watching a
Vice documentary, The Future of Work, that had a whole segment on the
role of automation in warehouses (please let’s refrain from calling them
‘fulfilment centres’). The company was proud of their efforts to
synchronize the work of humans and machines. But the workers were less
enthusiastic because of the demands involved in keeping pace with the
automated schedule. Rather than liberating the workers, the results of
automation have largely been to cut the workforce along with their wages
and working conditions, while increasing surveillance and allowing an ever-
shrinking minority to amass untold wealth.23 Amazon represents the
embodiment of all those forces, with its warehouse workers surveilled every
moment to the point they are afraid to take bathroom breaks whilst doing
back-breaking work to keep up with the targets mandated by an
algorithm.24 Meanwhile founder Jeff Bezos is on the way to becoming the
world’s first trillionaire, making roughly $2,489 every second, more than
double the average US worker’s earnings in a week.25 Bezos and his ilk are
the emperors in the new age of imperialism and the corporations are their
fiefdoms. For those hoping for the liberating impact of technology, be
warned: it is these corporations that are laying the foundation for the
third/fourth industrial revolution. There is no reason to believe that the new
system will differ from the old, in fact we should expect more of the same.
Due to the liberation of capital from nation-state control, national
governments find it almost impossible to regulate global corporations, for
the obvious reason that they simply do not have the jurisdiction. More could
certainly be done, but corporations pour their wealth into politicians
precisely so they can influence inaction. Look at the difficulty in getting
Facebook to stop sharing fake news stories. In 2019 Microsoft beat Apple to
a $10 billion contract to host the cloud services for the US Department of
Defense. Good luck regulating a company that stores your nation’s
classified documents.
The biggest flaw in the argument that abundance will save us is that we
already live in the land of plenty. Just sixty-two people hold the wealth of
an entire third of the world. There is more than enough food to feed
everyone, yet millions die every year while tons of food rot in the West.
Scarcity is not the problem, inequality is, and if the new system is built by
the same people who profit from the old then it is lunacy to expect better
technology to liberate the poor. It is particularly delusional to think that
global inequality, or White supremacy in the flesh, could possibly be
remedied by a reboot of Enlightenment narratives of progress.
Greater than all other influences over your life chances is where you
reside. Living in one of the top 10 per cent wealthiest areas of Britain could
put ten more years on your life than if you are trapped in one of the most
deprived.26 Meanwhile, a child born in Somalia today has a one in five
chance of dying before their fifth birthday, more than the chances of a
soldier being killed in the US Civil War, the Second World War, Vietnam or
any other major conflict of the last two centuries.27 While we complain
about our dodgy wi-fi connections most people in the world do not have an
inside toilet. There is literally no parallel between our lives in the West and
those of most around the globe. On average the poverty line is seventeen
times higher in the West than the underdeveloped world. This is the greatest
conceit of the supposedly radical new thinkers. By ignoring the dark side of
history that created the modern world they have also neglected any serious
analysis of how to repair the damage that has been done. Science and
technology can never be the solution to the problem of racism.
Absent from any of the analyses of the social order in the alternatives
presented is any question about just where the West gets the money and
resources needed to develop the next industrial revolution. Slavery and
colonialism produced the first two/three revolutions. There is now a new
scramble for Africa’s resources, which are being plundered for the green
revolution. Africa is the most mineral-rich continent, home to the raw
materials necessary for the solar panels and efficient batteries that are set to
power the globe. As we have seen, the West has the wealth to steal these
resources and develop them because of the racial global imbalances in
power. If it is highly unlikely that the poor in the West will benefit from
technological innovation it is unimaginable that the underdeveloped world,
and in particular Africa, will. Bastani fantasizes about being able to mine
asteroids for the bounties we will need to retrofit the globe. In the meantime
Africa is being stripped of its wealth, and if it ever becomes possible to
feast from the stars it remains to be seen how the continent will benefit.
So that everyone can gain from the land of plenty, Bregman proposes
tearing down the iron gates that are national borders and allowing those in
the underdeveloped world to freely travel into the Garden of Eden that is
the West. Apparently global freedom of movement would grow the world
economy by between 67 and 147 per cent, bringing huge benefits to the
underdeveloped world. He argues that ‘if all the developed countries would
let in just 3 per cent more immigrants the world’s poor would have $305
billion more to spend.’28 At least Bregman recognizes that most of the
world is locked out from the fruits of Western progress and proposes a
mechanism for sharing the dividends. It is just a shame that he presents
such a short-sighted solution.
Global freedom of movement would certainly lead to more money in the
underdeveloped world. Jamaica is the perfect example of the power of
migration, with the nation kept afloat by the reality that there are more
Jamaicans in the diaspora than on the island. A reduced population means
there are fewer mouths to feed, but the main benefit is the money made by
those in the diaspora in places like Britain, the United States and Canada.
Remittances, money sent back to Jamaica or claimed in foreign pensions,
represent 15 per cent of the overall GDP of the nation, a number that
somehow manages to mask Jamaica’s dependence on foreign payments.29
When accounting for the amount of money that actually remains in the
country (more than 60 per cent of tourism dollars immediately disappear to
the foreign entities that own the resorts), remittances are the largest source
of foreign income in the country.30 Outward migration has therefore
massively boosted Jamaica’s economy. But after all these years of
remittances Jamaica still remains extremely poor, unable to overcome its
colonial legacy. Whilst the closing-off of migration routes to Britain and the
United States makes the future look even bleaker, if they reopened the
plight of the average Jamaican would not greatly improve.
For a start, although freedom of movement sounds liberating in principle,
only those who can afford to travel, and their families, receive any benefit.
The poorest will stay exactly where they are and, worse still, migration
encourages the so-called ‘brain drain’, where those with skills leave an
underdeveloped nation to take advantage of opportunities in the West.31
The impact on an economy is obvious, particularly on those that already
lack infrastructure and services. Migration as the solution also suggests that
the onus should be on the poor to migrate to countries in the West in order
to live a better life. No one should want to come to Britain with its
miserable weather, dodgy infrastructure and brutal inequalities. We should
be trying to make the places people migrate from secure and wealthy
enough so that there is no desperation to flee in the first place. But the
bigger problem with the idea of open borders as a solution is the intellectual
arrogance of the progress narrative.
Only by pretending that the abundance in the West is produced by
legitimate means can anyone suggest inviting those in the former colonies
to feast. The fruits we are inviting them in to dine on are derived from the
exploitation of their home countries. To take back any of that wealth the
system of racism that exploits them has to stay intact. That is why Jamaica
stayed poor even after it had sent half its population out to raise its fortunes.
Jamaicans are in effect cannibalizing their own wealth when they cash a
remittance cheque. It is no different for any of the many other countries
dependent on remittances for their survival. ‘No borders’ would just keep
the underdeveloped locked in dependency on the forces of neo-colonialism.
Using GDP as a measure of progress is nonsensical in any case. GDP
measures only certain contributions to the economy, missing out things like
domestic labour whilst highlighting aspects like debt.32 I covered this
mirage in the discussion of the illusion of Africa rising through loans from
foreign sources. More money certainly does not mean more equality: it is
often the opposite. For example, since Thatcherism in the eighties Britain
has got a whole lot richer, but the gap between rich and poor has turned into
a chasm. Growing global GDP is meaningless if we do not account for
where the wealth ends up. Given both the history and present of how the
abundance in the West is produced it should now be glaringly obvious that
the spoils can never be equitably shared with the underdeveloped world.
Troublesome as the idea of no borders as the solution is, it at least makes
an attempt to include those in the underdeveloped world. This is rarely the
case when imagining the new utopias. In response to the crisis of work and
rise of the robots, one of the most fashionable ideas is that of a universal
basic income (UBI). Rather than implementing welfare states based on
various entitlements, the idea here is for the state to provide every citizen
with a set level of guaranteed income. There are various proposals of how
much this should be, but for the idea to work it would need to be a
significant amount, set to cover subsistence.33 Providing enough to survive
deals with the decline of available work and also the increased leisure time
that we are all pursuing. But the point is not for the income to replace work,
just to eradicate poverty by making sure everyone can survive.
 The aversion of policy makers to UBI is the narrative that it will make
people lazy and workshy. When trialled the result has usually been that
people spend the money wisely and work harder, and it vastly improves
their lives and economies. Many of the pilots have taken place as
development projects and there are suggestions that directly giving people
aid would be better than dispensing it through Western agencies. But it is in
the underdeveloped world that we can see the severe limitations of the
entire project.
The West is bloated with enough wealth to fund a generous basic income.
One of the bastions of progressive left democracy, Finland, launched a two-
year UBI experiment in 2017, making unconditional payments of around
$590 a month to 2,000 randomly selected unemployed individuals in order
to research the impact on outcomes and their participation in the workforce.
Contrast this to a similar experiment in Kenya, where the US charity
GiveDirectly selected 44 villages to make unconditional payments of $23 a
month per adult for twelve years in order to study the effects. The yawning
chasm between the amounts tells us the scale of racial global inequality and
how UBI does absolutely nothing to solve it.34 Providing enough money to
allow people to survive in Kenya is useful but it is never going to be able to
overturn the steep global inequalities that the nation is subject to.
Eradicating absolute poverty may be a good thing, but UBI would
actually lock in the logic of empire. Remember, the West only has such a
disproportionate amount of wealth because of poverty in places like Kenya.
A world in which a basic income is universal and paid for by no borders,
where the Black and Brown poor can make money by doing low-paid
migrant work in the West, is the definition of a dystopia. Everyone may be
able to eat but the political and economic system would be frozen in the
image of White supremacy, with the underdeveloped world unable to ever
catch up. The problem for places like Kenya is a global economic system
that exploits them, draining out their resources so that the standard of living
is so low that a Western charity can afford to pay subsistence to 4,966
villagers for twelve years. Whilst it may make those in the West feel better,
the fact that charities have the resources to do UBI experiments on the best
way to spend their benevolence is the problem.
UBI is not a new or radical idea: one of its proponents is the arch-
neoliberal economist Milton Friedman. There is a world in which UBI is
‘Thatcherism on steroids’, where the welfare state is replaced by payments
to the individuals who constitute the myth that is society.35 Given how
unequal Western societies are, welfare spending is a major part of all
Western budgets. In addition to further costs caused by poverty in areas
such as criminal justice and the health service, UBI may actually present as
a far more cost-efficient way of delivering a welfare state.
Accounting for police, courts and prison, criminal justice alone costs an
estimated $182 billion a year in the United States.36 This does not include
the impacts of crime on the economy, just the price of dealing with the
problem. This figure pales in comparison to estimates of how much poverty
overall costs the US economy. Child poverty alone is estimated to cost
$1.03 trillion a year.37 Overall poverty could cost the economy $4 trillion,
which is more than the $3.8 trillion a UBI of $1,000 a month would
entail.38 It should not be unimaginable that the right wing may seize on the
opportunity to end welfare by bringing in an individualized system of
payments, especially because it has already happened.
In 1968 Richard Nixon almost enacted unconditional payments to poor
families, which would have been the equivalent of $10,000 to a family of
four in today’s money. Millions of dollars were spent on experiments
involving thousands of families, with the results showing benefits and no
huge decline in working hours. Nixon’s plan was eventually derailed by the
ideological zeal of neo-conservatives who worshipped at the altar of Ayn
Rand and the free market, consigning the dream of UBI to the dustbin of
history.39 But the fact that Nixon was in favour should give us a big reason
to think twice about the idea. UBI is basically a conversation about how to
share out the spoils of empire and to mitigate the extreme inequality that
capitalism creates.

IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY
What ultimately undermines the Enlightenment is the claim to the universal
when its theories are based on the particular. Whiteness is at the heart of
Enlightenment thinking and this is no different in the supposedly radical
new approaches. All are fundamentally incapable of even naming the
racism that is the basis of the global political and economic system, let
alone able to offer any actual solutions. We can see this in the distorted
Enlightenment progress narratives that underpin the new utopias, but also in
the genesis and creation myths of the social movements that have informed
the theory.
The sparks that lit many of the new social movements were the financial
crisis in 2008, the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, which created,
in Bregman’s words, ‘more and more people hungry for a real radical
antidote to both xenophobia and inequality … for a new source of hope’.40
Ground zero in this narrative is the birth of neoliberalism, ushered in by
Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the eighties. Dismantling the social
democratic settlement unleashed the forces of capital and sowed the seeds
for the economic crash in 2008. The unemployment, insecurity and austerity
that followed led to the inevitable rise of the new right as people looked for
causes of their poverty. It also exposed the inherent contradictions of capital
and stoked the embers of protest by revealing their oppression to the
oppressed. One of the first and most high-profile responses to this crisis was
the Occupy movement, which swept the globe.
On 17 September 2011, protestors occupied Zuccotti Park in downtown
Manhattan near the financial district in order to protest at the cause of the
financial crisis. The movement grew rapidly, spreading to a thousand cities
and racking up 6,500 arrests within its first six months.41 The occupation
was prompted by the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters which
‘issued a call to action for a “revolution,” a “people’s revolt in the West”’ in
response to the crisis of capitalism.42 Occupy took inspiration from
previous movements like the Indignados in Spain, who had occupied public
space in response to rising unemployment, austerity and other structural
adjustments enforced by external financial institutions.43 The Arab Spring,
highlighted by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, had a large
influence on Occupy as the images of mass occupation of a public space
took hold in the imagination. Thousands occupied Zuccotti Park for almost
two months, until police raided and shut down the protest on 15 November.
Occupy’s reach was such that President Obama gave the movement his
approval in his 2012 re-election campaign. By focusing on the economic
crisis Occupy changed the political language and ‘income inequality’
became the ‘crisis du jour’, something that all the 2016 presidential
candidates at least had to address.44 The power of the economic message
was its simplicity. The Occupiers declared that they were the 99 per cent
standing up to the evil 1 per cent who hoarded the wealth. The only
problem is that this idea is a delusional fantasy and a continuation of the
universalizing of the White particular that we have seen from both left and
right.
Global inequality is so stark that those on the poverty line in the United
States are still in the top 14 per cent of earners worldwide. The average US
salary puts you in the top 4 per cent of earners. There is simply no
comparison between the conditions facing the poorest in the world and
those who are at the bottom in the United States, or in the rest of the West.
Only by focusing on a national analysis could the ‘99 per cent’ rhetoric
make any sense. By looking at its demands, or at least its articulation of the
problem, it is abundantly clear that Occupy was focused on those in the
West, not the victims of it.
The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, collectively
produced by Occupiers, is a laundry list of national demands around
healthcare, jobs and student debt. The most telling line is the complaint that
the 1 per cent ‘have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing
as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay’.45 No prizes for guessing
which ‘workers’ they are referring to here. Presumably, bringing back those
jobs and further impoverishing the underdeveloped world would be
acceptable as long as the true ‘workers’ had access to unskilled and well-
paid work. The declaration does include a line condemning the elite because
‘they have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.’ But this is so
vague and contradictory to the rest of the declaration that it makes a
mockery of their plea for the ‘people of the world’ to join the struggle. In
the same vein as the Enlightenment thinkers, the centre of Occupy’s world
was the West because it contained the fully formed workers, the movers of
history.
Even within the West the movement faced criticism for its tendency to
‘exclude minority voices’46 and faced serious issues of misogyny.47 There
were also marked class differences, with the people who could afford to
sleep in Zuccotti Park in protest brushing up against those who had already
made it their home because of poverty. The classed differences also spread
into tactics. Occupy Seattle angered working-class dock workers by closing
down the port in protest against commercialism; their principled stance
meant the people they were supposed to be fighting for, the ‘workers’, lost
valuable income. Occupy prided itself on democratic decision-making but it
was ‘limited by failures to build alliances beyond those implicit inside its
inner community’.48 Democracy matters very little if your electorate is
highly exclusive, a lesson that the left needs desperately to learn.
It might be tempting to see Occupy as ‘a global movement (inspired by
the Arab Spring)’, but the reality is that it was in a long tradition of Western
social movements which broke out in the United States and spread into
Europe and the rest of the world.49 In claiming to represent the 99 per cent,
Occupy, perhaps unwittingly, followed in the path of Enlightenment
universalism, speaking for the entire world through the very narrow lens of
Western privilege.
Occupy’s other main accomplishment is said to be its commitment to
horizontal, leaderless organization and a democratic style of decision-
making. It is commendable that although ‘Occupy’ itself is extremely
memorable the names of its leaders do not immediately come to mind. This
was done on purpose, with painstaking efforts taken to build consensus.
During speeches the rest of the protestors could respond with hand signals
and interject to make their points known. Due originally to lack of
technology, they used a ‘human microphone’ to communicate, where the
audience in earshot of the speaker would shout out their words to those
behind and so on. With such commitment to participation it must have been
almost impossible to come to any consensus. The declaration that came
from the occupiers of Zuccotti Park is frustratingly vague, but given the
circumstances it is miraculous that anything was produced at all. The
looseness of its political goals was one of the strengths of Occupy but also
its primary weakness. Due to its very broadly stated aims the movement had
a wide range of support from figures ‘including Noam Chomsky, Michael
Moore, Kanye West, Russell Simmons, Alec Baldwin and Susan
Sarandon’.50 But with a tent that large it could never hope to articulate a
coherent platform.
There were attempts to produce a more defined agenda, particularly by
those at Adbusters who had put out the call for action in the first place.
Micah White and Kalle Lasn, both from the magazine, tried to put together
a manifesto to send to Obama three days after the start of the occupation,
including the threat to ‘to stay here in our encampment in Liberty Plaza’
until their demands were met.51 The only problem was that they were
thousands of miles away in Canada at the time. Credit to Occupy, although
a lot of its success was found in digital networks, it relied on people on the
ground coming together to form bonds and consensus. Given the broad
range of people, ideas and motivations involved it is not surprising that the
loose-knit coalition eventually splintered, but many of the protestors would
argue that although occupation ended it achieved much of what it set out to
do.
It would be wrong to judge the movement by conventional metrics
because it set out to subvert them. The most obvious way Occupy was
effective was as a ‘communications success’, utilizing social media to
spread its messages across the world and making truly global links.52
Using these networks to bring people together during occupations allowed
those gathered to think through how they could address social problems, to
engage in ‘DIY politics’ in the space.53 During occupations, tent city
universities sprang up offering seminars and workshops, food was delivered
to the hungry, medical advice was dispensed and successes were had in
buying people out of their debt. To truly see the power of Occupy you have
to view it through a different lens:

it is not a media object or a march. It is first and foremost, a church

of dissent, a space made sacred by a community. But like Medieval
churches, it is also now the physical center of that community. It has
become many things. Public square. Carnival. Place to get news.
Daycare center. Health care center. Concert venue. Library.
Performance space. School.54

In many ways Occupy was ‘the idealist moment, the performance rather
than permanence’.55 In Zuccotti Park, or in their hundreds of other
locations around the world, they were performing the ideal. Occupy was
performance art, a grand piece of ‘utopian theatre’ dramatizing the other
world that is otherwise out of reach.56
Here we see the White left at its most stomach-churning. Reading
through some of the misty-eyed reflections on the movement, they have the
feeling of romantic holiday diaries. Nothing may have changed and the
movement may have collapsed but no fear, we will always have Zuccotti
Park. Occupy’s horizontal organization involved both a deep narcissism –
with slogans such as ‘we are our demands’ – and a way of building
community that relied on ‘people forming loose connections quickly’ which
fit perfectly into current times.57 It was the swipe-right of social
movements, with no deep ideological commitments, loose connections, and
the ability to find some fun elsewhere without feeling guilty. Performance
over permanence is only an option to those in the land of plenty who have
jobs or at least a welfare state to fall back on.
What made Tahrir Square a completely different sort of movement was
that the protestors had a clear demand, which was life or death, and they
refused to move until it was met. We can debate how much difference came
about when the military took over from President Mubarak in Egypt but not
the organic commitment of the people to their struggle, nor that they risked
their lives for their cause. The stakes in the West are of a different nature
and therefore so are the politics.
Democracy as a principle runs through the new left agenda. In Britain the
new left is pushing for a more inclusive economy, similar to the demands of
Occupy. Neoliberalism is diagnosed as the source of the ills of society, with
the rich taking too much of the economic pie. We are promised that by a
‘democratic revolution’ we can transform the institutions of governance and
society at large.58 Not only is this struggle about income but it is also about
reducing the social distance between people in society so that ‘everyone can
share a common life as citizens’.59 The Labour Party under the leadership
of Jeremy Corbyn embraced these ideals when he was unexpectedly voted
leader in 2015. Prior to this, Labour had been in a period of mimicking
Conservative policy on the economy, fully embracing neoliberalism with
the idea that the spoils could be shared across society. After Labour’s
surprising success (but not victory) in the general election of 2017, Corbyn
launched what he called Labour’s ‘radical and ambitious’ manifesto for the
2019 election, promising to transform both society and the economy.60
Labour’s plans mirrored much of the New Economic Foundation’s
recommendations for policy reform (the NEF is a key think-tank for the
new left).
The NEF hits all the key notes with the goal to build a society where all
people are ‘paid well, have more time off to spend with their families, have
access to affordable housing, know there is a decent safety net if they need
one, and are provided with a high level of care throughout their lives’.61 In
order to do this they propose a four-day week, a living wage, boosting trade
union membership and fashioning a ‘well-being state’ where targets are not
simply economic but relate to the mental and physical health of the nation.
They stopped short of a universal basic income, instead suggesting a far
more modest national allowance of £50 a week that counts when calculating
benefit entitlements. But they are in favour of universal basic services,
nationalizing key industries and providing free childcare to support
families. The Green New Deal is of course embraced as a motor for both
saving the world and job creation. They are also keen on ‘people’s
participation in decision making’ in both policy-making and business.62
One of the NEF’s and Labour’s main focuses is on establishing workers’
cooperatives as a model for sharing wealth.
Preston, a small city in the north of England, has an outsize importance in
the new economy, since it has become a model for local-government led
cooperatives. The council’s decision to source more locally and create
cooperatives in the city has both boosted income and dispersed that extra
money somewhat more fairly. Other large local employers like the
university have followed suit by engaging with local suppliers, and the city
is improving. But we should be wary of celebrating a radical new dawn.63
For a start it is nothing new, with democratic reforms being part of the left-
wing imagination for ‘at least a century’. Labour governments and councils
attempted such projects before neoliberalism took over in the Thatcher
era.64 John McDonnell, the architect of Corbyn’s economic policy, served
his political apprenticeship in the eighties under Tony Benn, who developed
a series of cooperative projects.
The major flaw with these concepts of participation is who is included
and who remains firmly on the outside. For all the talk of participation there
is scant regard for the fact that those in the underdeveloped world are
equally stakeholders in the economic life of the West. One of the
cooperatives so praised in Preston is a coffee shop, and while we celebrate
the benefits to the worker in Britain, the shop’s success is only possible
because of the racial exploitation of the poor people farming the coffee
beans it uses for next to nothing (it may be a surprise, but coffee does not
grow in the north of England). This is Cadbury World all over again but on
a societal scale. The wealth the left wants to share with those in their
nations is derived in large part from global, racial exploitation. What the
new left are offering is just a modified version of social democracy. A return
to the days of high taxes, social housing, reduced inequality and the
guarantee of a decent wage … but only in the West. In reality it is not a
social but an imperial democracy they are yearning for.
My grandmother came to Britain during the wonderful days of social
democracy and found a nation even more overtly racist than the one I grew
up in under neoliberalism. Malcolm X visited Birmingham in 1965 and his
trip to Smethwick is remembered because of his comments on the racial
situation in the town, which he heard was similar to how the ‘Jews were
[being treated] under Hitler’.65 This was in large part because he visited the
year after what has been dubbed the most racist election in British history,
when the Conservative Party candidate Peter Griffith won with the
unofficial slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. But
people often forget that the Labour club in the area was for Whites only;
and there is a long tradition of the trade unions barring people of colour
from membership.66 Imperial democracy cannot deal with the problem of
racism because it limits the collective to the citizens of the West, allowing
them to participate in economic decisions and to increase their access to the
bounty stolen off the backs of the Black and Brown. It took the financial
crisis in 2008 to spark this new so-called radicalism, and the uncomfortable
truth is that if some of the wealth generated from the new age of empire was
distributed fairly enough to provide stability and comfort to everyone in the
West, calls for the transformation of society would swiftly end.

The rebooted version of Western imperialism updated the colonial logic

embedded in the progressive left. Undoubtedly, the inclusion of Black and
Brown activists in the West has meant that there is currently more
awareness of issues of racial justice. We have always organized, resisted
and ensured that there was a spotlight on White supremacy. But if we are
honest, activism for the most part remains one of the most segregated social
spaces. Green issues have always formed a part of Black and Brown
activism in the West and in the Rest because we are more likely to feel the
impacts. But whilst the Green New Deal offers at least a view on racial
justice, it is a partial and unfocused one. Solving the climate crisis is an
existential priority, but doing so will not end the logic of empire.
Enlightenment narratives of science and progress as the solution to the
world’s ills are still the foundation of the various branches of the left. A
narrow focus on full humanity for workers in the West, and merely the right
to life for the those in the Rest, prevents any serious reckoning with the
scale of injustice upon which global wealth disparities are built. Bernie or
Trump, Corbyn or Boris, are decisions that matter, but the degree to which
they end Western imperialism is the same. Heads the West wins, tails the
Rest loses. Those of us lucky enough to be in the land of plenty will benefit
from a return to social democratic values. But nothing short of a revolution
that overturns the very foundations of empire can ever undo the problem of
racism.
 8

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Britain and the United States came towards the top of the death charts from
Covid-19 in 2020 in an unwelcome demonstration of the much-vaunted
‘special relationship’. Given the history there is a dark irony in a virus
tearing through the past and present centres of Western imperialism. Unlike
the genocide in the Americas and Caribbean this illness was never an
existential threat, but the death toll is a reminder that imperialism has
unintended consequences. Britain and the United States were not hit hard
due to historical karma, but because they are at the most advanced stage of
development of the new age of empire: neoliberalism. The deadly
prescription of austerity, privatization and unrestrained private capital for
the underdeveloped world is now being firmly implanted in the West, with
Britain and the United States leading the way. The United States has a
disastrous private healthcare system that fails to manage its normal load, so
it is no surprise the pandemic was so catastrophic. Britain has the much
cherished National Health Service, but decades of privatization and cuts
have led to a service unable to effectively mobilize against the virus.
Prioritizing profit and the individual over services and society is deadly at
the best of times but utterly ruinous during a pandemic.
The financial regimes inflicted on the Rest coming home to roost in the
West was a likely but not inevitable result of the new age of empire. Once
the nation state lost its centrality in coordinating empire, and business was
free to exploit with no restraints, it was only a matter of time before
neoliberal forces would try to bang down the door. Social democracy was a
vital element in rebuilding the West after the devastation wrought by the
Second World War. The post-war settlement shared the spoils of colonial
plunder more fairly in the West, easing internal inequality and tying its
White majorities firmly to the imperial project. High taxes, public
ownership and restraints on financial markets were the status quo until the
1980s. In order for the floodgates of neoliberalism to open, people had to be
convinced to vote for an agenda that would reduce the quality of their lives.
More than anything else it was the racist logic of empire that opened the
floodgates to imposing the Washington consensus in the West.
Brexit unleashed the rabid dogs of neoliberalism, hell-bent on
maximizing their profits from liberating the United Kingdom from the
regulation (or protection) of the European Union. The ironically named
European Research Group, made up of a segment of Conservative members
of parliament, made it impossible to get a deal done, effectively forcing the
resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May in 2019. Let us be clear: May
was part of one of the most racist British governments of recent times,
creating a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants that included vans
with ‘go home’ written on them driving around the capital, mass-
deportation flights, and withdrawing support for search-and-rescue missions
for predominantly African migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea
into Europe. If that wasn’t enough, she was also the architect of the
‘Windrush Scandal’, which left thousands of people with every legal and
historic right to live in Britain subject to losing their jobs and to deportation
if they could not provide documentation to prove they had migrated before
1973, when Commonwealth citizens were legally entitled to enter. Bear in
mind that there was no need for documentation at the time and the only
official proof of entry held by the government was destroyed in 2010
because they ran out of office space. Thousands of those encouraged to
migrate to Britain because of a labour shortage, who had grown up in
Britain, were deemed illegal and subject to removal to countries they had
often never previously returned to.1 May’s response to the Grenfell Tower
tragedy, in which more than seventy mostly Black and Brown people were
killed, was so disgraceful and lacking humanity she later admitted that
failing to meet the families in the immediate aftermath was something she
would ‘always regret’.2
 I despised her politics to the point I argued that she was ‘more dangerous
than Donald Trump’.3 May was more problematic because she represented
what Malcolm X called the ‘Northern foxes’ of racism who ‘show their
teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling’.4 May shrouded
herself in the pretence of social justice, making all the right noises about
racial discrimination and the police, and commissioning reports into
inequality, without making any changes and continuing policies of austerity
that made everything worse. Trump is Malcolm’s Southern ‘bloody jawed
wolf’, one of those who ‘show their teeth in a snarl’ by being openly racist
in both word and deed.5
Theresa May’s departure opened the door to Britain’s Trump, Boris
Johnson, who has in the past referred to Black young people as
‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, claimed Obama had an ‘ancestral
dislike for the United States because he is part Kenyan’,6 and compared
Muslim women in the veil to ‘letterboxes’.7 Comparisons to Agent Orange
– sorry, I mean President Trump – do not stop there. He is also a highly
mediocre White man born into a wealthy family, with all the sense of
entitlement that comes from growing up with a silver spoon in one’s mouth.
Lies flow so effortlessly from both their mouths it is as if they feel that they
are not bound by the rules of the poor and unwashed. They create their own
realities, including the one where they represent the will of the people. I
was never a fan of May but celebrating her decline was premature. Her
replacement is not only an openly racist buffoon who is allergic to the truth
but a cheerleader for the forces of unrestrained neoliberalism that are due to
be unleashed on Britain.
The new reality that Johnson and the hardcore Brexiteers have created is
that people voted for a hard Brexit, a clean break from the EU. Although
even the most extreme of those advocating to leave, including the vile Nigel
Farage (another Trump favourite), assured voters in the referendum
campaign that there would be a deal that maintained substantive EU links,
they went on to pretend that leaving without a deal was what the people
really wanted. No economist or sensible politician believes that leaving the
EU without a deal is a practical strategy. So dire are the consequences that it
would likely mean food shortages, the end of whole industries that rely on
frictionless trade with the EU; and according to the government’s own
watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, could cost the UK £30
billion a year.8 The truth is no one knows the potential impact but the
prospects are so bleak that the government allocated over £6 billion to
prepare for the disaster that would ensue if Britain left without a deal.9
None of this mattered to the hardcore Brexiteers, who were perfectly happy
to risk the wellbeing of others if it means the creative destruction necessary
to build the kind of society they can maximize profits from. They may even
make a fortune off the chaos. There have been plenty of people with money
making a profit from betting against the pound, whose value has fallen to
historic lows due to the Brexit turmoil.
Johnson’s Brexit promises to shed regulations and workers’ rights and
open up the economy to even more privatization than Britain is currently
defined by. Some of the biggest fears raised during the so-called ‘Brexit
election’ in December 2019 were the looming impact of a trade deal with
the United States that would allow weaker food standards and protections.
Under a ‘Trump Brexit’, as the leader of the opposition dubbed it, we could
expect to be flooded with chlorinated chicken, currently banned by EU
regulations due to the unsanitary nature of the process. Worse still, the
much-loved National Health Service, which provides free-at-the-point-of-
delivery care to the population is on the table to be carved up by US
healthcare companies. Britain has always been far closer to the United
States than most of Europe in its economic policy and the fear is that Brexit
will push the nation more towards the neoliberal extremes of life across the
Atlantic. If, and when, Britain tips fully into the neoliberal abyss it will be
the result of ‘chickens coming home to roost’, the inevitable conclusion
where the logic of imperialism returns to wreak havoc at home.

WAGES OF WHITENESS
The ground zero for the emergence of the new left is the wrecking ball that
Thatcher and Reagan took to the welfare state in the eighties. Destroying
the post-war social democratic settlement led to the unrestrained greed of
bankers, which resulted in the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing misery
of austerity. Steep declines in living standards, the casualization of work
and whole communities being ‘left behind’ in the new economy led to the
rise in populism that elected Trump and gave the charlatan Brexiteers the
opportunity to argue that it was the EU that was to blame for society’s ills.
 Neither President Trump, Prime Minister Johnson or Brexit would be
possible without the support of millions of poor (White) people for agendas
that are diametrically opposed to their interests. There is no way to
understand this phenomenon separate from the racism that underpins
society. It is not an issue of class consciousness but the delusions of
Whiteness that have allowed the harbingers of the neoliberal apocalypse to
rise to power.
African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that even the
poorest of White people in the United States during the period of
Reconstruction after the Civil War received a ‘public and psychological
wage’ from their Whiteness.10 Even though they were being exploited by
the same people as African Americans, their status as Whites gave them
limited privilege, which they clung to. For Du Bois, this was the principal
reason that Black and White workers did not unite against their common
enemy and overthrow American capitalism. We see similar arguments
throughout the critical literature on Whiteness, with historian Noel Ignatiev
arguing that ‘White people must commit suicide as Whites in order to come
alive as workers, or youth, or women.’11 This is a classically Marxist
notion that race (Whiteness) is an inauthentic identity enacted by the ruling
class to divide the workers. As should hopefully now be evident, it is not
that simple. Whiteness is not a mirage, there are actual benefits to being in
the category that White workers have fought, and continue to fight, very
hard for. Still, Whiteness is a tool used by those in power to control poor
Whites, to tie them to the project of imperialism. The rise of neoliberalism
is the perfect case study.
Social democracy distributed wealth, at least within places like Britain
and the United States, reducing inequality between the rich and poor.
Conditions for the poor in the early twentieth century were horrendous and
there were almost no vehicles for social uplift. Providing housing,
infrastructure, transport, social security benefits, healthcare and schooling
vastly improved the lives of the poor. We should never forget that the
wealth to do this was achieved through colonial exploitation, but at least
within the bubble of the West social democracy transformed social
conditions. The only problem with the model of state-led, protectionist
economies is that they represented the outdated political and economic
model of the original version of Western empire. In the new ‘globalized’
world the state has less power and lacks sovereignty over the corporations
that manage the new imperialism. Once capital is liberated from national
constraints it becomes impossible for nation-state governments to control.
High taxes on individuals and corporations cannot work because capital is
mobile – often stored and registered offshore. There is no longer any such
thing as a British or American corporation because they are now all global
entities spread across disparate tax regimes.
In order to impose neoliberal regimes internally the White masses,
including the poor and the workers, needed to be convinced they were in
their interests so that they would vote them into being. The oil crisis in the
1970s destabilized the West and provided just the opportunity. Prior to
ruining underdeveloped economies, the IMF was primarily used to support
the West. Britain’s economy was so damaged by the crisis that it not only
sought help from the fund in 1976 but also accepted some of the conditions
that have been such a bane to the rest of the world, cutting back some of its
more left-wing programmes.12
The oil crisis was a result of the United States establishing its central role
at the heart of empire. In 1971 Nixon broke the Bretton Woods agreement
by removing the dollar from the gold standard, which had underpinned
global trade. The result was a devastating loss of revenue for the oil-rich
countries of the Middle East, who put an embargo on selling their most
valuable commodity to the United States.13 A global recession took hold
that made the costs of social democracy in the West exceedingly difficult to
meet and forced Britain into the conditional IMF loan. The country’s
economic crisis led to wage freezes in the public sector and a showdown
with the trade unions, who organized a series of strikes, which included bin
collectors and gravediggers. The chaos is seared into the political
imagination as the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–9 and provided all the
impetus necessary for the Thatcherite takeover in the election of 1979.
Social democracy was scapegoated as too expensive given the financial
crisis; inefficient; and as having given far too much power to the unions
who could bring the country to a halt. Privatization, individualism and a
small state were the obvious solutions to the statist former model. But
remember that this economic context existed in large part because the
United States was laying the foundations of the new age of empire. They
eventually won the battle with the Middle East and liberation from the gold
standard allowed for rapid expansion of finance capitalism, the boom on
Wall Street and the eventual financial crash of 2008.
 It was not only economics that allowed the rise of neoliberalism. In
Britain, Margaret Thatcher stormed to power in 1979 in large part because
she was able to secure the support of some traditional Labour, working-
class voters whose aversion to the Tory party was deeply ingrained. An area
that Thatcher could exploit was the issue of immigration. Due to labour
shortages, post-war Britain had opened its doors to immigration from the
colonies. Millions of people from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa had
settled in the UK by the time of the momentous election in 1979. My family
were part of that migration and the reason I am writing this book in Britain.
There were also millions of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Old
Commonwealth (Australasia, Canada, White South Africans) but they did
not concern Thatcher, who openly spoke about the ‘four million people of
the new Commonwealth or Pakistan’ flooding into Britain, in a nationally
televised interview.14 She argued that

people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather
swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the
British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done
so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might
be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those
coming in.

This was by no means the first time that the Conservatives had engaged in
such racist political language. Thatcher was mobilizing a more polite
version of Peter Griffiths’ ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote
Labour’ tactic. ‘Swamped’ is important because it suggests there are too
many darkies and that we are a corrupting influence on British institutions
and values.
Social democracy only works if society feels that everyone should have a
stake in sharing the wealth. The idea that foreigners, Black ones at that,
should be able to jump the queue for housing or doctor’s appointments
undermines the idea of universal service provision. Notions of being ‘left
behind’ are intrinsically tied up in this idea. White workers are supposedly
being short-changed by multiculturalism, which is privileging the darkies
who are swamping the country and demanding special protections under
anti-racist legislation. Britain’s embrace of individualism was in large part
driven by its rejection of diversity.
 There can be no ‘we’ if that includes the uninvited foreigners destroying
the so-called British way of life. Thatcher’s famous declaration that ‘there’s
no such thing as society’ must be seen in this context. She continued, ‘there
are individual men and women and there are families … It is our duty to
look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.’15 Given
the context of steep racial segregation in housing it is clear who the
neighbours are that she is referring to. In this logic, mass migration has torn
down the fabric of what once were the shared British values that held the
country together. Old ideas of community, nation and class are broken down
with the idea that the uniqueness of Britain is being lost and the neoliberal
individual is free to come into being, fending for themselves against the
hordes of foreigners swamping the country.
The anti-immigration rhetoric of Thatcher was key to her appeal and to
being able to maintain a Conservative government for the following
eighteen years. In that period taxes were slashed, public utilities privatized,
and social housing sold off to those individuals with enough money to be
able to afford to buy them. Finance capital was also set free to dominate the
economy, and neoliberalism flourished in Britain. Of course, inequality
soared and public services became run down through lack of investment,
whilst the rich kept on getting filthier and richer.
We saw the same use of racist logic in the campaign for Brexit. The
expansion of the EU in 2007 to include Eastern European countries meant
that freedom of movement within member states was open to those poorer
citizens of the former Communist bloc. As a result, large numbers of
migrants began to come to Britain to work, which became an increasing
source of discontent for many. Right-wing racists like Nigel Farage came to
prominence, with his United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), focused
on the single issue of leaving the EU, with fears of uncontrolled
immigration being its major talking point. Farage made clear the limits of
the social democratic dream with his declaration during an election debate
that the beloved NHS was ‘our National Health Service, not the
International Health Service’.16 Extending the protections of the welfare
state to bloody foreigners was not what the decent hardworking British
people had signed up to.
Fearing that the rise of UKIP, who did very well in the EU elections,
could be dangerous for his party, Prime Minister David Cameron sought to
outflank them on Europe by offering the referendum on membership of the
EU. It worked to depress the UKIP vote in the 2015 general election but he
was then left with the prospect of having to deliver on this promise. He
made a massive miscalculation when he assumed that people would not
‘vote themselves poorer because they don’t like the Poles living next
door’.17 But by voting in the Conservatives for ever more austerity, that is
precisely what a large chunk of the British electorate had already done.
Cameron’s Brexit gamble was no doubt in part influenced by the history
of racial politics and immigration. As we discussed earlier, migration from
Eastern Europe is not a new phenomenon in Britain. In fact, Cameron’s
opposite number in the Labour Party in 2015, Ed Miliband, was the son of
Polish Jewish migrants.18 There was certainly some questionable coverage
in the largely morally deficient right-wing press about his inability to eat a
bacon sandwich and how his refugee Marxist father hated Britain.19 But
his background did not receive any of the fanfare, for good or ill, that would
have been made had his parents migrated from Jamaica. White migrants are
still White and their children melt into the population in a way that we
never can. In many ways freedom of movement from Europe was just a
continuation of the long-held immigration policy to encourage White
migration whilst discouraging those who are Black and Brown. But the
pace and scale of migration had an impact on the debate.
Between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of the UK population from
Europe, excluding Ireland, rose from 1.5 per cent to 5 per cent. It is not
incredibly surprising that the xenophobic backlash against EU migrants
coincided with the financial crash and austerity. When people are struggling
it is easy to pin the blame on the newly arrived, even when they are
migrating from worse conditions. But Cameron should have seen this
writing on the wall because it had his fingerprints all over it.
Farage has been ridiculed for his blaming of all things on immigrants,
including too much traffic,20 but Cameron’s government was just a more
sophisticated version of the UKIP spin machine. During the 2015 general
election campaign Cameron warned that a Labour government would
massively increase immigration. His immigration minister James
Brokenshire declared that ‘uncontrolled mass immigration makes it difficult
to maintain social cohesion, puts pressure on public services and forces
down wages.’21 Shifting the blame for poverty and lack of investment
away from their root cause of neoliberalism and onto immigrants has been
key to the Conservatives’ electoral success. Millions have been duped into
believing that their problem is poor people from other countries looking for
a better life, rather than the rich and politicians who are robbing the
population of the opportunities to succeed.
Even when immigration is not about race, it still is. EU migrants are
overwhelmingly White but this did not stop the campaigners looking to
leave the EU during the Brexit referendum invoking race. Farage
consistently invoked the spectre of Turkey joining the EU, with its 75
million Muslims supposedly threatening to invade Britain. This is ironic
because Turkey has basically zero chance of EU membership because it is
not a White country. The EU has always been an exclusive club. Farage also
unveiled an infamous poster that depicted a long line of Syrian refugees
crossing into Croatia from Slovenia with the slogan ‘Breaking Point: The
EU has failed us all’. So egregious was the imagery that even Boris Johnson
denounced it; the imagery was reported to the police and even evoked
comparisons to Nazi propaganda. But the message was clear: immigration
is always a racial issue.
The result of all of this has been the vote for Brexit and the rise of Boris
Johnson, who threatens to complete the neoliberal project. There should be
no more worrying prospect for the average Brit. The problem is that the
nation voted for all of it in no small part because they bought into the racial
politics that underpin the system.
Immigration, in and of itself, is the chickens of imperialism coming home
to roost. By conquering a quarter of the globe Britain incorporated hundreds
of millions of Black and Brown people into its Empire. For all the fantasies
of Britain being great, the reality is that as a little, insignificant island, it
was the Empire that established the role of the nation in the world. Colonial
subjects were born in Britain, not outside it. Our blood, sweat and tears lay
at the foundation of British progress. After the War, when the mother
country needed labour to rebuild it naturally turned to the source it had been
exploiting for centuries. It was seen as your duty to do your part for Queen
and country in the same way as supporting the war effort had been.
Often forgotten in the anti-immigration debate is that we were invited. In
fact, Enoch Powell, who became infamous for his racist, anti-immigration
‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, was one of the first health secretaries to reach out
to the colonies for nurses. More than any other cherished institution, the
NHS has always relied, and still very much continues to rely, on the labour
of doctors and nurses from the former colonies to exist. Farage’s quip about
it not being the International Health Service is as ignorant as it is racist. The
truth is that the British welfare state has heavily relied on the former
colonies for both the wealth necessary to exist and the labour to run it. Fears
of ‘swamping’ and ‘losing’ the country are entirely imagined and frankly
ridiculous. But if immigration has been seen as a problem and has led to the
embrace of the neoliberal individual, then this was a problem of Britain’s
own making. As the late intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it, ‘we
are here because you were there.’22 Had the West not colonized and then
underdeveloped the world there would not be millions of former colonial
subjects trying to migrate into their former mother countries for a better life.
The dark chickens of the colonies coming home to roost happened later in
Europe because of the nature of empire, with indirect rule and slavery in the
Caribbean, but the United States had to deal with this issue from its
foundation.
The rise of neoliberalism in the United States was no different, driven by
the same forces of White supremacy. Donald Trump’s victory has been seen
as an outlier because he is so ill-suited and unprepared for the role of
president, but his election was decades in the making. He is the poster boy
for neoliberalism and the silver-spoon-in-the-mouth elite, posing as the
friend of the people; and his election was driven by the same basic factors
as we saw in Britain. Poor Whites supposedly being left behind by
multiculturalism. Fear of the immigrants taking control. A wish to return to
the glory days when racism could openly form public policy. Trump’s
embrace of ‘law and order’ is the classic racialized language of the right:
that the dark inner cities need to be heavily policed to keep the savages in
the jungle in check.
Following his tragicomic handling of the Covid-19 outbreak, the rise of
the Black Lives Matter protests unfortunately gave Trump the opportunity
to play to his strengths and his base. As well as threatening to use the army
to quell the unrest, Trump has described Black Lives Matter as a ‘symbol of
hate’23 and vowed to defend the monuments to the slave-owning ‘patriots’
who built the United States that he described as ‘heroes’ rather than
villains.24 Doubling down on his appeals to Whiteness was undoubtedly
the best call in the lead-up to the presidential election. He may have
ultimately lost but more voters voted for him than did for Obama in his
historic victory of 2008. Millions of voters are seduced by the wages of
Whiteness even in the absence of actual wages to support them.25 Just as in
Britain, the real problem is the rich and the politicians who support them,
while the blame for inequality is shifted to immigrants and Black folk.
Du Bois declared that the issue of ‘the twentieth century was the problem
of the color line’,26 and the so-called race problem has been a focus of
attention, both well-meaning and mendacious, since emancipation. Having
to deal with millions of African Americans is the definition of chickens
coming home to roost, the result of stolen bodies, lives and labour. The
wages of Whiteness can be traced to the development of the United States,
to which the issue of the enslavement of African people was central. We
should not delude ourselves with the mythology that the Civil War was
about ending slavery. Lincoln made it clear that if he could ‘save the Union
without freeing any slave’ he was perfectly happy to do so.27 To win the
battle with the South, the North ended up issuing the emancipation
proclamation in order to enlist the support of the enslaved. During the war
so many African Americans had liberated themselves from bondage that if
he wanted victory Lincoln had no real choice but to support emancipation.
After the war the first solution to the ‘problem’ of living with millions of
free Black folk was, in effect, to deport them to another country. The more
polite term of ‘colonization’ was used, and Lincoln and his successors
pursued the idea of ejecting their Black population to another place,
possibly Haiti or Liberia.28 It is in the Reconstruction period that Du Bois’
phrase ‘wages of Whiteness’ was applied to the inability of White workers
to find comradeship with the formerly enslaved. This dynamic only got
worse with the immigration of millions of Europeans into the nation who
‘became White’ in large part by embracing the racism of the United States
and directing hatred towards African Americans.29
By being openly racist and segregationist wolves, politicians in the South
were able to maintain their power whilst the cunning foxes in the North
gave nods to racial equality while presiding over de facto Jim Crow through
housing segregation, police brutality and institutional racism. In his 1964
‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ speech Malcolm X declares that he is ‘not a
Democrat, nor a Republican, nor even an American’ because of how
misused the votes of Black people had been by politicians.30
Like Thatcher, when Reagan wanted to usher in neoliberalism he knew
the perfect scapegoat. During both his presidential campaigns, and while in
office trying to dismantle the welfare state, he invoked the tale of a Black
woman in Chicago who had been gaming the system to the extent that her
‘tax-free cash income alone had been running at $150,000 a year’.31
Reagan’s tale of the ‘welfare queen’ hit all the right notes with certain
segments of the electorate. A freeloader, living off the backs of the
hardworking. It was abundantly clear that this was a stereotype built on the
longstanding racist idea that Black people are workshy. The United States is
so racially segregated that nodding to the ‘woman in Chicago’, one of the
cities where the problem of segregation is most acute, created a clear
picture of exactly whom Reagan was talking about. Just as in Britain, social
democratic principles can only hold if everyone feels everyone else is an
equal part of the nation. African Americans, and immigrants, were the
perfect weapon to break the New Deal consensus.
Welfare reform was ushered in on the myth of the undeserving Blacks,
and the ‘war on drugs’ sparked mass incarceration as an alternative to
welfare provision for African Americans, as well as hugely expanding the
role of the private sector in prisons. Trump’s election, on a tide of anti-
Black and anti-immigration rhetoric, is not an aberration but the logical
conclusion of the resentment at neoliberalism being turned onto those
perceived as alien to the nation.
We have seen the same process of neoliberal structural adjustment wreak
havoc across Britain and the United States, enabled by the same colonial
logic that remains deeply written into the political calculus. When covid
struck with Trump on one side of the Atlantic and Johnson on the other, we
were stuck in the middle, with the chickens that well and truly came home
to roost.

LOOK TO THE EAST

Much has been made about the rise of the East as a major change in the
global political and economic system. There is no doubt that ‘we are living
in the Asian century’, with dramatic increases of both wealth and standards
of living across the continent.32 China’s influence, in particular, is being
increasingly felt on the world stage, with the trade war with the United
States being just one example. There has undoubtedly been a shift in the
balance of power to the East that is not set to reverse. With rising standards
of living come greater economic influence, China and India alone hold
more than a third of the world’s population. In India between 1990 and
2014 the number of households with more than $10,000 a year in
disposable income leapt from 2 to 50 million.33 China has become the new
workshop of the world, manufacturing goods for global consumption, while
the region is also at the forefront of technological and communications
innovations. It is not difficult to see why the West would be worried about
China hosting both the means of production and a mass consumer base. But
the reality is that the emergence of Asia neither ends the Western imperial
project nor calls for a system update. What we are seeing today is the logic
of the current version of the system, and ‘the sun rising in the east does not
mean that it is setting on the west.’34
In order to deliver its remarkable economic growth the East has ingrained
itself into the Western political and economic system. It is not a coincidence
that it is not Mao’s China that is poised to become the centre of the global
political and economic system; China holds that position because the
Chairman’s legacy has been abandoned. The collapse of Communism led to
the infamous declaration of the ‘end of history’ by Francis Fukuyama, who
theorized ‘that liberal democracy may constitute the end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution’.35 No one could accuse China of being a liberal
democracy, but its surrender to market capitalism is almost total. While
certainly not neoliberal, the country is remarkably comfortable with
billionaires for a supposedly Communist nation. As China depends on the
West for its prosperity there is nothing to be gained from trying to foment
revolution. Fukuyama’s argument is wrong-headed because it is steeped so
deeply in Enlightenment principles he forgets that actors, particularly in the
former colonies, have agency. But he is right about the extent to which the
Western economic model has erased almost all alternatives.
Just as New Labour was Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement,
China is the ultimate success of the West: a potential successor to the seat of
power that maintains the relations and exclusions of the old system. This is
an absolute defeat of the revolutionary principles that the nation was
founded upon. In fact, because China has yet to embrace liberal democracy,
let alone neoliberalism, it may end up representing a better form of Western
imperialism. With its population of over 1 billion led firmly by the state it is
able to mobilize and plan its economy with military precision in a way the
rest of the world should equally envy and fear.
 The fact that there are non-White faces at the head of the latest version of
empire does not mean the system has changed. It is perfectly possible to
maintain racism whilst diversifying those in charge of dispensing it. It was
precisely by exploiting racial political and economic systems that the region
grew. Asia’s growth depends on the extreme poverty of hundreds of
millions of its own citizens and the continued evisceration of Africa in order
to plunder the continent’s resources. There are no signs of this changing,
and a collection of crazy rich Asians does not alter reality for the majority
of people on the continent. One of the most disappointing arguments for the
decline of racism is the presence of rich Black and Brown folk. A Black
middle class is no more evidence of racial salvation than the existence of
many more rich White people means that the class struggle is over. There
have always been some who were better-off than others, even under the
brutally violent version of Western imperialism. The current edition has
meant that there are now far more opportunities for a limited elite, both in
the West and the former colonies, to enjoy the fruits of the system. But we
should not delude ourselves into believing that means that the nature of the
system itself has changed.
Rather than seeing the emergence of Black and Brown elites as a break
from Western imperialism, we should understand them as one of the logics
of the new system. The new age of empire is based on moving away from
formal colonialism, breaking down the power of the state and delivering
racial exploitation through economic, not physical, coercion. This meant
granting so-called independence and relying even more on local elites to
manage their countries. There are classes of the wealthy from the former
colonies who owe their lifestyles and positions to Western imperialism. To
be in the elite in the former colonies is to inhabit a position beyond most of
those in the West. This also tends to come with Western education, offshore
bank accounts and truly being able to access the world as a global citizen.
Occupy’s 1 per cent certainly includes some of those who are not White,
but we are mistaken if we think that their positions are not defined by
Whiteness. To gain that level of wealth in economies that include some of
the poorest people on the planet tells us the scale of the inequalities in the
system. Even for those of us who are by no means rich but still successful,
our relative prosperity remains built on the same colonial logic that keeps
the masses of the Black and Brown in poverty. The most painful
development of the new age of empire is that we have now become part of
the problem, with our hands stained with the blood of the victims of our
success.
When the architects of the new age of empire were designing the update
to the system they doubtless did not predict the emergence and potential
takeover of China and the East. Belief in White supremacy has a tendency
to override common sense, and they more than likely thought that the
impoverished East could be contained. But taking the boot directly off the
neck of the underdeveloped world allowed space for the changes that have
occurred. One of the biggest factors has been offshoring as part of the
neoliberal project. Due to the racist political and economic system, wages
are far lower in the underdeveloped world and therefore when capital and
technology were free to be global it made economic sense for companies to
move their production overseas. China has been adept at using its cheap
labour to become the workshop of the world. This labour was offshored
precisely because of the wealth in the West: it became too expensive to pay
the workers here for it, and the work is mundane.
Consumption, technology and services replaced manufacturing as the
basis of Western economies. In the pursuit of the middle-class dream this
makes some kind of sense, but it is also a big driver of the ‘left behind’
narrative because it means that unskilled manual jobs are in short supply.
Ceding production to the underdeveloped world always had the potential
for the rapid development we are seeing. For all the hype about
consumption, it is impossible without production. China in particular, but
also the region in general, has become expert at making the most of owning
substantial elements of the means of production.
When the centre of empire shifts to China, or robots take over
production, it may well mean the West moves to its next stage. None of
these developments will mean ending the racist political and economic
system, and at best they only offer a slightly more bearable format.

END OF EMPIRE
No matter how many of the chickens come home to roost in the West they
will never erase the racism at the heart of the global political and economic
system. As Malcolm X warned us, ‘this system can no more provide
freedom, justice and equality … than a chicken can lay a duck egg.’36 But
history tells us that all empires end. They either collapse under their own
contradictions or are brought crashing down by rebellion or conquest. We
may have been told that there is no alternative, but Western imperialism will
at some point come to a conclusion. The West has only been truly dominant
for 250 years, a blip on the timeline of human history. But despite
diagnosing racism as a fundamental sequence in the DNA of the current
social order, the premise of this book is deeply optimistic. We do not need
to placate the powers that be by limiting our vision to reforming a system
that is not broken. Police brutality, health inequalities, thousands of children
dying a day are all symptoms of the disease of racism caused by the
machine of Western imperialism. Once we recognize that this racism is a
necessary a by-product of the political and economic system then we have
the freedom to imagine what comes after we have torn it down.
Revolution is possible, but we have to accept that it will not come from
those who benefit from Western imperialism. There are centuries-long
traditions of radical politics emerging from the oppressed. The bulk of my
work is about developing the politics of Black radicalism, which centres on
uniting Africa and the African diaspora to create a true revolution, which
remains the only solution to the problem of racism.37 The oppressed never
accept their condition and will always struggle to overturn the system that
holds them down. Enslaved Africans in Haiti cast off their shackles and
took their freedom. Black Power movements changed the conditions of
possibility for Black people in the belly of the beast. It was revolutions
across the Third World that forced the West to abandon the brutally violent
forms of colonial domination. This book is a reminder of the stakes, to not
accept edits to the status quo as some kind of progress. Revolution is not
only possible but it is absolutely essential if we truly want freedom.
The protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd are deeply rooted in
the histories of Black resistance but offer a new hope in one regard. In the
sixties there was a struggle between the agendas of revolution and reform:
overturning the system or trying to fix it. Reform won out in the shape of
civil rights movements in the West and independence for nations in the
underdeveloped world. These were some of the most successful movements
in history, gaining access to voting rights, changes to legislation and even
representation in the halls of power. For fifty years we have been promised
we are on a path to freedom, but it is more than just symbolic that Black
Lives Matter first came into existence with a Black man in the White
House. No amount of editing or inclusion to this racist system will ever
give us freedom, and we now have a generation who should no longer be
persuaded we are on the right path. The future is now, and it is one in which
we can watch a police officer kneel on the neck of a Black person in public
for almost nine minutes. If that does not remove the scales from our eyes
then nothing will.
The question that I get asked the most, and have no answer to, is ‘What
can White people do?’ If you got to the end of this book hoping there would
be a magic bullet, some quick fix or anti-racist potion that could build
meaningful allyship then you will leave disappointed. The quest for allyship
is in itself misguided. The problem is that society is built on a White
supremacy that permeates every institution, intellectual framework and
interaction within it. If you have come this far and believe that White
people offering a meaningful hand of friendship is the solution then you
have entirely missed the point. It is not the place of the oppressed to suggest
a progressive role for those who benefit from their oppression. My hope is
that understanding the scale of the problem and the limits of the solutions
offered can spark a genuine conversation about how to overhaul this wicked
system. In one of Malcolm X’s most famous speeches he offered a seeming
olive branch to mainstream White society, arguing that America was ‘the
only country in history in a position to actually become involved in a
bloodless revolution’.38 All it had to do was give Black people ‘everything
they’re due’, in order to repair the damage done over the centuries.
Malcolm did not hold out much hope, and busied himself with organizing
the Black masses. If anything should be clear by now, it is that we cannot
wait for White allies to join the struggle to end their systemic privilege.
The glimmer of hope for true transformation in the West is that if the
system is left to collapse under its own weight it may well end human
existence as we know it. The pile of Black and Brown bodies stacked up
since Columbus, to millions each year dying from poverty, is of an
unimaginable scale. But the West has not shied away from White-on-White
violence when vying for the leadership of its empire. Millions of European
and American lives were lost in the two World Wars, and we were on the
brink of Armageddon more than once during the Cold War. One of the
consequences of the rise of a non-White power such as China threatening to
take control of the reins is the increased likelihood of nuclear holocaust. It
was not by chance that the Japanese were used as guinea pigs for the atomic
bomb. Black and Brown bodies are far easier to erase in the logic of empire.
Violence consuming the West (and the entire globe in the process) would be
the ultimate example of chickens coming home to roost, but there is an even
more likely existential threat to humanity.
Over-consumption is killing the planet. The constant pursuit of growth at
all costs is polluting the atmosphere to the point where the world may
become uninhabitable. If drastic action is not taken to reverse global
warming soon then floods of a biblical nature are coming to not only wash
away the sins of the West but also its victims. Solar panels, electric cars and
planting trees are not enough to undo the damage that has been done. It is
the very nature of Western consumption that is due to melt the ice-caps.39
Climate justice is not just a matter of life and death for those who are Black
and Brown; a radical rethink is necessary for humanity to continue.
Maybe it is in this moment, standing on the cliff-edge of annihilation,
staring into the abyss caused by Western so-called civilization, that the
depth of the problem and scale of the solution can be grasped. Perhaps we
can wipe away the illusions of progress based on the distorted vision of
Whiteness we are brainwashed into. This is the chance to refuse the next
system update of imperialism, destroy the hard drive and create an entirely
new framework for the world’s political and economic system. But make no
mistake, whether spurred by revolution or tipped into collapse under its
own weight, the West will eventually fall. Malcolm was right when he
warned that it will be ‘the ballot or the bullet, liberty or death, freedom for
everybody or freedom for nobody’.40
 Endnotes

Foreword
1 Public Health England (2020) Disparities in the Risk and Outcomes of COVID-19. London: Wellington
House; Schwitz, M. and Cook, L. (2020) ‘These N.Y.C. neighborhoods have the highest rates of virus
deaths’. New York Times, 18 May.
2 Office for National Statistics (2020) ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by ethnic group, England
and Wales: 2 March 2020 to 10 April 2020’. 7 May. Available at
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/coronavirusr
3 SA Stats (2015) ‘Mortality and causes of death in South Africa: findings from death notification, 2015’.
Available at http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P03093/P030932015.pdf
4 Boseley, S. (2019) ‘The children labouring in Malawi’s fields for British American Tobacco’. Guardian,
31 October.
 Introduction
1 Robinson, C. J. (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books,
83, 2.
2 The Sentencing Project (2018) ‘Report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms
of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance regarding racial disparities in the
United States criminal justice system’. Available at
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/
3 Melamed, J. (2015) ‘Racial capitalism’. Critical Ethnic Studies 1(1): 77.
4 Alexander, M. (2016) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York:
The New Press.
5 Morrison, T. (1998) ‘Talk of the town: comment’. New Yorker, 28 September.
6 Alexander, New Jim Crow.
7 Campbell, A. (2018) ‘The federal government markets prison labor to businesses as the “best-kept
secret”’. Vox, 24 August. Available at
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/24/17768438/national-prison-strike-factory-labor
8 Prison Bureau (2018) ‘Annual determination of average cost of incarceration’. Federal Register, 30
April. Available at
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/04/30/2018-09062/annual-determination-of-average-cost-of-in
9 Gilmore, R. (2002) ‘Fatal couplings of power and difference: notes on racism and geography’.
Professional Geographer 54(1): 16.
10 Dahlgreen, W. (2014) ‘The British Empire is “something to be proud of”’. YouGov, 26 July. Available at
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire
11 Malcolm X (1962) ‘Black man’s history’. Speech at Muslim Mosque No. 7, New York, 12 December.
12 Malcolm X (1964) ‘The ballot or the bullet’. Speech at Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, 3
April.
13 Andrews, N. (2017) ‘Blackness in the Roundabout’. Paper at Blackness at the Intersection workshop, 8
June, Rugby, UK.
14 Crenshaw, K. (2021) On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New York: The New Press; Taylor, K.
(2019) Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.
Chapel Hill: UNC Press; Hill Collins, P. (2019) Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press; Kendall, M. (2020) Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement
Forgot. New York: Viking.
15 Perez-Pena, R. (2017) ‘Woman linked to 1955 Emmett Till murder tells historian her claims were false’.
New York Times, 27 January.
16 Wells, I. (2014) The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. London: Penguin.
17 Davis, A. (1981) Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House.
18 Wolfers, J., Leonhardt, D. and Quealy, K. (2015) ‘1.5 million missing black men. The upshot’, New York
Times, 20 April. Available at
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?smid=pl-
19 Crenshaw, K. (2017) ‘Say her name’. Paper at Blackness at the Intersection workshop, 8 June, Rugby,
UK.
20 Olusoga, D. (2016) Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Macmillan.
21 Hill Collins, Intersectionality.
22 Crenshaw, K. (2011) ‘Postscript’ in Lutz, H. Herrera Vivar, M. and Supik, L. (eds) Framing
Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies. Farnham: Ashgate: 221–33.
23 Hall, D. (1999) In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86. Houndmills:
Macmillan.
24 Roser, M. (2018) ‘When will we reach “peak child”?’ Our World in Data. Available at
ourworldindata.org.peak-child
25 Harris, P. (2010) ‘Martin Luther King’s spirit is claimed by Fox TV’s Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’. The
Observer, 29 August.
26 Dolak, K. (2010) ‘Alveda King speaks at Glenn Beck’s DC rally’. ABC News, 28 August. Available at
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/alveda-king-speaks-glenn-becks-dc-rally/story?id=11504453&page=2
27 Malcolm X (1963) ‘Message to the grassroots’. Speech at the Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference,
Michigan, 10 November.
28 King, M. (1963) ‘I have a dream’. Speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,
Washington, DC, 28 August.
29 Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., and Thomas, K. (1995) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings
that Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press, 85–102.
30 Andrews, K. (2018) Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. London: Zed Books.
31 Cabinet Office. (2017) Race Disparity Audit: Summary Findings from the Ethnicity Facts and Figures
Website. London: Cabinet Office.
32 Green, L. (2019) Children in Custody 2017–18: An analysis of 12–18-year-olds’ perceptions of their
experiences in secure training centres and young offender institutions. London: HM Prison Inspectorate.
33 Bell, D. (1992) Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books, 12.
 1 I’m White, Therefore I Am
1 Whyman, T. (2017) ‘Soas students have a point. Philosophy
degrees should look beyond white Europeans’. Guardian, 10
January.
2 Turner, C. (2017) ‘University students demand philosophers such
as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are
white’. Telegraph, 8 January.
3 Collins, D. (2017) ‘UNI KANT TOUCH THIS: Barmy SOAS
students try to ban classical philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and
Voltaire from their courses … because they are white’. Sun, 9
January.
4 Bhambra, G., Gebrial, D. and Nis¸ancıog˘lu, K. (2018)
Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press.
5 Turner, ‘University students’.
6 Hill, T. and Boxill, B. (2001) ‘Kant and race’ in Boxill, B. (ed.)
Race and Racism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 455.
7 Kant, I. (1777) ‘On the different human races’ in Bernasconi, R.
and Lott, T. (eds) (2000) The Idea of Race. Indianapolis: Hackett,
17.
8 Eze, E. (1997) ‘The color of reason: the idea of “race” in Kant’s
Anthropology’ in Eze, E. (ed.) Postcolonial African Philosophy: A
Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 116.
9 Allais, L. (2016) ‘Kant’s racism’. Philosophical Papers. 45(1–2):
2.
10 Kant, ‘On the different races’, 11.
11 Ibid., 12.
12 Eze, ‘The color of reason’, 116.
13 Ibid., 108.
14 Kant, ‘On the different races’, 17.
15 Hund, W. (2011) ‘It must come from Europe: the racisms of
Immanuel Kant’ in Hund, W., Koller, C. and Zimmerman, M.
(eds) Racisms Made in Germany. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 81.
16 Eze, ‘The color of reason’, 117.
17 Kant, ‘On the different races’, 16.
18 Hill and Boxill, ‘Kant and race’, 452.
19 Rutherford, A. (2020) How to Argue with a Racist: History,
Science, Race and Reality. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
20 Bernasconi, R. (2003) ‘Will the real Kant please stand up: the
challenge of Enlightenment racism to the study of the history of
philosophy’. Radical Philosophy 117: 13–22.
21 Allais, ‘Kant’s racism’.
22 Bernasconi, R. (2011) ‘Kant’s third thoughts on race’ in Elden, S.
and Mendieta, E. (eds) Reading Kant’s Geography. Albany: State
University of New York.
23 Hund, ‘It must come from Europe’, 79.
24 Hill and Boxill, ‘Kant and race’, 452.
25 Allais, ‘Kant’s racism’, 19.
26 Hund, ‘It must come from Europe’, 81.
27 Olusoga, D. (2016) Black and British: A Forgotten History.
London: Macmillan, 272.
28 Goldberg, J. (2018) ‘Was the Enlightenment racist?’ National
Review, 21 June.
29 Voltaire (1765) ‘On the different races of man’ in Bernasconi and
Lott, The Idea of Race, 6.
30 Hegel, G. (1830) ‘Encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences’.
Ibid., 40.
31 Kendi, I. (2017) Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive
History of Racist Ideas in America. London: Bodley Head.
32 Ibid., 96.
33 Ibid., 109.
34 Niro, B. (2003) Race. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 65.
35 Dover, C. (1952) ‘The racial philosophy of Johann Herder’.
British Journal of Sociology 3(2): 124–33.
36 Ibid., 128.
37 Voltaire, ‘On the different races’, 6.
38 Kendi, Stamped. 86.
39 Darwin, C. (1871) ‘On the races of man’ in Bernasconi and Lott,
The Idea of Race, 75.
40 Dubois, L. (2006) ‘An enslaved Enlightenment: rethinking the
intellectual history of the French Atlantic’. Social History 31(1):
5.
41 Halberstam, J. (1988) ‘From Kant to Auschwitz’. Social Theory
and Practice 14: 45.
42 Darwin, ‘On the races of man’, 70.
43 Hegel, ‘Encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences’, 43.
44 Muthu, S. (1999) ‘Enlightenment anti-imperialism’. Social
Research 66(4): 965.
45 Dover, ‘Racial philosophy’, 128.
46 Grosfoguel, Ramón (2013) ‘The structure of knowledge in
westernized universities: epistemic racism/sexism and the four
genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century’. Human
Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11(1:8),
73–90.
47 Eze, ‘The color of reason’, 122.
48 Grosfoguel, ‘Structure of knowledge’.
49 Moller, V. (2019) The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas
Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities. London:
Picador, 66.
50 Ibid., 112.
51 Ibid., 150.
52 Ibid., 114.
53 Ibid., 133.
54 Henrik Clarke, J. (1977) ‘The University of Sankore at
Timbuctoo: A neglected achievement in Black intellectual
history’. Western Journal of Black Studies 1(2): 142–6.
55 Diop, C. (1974) The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or
Reality? Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 4.
56 Ibid., 230.
57 Ibid., 168.
58 Dabiri, E. (2019) Don’t Touch My Hair. London: Allen Lane, 209.
59 Moller, Map of Knowledge, 55.
60 Moller, Map of Knowledge, 2.
61 Dabiri, Don’t Touch, 218.
62 Kendi, Stamped, 109.
63 Jefferson, T. (1853) Notes on the State of Virginia. Virginia: J. W.
Randolph.
64 Wright, J. (2007) The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. Abingdon:
Routledge, 5.
65 Hill and Boxill, ‘Kant and race’, 470.
66 Ishay, M. (2004) The History of Human Rights: From Ancient
Times to the Globalization Era. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 65.
67 Kendi, Stamped, 116.
68 Ishay, History of Human Rights, 96.
69 Muthu, ‘Enlightenment anti-imperialism’, 997.
70 Allais, ‘Kant’s racism’, 19.
71 Eisenman, S. F. (1996) ‘Triangulating racism’. Art Bulletin, 78(4):
607.
72 Walby, S. (2003) ‘The myth of the nation-state: theorizing society
and polities in a global era’. Sociology 37(3): 529–46.
73 Ting, H. (2008) ‘Social construction of nation: a theoretical
exploration’. Nationalism & Ethnic Politics 14(3): 453–82.
74 Andrews, K. (2018) Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for
the 21st Century. London: Zed Books.
 2 Genocide
1 Hitchman, S. (2020) ‘Columbus statues are coming down – why he is so offensive to Native Americans’.
The Conversation, 9 July. Available at
https://theconversation.com/columbus-statues-are-coming-down-why-he-is-so-offensive-to-native-americans-14
2 Trump, D. (2020) ‘Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore fireworks
celebration’ at Keystone, South Dakota. 4 July.
3 (1992) ‘Columbus Day parade canceled to avoid protests’. LA Times, 11 October.
4 Doumar, K. (2018) ‘Goodbye, Columbus Day’. Citylab, 8 October.
5 Bigelow, B. (1992) ‘Review: once upon a genocide: Christopher Columbus in children’s literature’.
Social Justice 19(2): 106–21.
6 Sertima, I. (1976) They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in North America. New York:
Random House.
7 Balababova, S., Parsche, F. and Pirsig, W. (1992) ‘First identification of drugs in Egyptian mummies’.
Naturwissenschaften 79: 358.
8 Kehoe, A. B. (1998) The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology. London:
Routledge.
9 Wiener, L. (2012) Africa and the Discovery of America: Volume 1. Philadelphia: Innes and Sons, 34.
10 Thornton, R. (1987) American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492.
Norman: University of Oklahoma.
11 Hinton, A. (2008) ‘Savages, subjects and sovereigns: conjunctions of modernity, genocide and
colonialism’ in Moses, D. (ed.) Empire, Colony and Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern
Resistance in World History. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
12 Tinker, G. E. and Freeland, M. (2008) ‘Thief, slave trader, murderer: Christopher Columbus and
Caribbean population decline’. Wicazo Sa Review 23(1): 25–50.
13 Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, 79.
14 Hinton, ‘Savages’, 442.
15 Tinker and Freeland, ‘Thief, slave trader’.
16 Ibid., 41.
17 Beckles, H. (2013) Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations of Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide.
Kingston: University of the West Indies Press.
18 Ibid., 33.
19 Washington, G. (1985) The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, Volume 20.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 717.
20 Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, 110.
21 Ibid., 199.
22 Wolfe, P. (2006) ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’. Journal of Genocide Research,
8(4): 388.
23 Thornton, American Indian Holocaust.
24 Madley, B. (2004) ‘Patterns of frontier genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of
California, and the Herero of Namibia’. Journal of Genocide Research 6(2): 168–9.
25 Ibid., 179.
26 Rogers, T. and Bain, S. (2016) ‘Genocide and frontier violence in Australia’. Journal of Genocide
Research 18(1): 85.
27 Barta, T. (1987) ‘Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia’ in Wallimann, I.
and Dobkowski, M. (eds), Genocide and the Modern Age. New York: Greenwood, 238.
28 Moses, D. (2008) ‘Moving the genocide debate beyond the history wars’. Australian Journal of Politics
and History 54(2): 248–70.
29 Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’, 243.
30 Rogers and Bain, ‘Genocide and frontier violence’, 87.
31 Ibid., 88.
32 Moses, ‘Moving the genocide debate’, 253.
33 Tatz, C. (1999) ‘Genocide in Australia’. Journal of Genocide Research 1(3): 325.
34 Markus, A. (2001) ‘Genocide in Australia’. Aboriginal History 25: 63.
35 Tatz, C. (2001) ‘Confronting Australian genocide’. Aboriginal History 25: 23.
36 Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’, 245.
37 Ibid.
38 O’Malley, P. (1994) ‘Gentle genocide: the government of aboriginal peoples in Central Australia’. Social
Justice 21(4): 1.
39 Ibid., 4.
40 Batrop, P. (2001) ‘The Holocaust, the Aborigines, and the bureaucracy of destruction: an Australian
dimension of genocide’. Journal of Genocide Research 3(1): 75–87.
41 Elinghaus, K. (2009) ‘Biological absorption and genocide: a comparison of indigenous assimilation
policies in the United States and Australia’. Genocide Studies and Prevention 4(1): 67.
42 Ibid., 68.
43 (1997) Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Children from Their Families [Commissioner: Ronald Wilson]. Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission: Sydney, 368.
44 Tatz, ‘Confronting Australian genocide’, 19.
45 Davis, J. (2001) ‘American Indian boarding school experiences: recent studies from native perspectives’.
Magazine of History 15(2): 20–22.
46 Batrop, ‘The Holocaust, the Aborigines’, 87.
47 Madley, ‘Patterns of frontier genocide’, 183.
48 Ibid., 187.
49 Ibid., 188.
50 Schaller, D. (2008) ‘From conquest to genocide: colonial rule in German Southwest Africa and German
East Africa’ in Moses, Empire, Colony and Genocide, 309.
51 Sarkin, J. and Fowler, C. (2008) ‘Reparations for historical human rights violations: the international and
historical dimensions of the Alien Torts Claims Act genocide case of the Herero of Namibia’. Human
Rights Review 9: 331–60.
52 Kössler, R. (2005) ‘From genocide to Holocaust? Structural parallels and discursive continuities’. Afrika
Spectrum 40(2): 313.
53 Ibid.
54 Lemkin, R. (1946) ‘Genocide’. American Scholar 15(2): 227.
55 Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity, 16.
56 Ibid., 17.
57 Grosfoguel, Ramón (2013) ‘The structure of knowledge in westernized universities: epistemic
racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century’. Human Architecture:
Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 11(1/8): 83.
58 Badru, P. (2010) ‘Ethnic conflict and state formation in post-colonial Africa. A comparative study of
ethnic genocide in the Congo, Liberia, Nigeria and Rwanda-Burundi’. Journal of Third World Studies
27(2): 149–69.
59 Hochschild, A. (1999) King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
New York: Mariner, 44.
60 Ibid.
61 Ward, T. (2005) ‘State crime in the heart of darkness’. British Journal of Criminology 45(4): 439.
62 Kevorkian, R. (2011) The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London: I. B. Tauris.
63 Ward, ‘State crime’, 437.
64 Presse, A. (2017) ‘Germany to investigate 1,000 skulls taken from African colonies for “racial research”’.
Guardian, 6 October.
65 Saini, A. (2019) Superior: The Return of Race Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 47.
66 Painter, N. (2011) The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton Company, 268.
67 Semujanga, J. (2003) Origins of Rwandan Genocide. Montreal, Canada.
68 Clinton, B. (1998) ‘Rwanda speech’ at Kigali International Airport. 25 March.
69 Carrol, R. (2004) ‘US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide’. Guardian, 31 March.
70 Epstein, H. (2017) ‘America’s secret role in the Rwandan genocide’. Guardian, 12 September.
71 Mamdani, M. (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
72 Ibid., 88.
73 Nubia, O. (2019) England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society. London: Zed Books.
74 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 79.
 3 Slavery
1 Hall, C., Draper, N., McClelland, K., Donnington, K. and Lang, R.
(2014) Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery
and the Formation of Victorian Britain. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 140–41.
2 Sir Charles Grey in ibid., p. 140.
3 Olusoga, D. (2016) Black and British: A Forgotten History.
London: Macmillan.
4 Ibid.
5 Hunter, T. (2019) ‘When slaveowners got reparations’. New York
Times, 16 April.
6 Darity, W. (2008) ‘Forty acres and a mule in the 21st century’.
Social Science Quarterly 89(3): 656–64.
7 Visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ for the searchable database.
8 Mason, R. (2015) ‘Jamaica should “move on from painful legacy
of slavery”, says Cameron’. Guardian, 30 September.
9 Hall et al., Legacies, 101.
10 Malachy Postlethwayt in Williams, E. (1964) Capitalism and
Slavery. London: Andre Deutsch, 51.
11 Ibid., 104.
12 Rawlinson, K. (2020) ‘Lloyd’s of London and Greene King to
make slave trade reparations’. Guardian, 18 June.
13 Groark, V. (2002) ‘Slave policies’. New York Times, 5 May.
14 Beckles, H. and Downes, A. (1987) ‘The economics of the
transition to the black labour system in Barbados, 1630–80’.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18: 505–22.
15 Thomas, H. (2006) The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic
Slave Trade, 1440–1870. Chatham: Phoenix.
16 Batie, R. (1976) ‘Why sugar? Economic cycles and the changing
staples of the English and French Antilles’. Journal of Caribbean
History 8: 1–41.
17 Walvin, J. (1992) Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery.
Washington, DC: Howard University Press.
18 Rodney, W. (1972) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London:
Bogle-L’Ouverture Books, 99.
19 Satchell, V. (2000) ‘The early use of steam power in the Jamaican
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20 Olusoga, Black and British.
21 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
22 Rodney, How Europe, 96.
23 Engerman, S. (1972) ‘The slave trade and British capital
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24 Thomas, Slave Trade.
25 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
26 Thomas, R. and Bean, R. (1974) ‘Fishers of men: the profits of the
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27 Diouf, S. (2004) ‘The last resort: redeeming family and friends’ in
Diouf, S. (ed.) Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
28 Ibid.
29 Ekiyor, H. (2007) ‘Making a case for reparations’. Journal of Pan
African Studies 1(9): 103–16.
30 Thomas, Slave Trade.
31 de Kok, G. (2016) ‘Cursed capital: the economic impact of the
transatlantic slave trade on Walcheren around 1770’. TSEG 13(3):
1–27.
32 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
33 Eltis, D. and Engerman, S. (2000) ‘The importance of slavery and
the slave trade to industrializing Britain’. Journal of Economic
History 60(1): 123.
34 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 82.
37 Ibid., 84.
38 Eltis and Engerman, ‘Importance of slavery’, 135.
39 Thomas and Bean, ‘Fishers of men’.
40 Clarke, J. H. (1998) Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan
Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism. Buffalo:
E-World Inc., 15.
41 Russell-Wood, A. (1995) ‘Before Columbus: Portugal’s African
prelude to the middle passage and contribution to discourse on
race and slavery’ in Beckles and Shepherd, Caribbean Slavery,
11–32.
42 Thomas, Slave Trade.
43 Klein, H. (1972) ‘The Portuguese slave trade from Angola in the
eighteenth century’. Journal of Economic History 32(4): 894–
918.
44 Thomas, Slave Trade, 185.
45 Batie, ‘Why sugar?’.
46 Kopperman, P. (1987) ‘Ambivalent allies: Anglo–Dutch relations
and the struggle against the Spanish empire in the Caribbean,
1621–1641’. Journal of Caribbean History 21(1): 55–77.
47 Rodney, How Europe.
48 James, C. L. R. (2001) The Black Jacobins. London: Penguin.
49 Rodney, How Europe.
50 James, Black Jacobins, 47.
51 Evans, C. and Rydén, G. (2013) ‘From Gammelbo Bruk to
Calabar: Swedish iron in an expanding Atlantic economy’ in
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Rise of Modernity. Springer: New York.
52 Thomas, Slave Trade.
53 Anderson, A. (2013) ‘“We have reconquered the islands”:
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54 James, Black Jacobins.
55 Thomas and Bean, ‘Fishers of men’, 892.
56 James, Black Jacobins.
57 Dadzie, S. (2020) A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and
Resistance. London: Verso.
58 Knight, F. (1970) Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth
Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
59 Thomas, Slave Trade.
60 Wright, M. (2015) Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle
Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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61 Walvin, Black Ivory, 34.
62 Krikler, J. (2007). ‘The Zong and the Lord Chief Justice’. History
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63 Walvin, Black Ivory.
64 Inkiori, J. (2003) ‘The struggle against the Atlantic slave trade: the
role of the state’ in Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade, 170–98.
65 Anievas, A. and Nis¸ancıog˘lu, K. (2015) How the West Came to
Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto
Press, 155.
66 Wright, J. (2007) The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. Abingdon:
Routledge, 167.
67 Ibid., 5.
68 Russell-Wood, ‘Before Columbus’, 25.
69 Wright, Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 167.
70 Ibid., 20.
71 Olusoga, Black and British.
72 Ibid.
73 Beckles, H. (2007) ‘“Slavery was a long, long time ago”:
remembrance, reconciliation and the reparations discourse in the
 Caribbean’. ARIEL 38(1): 22.
74 Ibid.
75 Darity, W. and Frank, D. (2003) ‘The economics of reparations’.
American Economic Review 93(2): 326.
76 Beckles, ‘Slavery’.
77 Craemer, T. (2018) ‘International reparations for slavery and the
slave trade’. Journal of Black Studies 49(7): 694–713.
 4 Colonialism
1 Mondelez (2018) ‘Cadbury 2017 fact sheet’. Available at
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2 Cadbury (n.d.) ‘Fact sheet – Bournville site’. Available at
https://www.cadburyworld.co.uk/schoolandgroups/~/media/CadburyWorld/en/Files/Pdf/factsheet-bournville-sit
3 Ibid.
4 Nieburg, O. (2018) ‘How will the chocolate industry approach cocoa farmer “living income”?’
Confectionery News, 3 May. Available at
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5 Nkrumah, K. (1998) Africa Must Unite. London: Panaf Books, 27.
6 Nieburg, ‘How will the chocolate industry’.
7 Rodney, W. (1972) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Books.
8 Ibid., 29.
9 Ibid., 228.
10 Ayokhai, F. and Rufai, B. (2017) ‘West African women and the development question in the post World
War Two economy: the experience of Nigeria’s Benin province in the palm oil industry’. Journal of
Global South Studies 34(1): 72–95.
11 Rodney, How Europe, 182.
12 Ibid.
13 Kemp, K. (2019) ‘Unilever turnover dips in “challenging market conditions”’ Insider.co.uk, 31 January.
Available at
https://www.insider.co.uk/company-results-forecasts/unilever-shares-dove-vaseline-profits-13932365
14 Rodney, How Europe, 182.
15 Li, T. (2017) ‘The price of un/freedom: Indonesia’s colonial and contemporary plantation labor regimes’.
Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(2): 245.
16 Koh, L. P. and Wilcove, D. S. (2007) ‘Cashing in palm oil for conservation’. Nature 448(30): 993–4.
17 Li, ‘Price of un/freedom’, 250.
18 Ibid., 253.
19 Ibid., 269.
20 Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 35.
21 Rodney, How Europe.
22 Lassou, P., Hopper, T., Tsamenyi, M. and Murinde, V. (2019) ‘Varieties of neo-colonialism: government
accounting reforms in anglophone and francophone Africa – Benin and Ghana compared’. Social and
Environmental Accountability Journal 39(3): 207–8.
23 Kieh, G. (2012) ‘Neo-colonialism: American foreign policy and the first Liberian civil war’. Journal of
Pan African Studies 5(1): 164–84.
24 Rodney, How Europe.
25 Lassou et al., ‘Varieties of neo-colonialism’, 17.
26 Rodney, How Europe, 287.
27 Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite.
28 Rodney, How Europe.
29 Malcolm X (1963) ‘Message to the grassroots’. Speech at the Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference,
Michigan, 10 November.
30 Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2011) ‘Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century’.
Guardian, 17 January.
31 Schama, S. (2009) A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire 1776–2000. London: The Bodley Head, 196.
32 Tharoor, S. (2016) Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. London: Penguin.
33 Frankopan, P. (2015) The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
34 Ibid., 227.
35 Huntingdon, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London: Simon and
Schuster.
36 Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 3.
37 Ibid.
38 Tharoor, Inglorious Empire.
39 Frankopan, Silk Roads, 277.
40 James, C. L. R. (2001) The Black Jacobins. London: Penguin.
41 Tharoor, Inglorious Empire.
42 Arnold, D. (1986) ‘Cholera and colonialism in British India’. Past & Present 113: 118–51.
43 Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 55.
44 Mukerjee, M. (2010) Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World
War II. New York: Basic Books, 347.
45 Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 155.
46 (2017) ‘Good news ! India will win over illiteracy by 2021’. India Today, 7 August. Available at
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47 Unicef (n.d.) ‘India: country profile’. Available at https://data.unicef.org/country/ind/
48 Bennett, J. (1999) ‘The confederate bazaar at Liverpool’. Crossfire: The Magazine of the American Civil
War 61. Available at http://www.acwrt.org.uk/uk-heritage_The-Confederate-Bazaar-at-Liverpool.asp
49 Olusoga, D. (2016) Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Macmillan.
50 Guyatt, N. (2016) Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
51 Kieh, ‘Neo-colonialism’, 169.
52 Adogamhe, P. (2008) ‘Pan-Africanism revisited: vision and reality of African unity and development’.
African Review of Integration 2(2): 1–34.
53 Kieh, ‘Neo-colonialism’.
54 Turse, N. (2018) ‘U.S. military says it has a “light footprint” in Africa. These documents show a network
of bases’. The Intercept, 1 December. Available at
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55 Arimatéia da Cruz, J. and Stephen, L. (2010) The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM): building
partnership or neo-colonialism of U.S.–Africa relations?’ Journal of Third World Studies 27(2): 194.
56 Stiglitz, J. and Bilmes, L. (2008) The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. New
York: W. W. Norton and Company.
57 McCulloch, J. and Pickering, S. (2005) ‘Suppressing the financing of terrorism: proliferating state crime,
eroding censure and extending neo-colonialism’. British Journal of Criminology 45: 478.
58 Ibid., 480.
59 Crawford, N. (2018) ‘Human cost of the post-9/11 wars: lethality and the need for transparency’.
Available at https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2018/human-cost-post-911-wars-lethality-and-
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60 Bureau of Investigative Journalism database, ‘Drone wars: the full data’. Available at
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-01/drone-wars-the-full-data
61 Zabci, F. (2007) ‘Private military companies: “shadow soldiers” of neo-colonialism’. Capital and Class
31(2): 1–10.
62 Fifield, A. (2013) ‘Contractors reap $138bn from Iraq war’. Financial Times, 18 March.
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1 Ferguson, N. (2004) Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 198.
2 United Nations (1941) The Atlantic Charter. Available at:
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3 Malcolm X (1964) Speech at the 2nd Founding Rally of the OAAU. New York, 28 June.
4 Peet, R. (2007) Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO. London: Zed Books, 28.
5 Boughton, J. M. (2004) ‘The IMF and the force of history: ten events and ten ideas that have shaped the
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6 Pahuja, S. (2000) ‘Technologies of empire: IMF conditionality and the reinscription of the north/south
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7 Peet, Unholy Trinity.
8 Ibid., 73.
9 Forster, T., Kentikelenis, A., Reinsberg, B., Stubbs, T. and King, L. (2019) ‘How structural adjustment
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10 Ball, J. (2004) ‘The effects of neoliberal structural adjustment on women’s relative employment in Latin
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11 Goulas, E. and Zervoyianni, A. (2016) ‘IMF-lending programs and suicide mortality’. Social Science &
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12 Abouharb, M. and Cingranelli, D. (2009) ‘IMF programs and human rights, 1981–2003’. Review of
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13 Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 67.
14 Pop-Eleches, G. (2008) Crisis Politics: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Princeton:
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15 Harvey, New Imperialism, 66.
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17 Pop-Eleches, Crisis Politics, 134.
18 Ibid., 158.
19 Stone, R. (2004) ‘The political economy of IMF lending in Africa’. American Political Science Review
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20 Dreher, A. and Sturm, J. (2012) ‘Do the IMF and the World Bank influence voting in the UN General
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21 Stiglitz, J. (2017) Globalization and its Discontents Revisited: Anti-globalization in the Era of Trump.
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22 Ibid., 191.
23 Collins, C. and Rhoads, A. (2010) ‘The World Bank, support for universities, and asymmetrical power
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24 Williamson, J. (2004) ‘The Washington consensus as policy prescription for development’. Lecture at the
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25 Glewwe, P. and de Tray, D. (1989) ‘The poor in Latin America during adjustment: a case study of Peru’.
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26 Stiglitz, Globalization.
27 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 175.
28 Easterly, W. (2006) The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much
Ill and So Little Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
29 Ibid.
30 United Nations (2015) The Millennium Development Goals Report. New York: United Nations.
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York: Penguin, 6.
32 Harris, S. (2010) The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York: The
Free Press.
33 Rosling, H. and Rosling, O. and Rönnlund, A. (2008) Factfulness. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
34 World Bank (2019) Poverty. Available at https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview
35 UN, Millennium, 8.
36 Ayres, R. (1983) Banking on the Poor: The World Bank and World Poverty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
81.
37 Warner, M. (2017) ‘Is development aid the new colonialism?’. Foundation for Economic Education, 28
September.
38 Williams, Z. (2017) ‘The UK peddles a cynical colonialism and calls it aid’. Guardian, 23 July.
39 Pahuja, ‘Technologies of empire’, 751.
40 Chakrabortty, A. (2016) ‘A death foretold: watch as Priti Patel trashes our proud record on aid’.
Guardian, 23 August.
41 Elliott, L. (2017) ‘Impact of UK foreign aid diluted by pursuing national interest, says IFS’. Guardian, 8
May.
42 Noxolo, P. (2011) ‘Postcolonial leadership: a discursive analysis of the Conservative Green Paper “A
Conservative agenda for international development”’. Area 43(4): 509.
43 Williams, ‘UK peddles a cynical colonialism’.
44 Provost, C., Dodwell, A. and Scrivener, A. (2016) The Privatisation of UK Aid: How Adam Smith
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45 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2017) Policy Paper: Global Challenges
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47 Easterly, White Man’s Burden, 239.
48 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 175.
49 Bush, G. W. (2005) Speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 29 June.
50 Easterly, White Man’s Burden, 273.
51 Mearsheimer, J. and Walt, S. (2009) ‘Is it love or the lobby? Explaining America’s special relationship
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52 Green, E, (2016) ‘Why does the United States give so much money to Israel?’. The Atlantic, 15
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53 Syal, R. and Asthana, A. (2017) ‘Priti Patel forced to resign over unofficial meetings with Israelis’.
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54 Hiernaux, J. and Banton, M. (1969) Four Statements on the Race Question. Paris: UNESCO.
55 Pappé, I. (2008) ‘Zionism as colonialism: a comparative view of diluted colonialism in Asia and Africa’.
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56 Text available at https://avalon.law.yate.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp
57 Ibid., 66.
58 Ibid., 77.
59 Chomsky, N. (1999) Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. London: Pluto, 95.
60 Ibid., 96.
61 Little, D. (1993) ‘The making of a special relationship: the United States and Israel, 1957–68’.
International Journal of Middle East Studies 25(4): 575.
62 Mearsheimer, J. and Walt, S. (2006) ‘The Israel lobby’. London Review of Books 28(6): 4.
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64 Mearsheimer and Walt, ‘Israel lobby’.
65 Little, ‘Making of a special relationship’, 580.
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3 Adem, S. (2010) ‘The paradox of China’s policy in Africa’. African and Asian Studies 9(3): 334.
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6 Pinghui, Z. (2019) ‘Chinese in disbelief that a US$295 monthly salary makes them “middle class”’. South
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12 French, H. (2014) ‘Why 1 million Chinese migrants are building a new empire in Africa’. Quartz Africa,
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19 Adem, ‘The paradox’.
20 Lumumba-Kasongo, ‘China–Africa relations’.
21 Nkrumah, K. (1998) Africa Must Unite. London: Panaf Books, 27.
22 French, China’s Second Continent.
23 Burgis, T. (2016) The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of
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24 French, China’s Second Continent.
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26 Ibid., 113.
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28 Burgis, Looting Machine.
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31 Ibid.
32 World Bank (n.d.) ‘Physicians (per 1,000 people)’. Available at
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34 Taylor, Africa Rising?
35 Ibid.
36 Phillips, T. (2011) ‘Portuguese migrants seek a slice of Brazil’s economic boom’. Guardian, 22
December.
37 McKinsey Global Institute (2010) Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential of African Economies.
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38 Robertson, B. and Pinstrup-Andersen, P. (2010) ‘Global land acquisition: neo-colonialism or
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39 Li, T. (2017) ‘The price of un/freedom: Indonesia’s colonial and contemporary plantation labor regimes’.
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40 Laishley, R. (2014) ‘Is Africa’s land up for grabs?’. Africa Renewal. Available at
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41 Li, ‘Price of un/freedom’.
42 Ibid., 272.
43 Anievas, A. and Nis¸ancıog˘lu, K. (2015) How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of
Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 145.
44 World Bank (n.d.) ‘GDP annual growth (%)’. Available at
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47 Burgis, Looting Machine.
48 United Nations (n.d.) ‘Population’. Available at https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/population/
49 French, China’s Second Continent.
50 World Bank (2019) ‘The World Bank in Africa’. Available at
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51 Wengraf, Extracting Profit.
52 de Maria, B. (2008) ‘Neo-colonialism through measurement: a critique of the corruption perception
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53 Ndikumana, L. and Boyce, J. (2018) Captial Flight from Africa: Updated Methodology and New
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54 Wengraf, Extracting Profit.
55 Burgis, Looting Machine.
56 Osborne, H. (2020) ‘What are the Luanda leaks?’. Guardian, 20 January.
57 Burgis, Looting Machine, 19.
58 Wengraf, Extracting Profit, 208.
59 Ibid., 204.
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61 Burgis, Looting Machine, 190.
62 Angeles, L. and Neandis, K. (2015) ‘The persistent effect of colonialism on corruption’. Economica 82:
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63 Witte, L. (2001) The Assassination of Lumumba. London: Verso.
64 Smith, D. (2015) ‘Where Concorde once flew: the story of President Mobutu’s “African Versailles”’.
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65 Burgis, Looting Machine.
66 Ibid., 27.
67 Rich, T. and Recker, S. (2013) ‘Understanding Sino-African relations: neocolonialism or a new era?’.
Journal of International and Area Studies 20(1): 61–76.
68 Burgis, Looting Machine.
69 Alemazung, J. (2010) ‘Post-colonial colonialism: an analysis of international factors and actors marring
African socio-economic and political development’. Journal of Pan African Studies 3(10): 68.
70 Easterly, W. (2006) The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much
Ill and So Little Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 242.
71 Ibid.
72 Yates, D. (2008) ‘French puppet, Chinese strings? Sino-Gabonese relations’ in Ampiah, K. and Naidu, S.
(eds) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?: Africa and China. Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal
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73 Kakar, A. (2017) ‘Why is Gabon poor when the country is rich in natural resources?’. The Borgen
Project, 9 October. Available at https://borgenproject.org/why-is-gabon-poor-despite-natural-resources/
74 Gevisser, M. (2019) ‘“State capture”: the corruption investigation that has shaken South Africa’.
Guardian, 11 July.
75 Chutel, L. (2017) ‘Post-apartheid South Africa is failing the very people it liberated’. Quartz Africa, 25
August. Available at
https://qz.com/africa/1061461/post-apartheid-south-africa-is-failing-the-very-people-it-liberated/
 7 Imperial Democracy
1 Philbeck, T. and Davis, N. (2019) ‘The fourth industrial revolution: shaping a new era’. Journal of
International Affairs 72(1): 17.
2 Schwab, K. (2016) The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 9.
3 Caruso, L. (2018) ‘Digital innovation and the fourth industrial revolution: epochal social changes?’. AI
& Society 33: 379–92.
4 Sealey-Huggins, L. (2017) ‘“1.5°C to stay alive”: climate change, imperialism and justice for the
Caribbean’. Third World Quarterly 38(11): 2444–63.
5 Kelly, K. (2019) ‘Naomi Klein is not here to make you feel better’. Vice, 23 September. Available at
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kxvg8/naomi-klein-is-not-here-to-make-you-feel-better
6 Klein, N. (2020) On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Simon and Schuster.
7 Sunrise Movement (2019) ‘Ready for a green new deal: your guide to build an unstoppable movement
to bring a new day to America’. Available at
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8 Taylor, K. (2019) Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black
Homeownership. Chapel Hill: UNC Press.
9 Klein, On Fire, loc 504.
10 https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/
11 Bregman, R. (2017) Utopia for Realists: And How We Get There. Bloomsbury Audio Book, ch. 11,
8:25; ch. 10, 27:14; ch. 11, 3:29.
12 Ibid., ch. 1, 34:22.
13 Bastani, A. (2019) Fully Luxury Automated Communism. London: Verso, 189.
14 Robinson, C. J. (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed
Books.
15 Robinson, C. (1992) ‘C. L. R. James and the world-system’. Race & Class 34(2): 61.
16 Robinson, Black Marxism.
17 Bastani, Fully Luxury Automated Communism.
18 Ibid., 17.
19 Bregman, Utopia for Realists.
20 Mutwa, V. C. (1998) Indaba My Children: African Tribal History. Edinburgh: Payback Press.
21 Frankopan, P. (2019) The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
22 Byler, D. (2019) ‘China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority’. Guardian, 11 April.
23 Caruso, L. (2018) ‘Digital innovation’, 390.
24 Sainato, M. (2020) ‘“I’m not a robot”: Amazon workers condemn unsafe, grueling conditions at
warehouse’. Guardian, 5 February.
25 Warren, K. (2020) ‘Jeff Bezos is the only one of the world’s five richest people who hasn’t lost money
in 2020. Here are 11 mind-blowing facts that show just how wealthy the Amazon CEO really is’.
Business Insider, 1 April. Available at
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-rich-is-jeff-bezos-mind-blowing-facts-net-worth-2019-4?r=US&IR=T
26 Raleigh, V. (2020) ‘What is happening to life expectancy in the UK?’. The King’s Fund. Available at
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/whats-happening-life-expectancy-uk
27 Bregman, Utopia for Realists.
28 Ibid., ch. 9, 45.35.
29 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?locations=JM
30 Andrews, K. (2018) Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. London: Zed
Books.
31 Dodani, S. and LaPorte, R. E. (2005) ‘Brain drain from developing countries: how can brain drain be
converted into wisdom gain?’ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 98(11): 487–91.
32 Bregman, Utopia for Realists, ch. 5. 12:39.
33 Standing, G. (2017) Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. London: Penguin.
34 McFarland, K. (2017) ‘Current basic income experiments (and those so called): an overview’. Basic
Income Earth Network, 23 May. Available at
https://basicincome.org/news/2017/05/basic-income-experiments-and-those-so-called-early-2017-updates/
35 Bastani, Fully Luxury Automated Communism, 225.
36 Wagner, P. and Rabuy, B. (2017) Following the Money of Mass Incarceration. Prison Policy Initiative.
Available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html
37 McLaughlin, M. and Rank, M. (2018) ‘Estimating the economic cost of childhood poverty in the
United States’. Social Work Research 42(2): 73–83.
38 Fri, T. (2019) ‘Poverty costs the U.S. more than UBI would’. The Incomer, 15 February. Available at
https://www.theincomer.com/2019/02/15/poverty-costs-the-u-s-more-than-ubi-would/
39 Bregman, Utopia for Realists.
40 Ibid., ch. 11, 16:48.
41 Kavada, A. (2015) ‘Creating the collective: social media, the Occupy movement and its constitution as
a collective actor’. Information, Communication & Society 18(8): 872.
42 Da Silva, C. (2018) ‘Has Occupy changed America?’ Newsweek, 19 September.
43 Castañeda, E. (2012) ‘The indignados of Spain: a precedent to Occupy Wall Street’. Social Movement
Studies 11(3–4): 310.
44 Levitin, M. (2015) ‘The triumph of Occupy Wall Street’. The Atlantic, 10 June.
45 (2011) ‘Declaration of the occupation of New York City’. Available at
http://uucsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Declaration-of-the-Occupation-of-New-York-City.pdf
46 Kerton, S. (2012) ‘Tahrir, here? The influence of the Arab uprisings on the emergence of Occupy’.
Social Movement Studies 11(3–4): 307.
47 Halvorsen, S. (2012) ‘Beyond the network? Occupy London and the global movement’. Social
Movement Studies, 11(3–4): 427–33.
48 Calhoun, C. (2013) ‘Occupy Wall Street in perspective’. British Journal of Sociology 64(1): 14.
49 Pickerill, J. and Krinsky, J. (2012) ‘Why does Occupy matter?’. Social Movement Studies 11(3–4):
284.
50 Da Silva, C. (2018) ‘Has Occupy changed America?’. Newsweek, 19 September.
51 Schwartz, M. (2011) ‘Pre-occupied: the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street’. New Yorker, 21
November.
52 Piven, F. (2014) ‘Interdependent power: strategizing for the Occupy movement’. Current Sociology
Monograph 62(2): 225.
53 Halvorsen, ‘Beyond the network?’, 428.
54 Stoller. M. (2011) ‘The anti-politics of #OccupyWallStreet’. Naked Capitalism, 6 October. Available at
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/matt-stoller-the-anti-politics-of-occupywallstreet.html
55 Calhoun, C. (2013) ‘Occupy Wall Street in perspective’. British Journal of Sociology 64(1): 33.
56 Schwartz, M., ‘Pre-occupied’.
57 Ibid.
58 Jones, O. (2014) The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It. London: Penguin.
59 O’Neil, M. and Guinan, J. (2019) ‘From community wealth building to system change: local roots for
economic transformation’. IPPR Progressive Review 25(2): 387.
60 Cowburn, A. (2019) ‘Labour manifesto: Corbyn vows to take on “wealthy and powerful” and save
NHS from privatisation, as election pledges unveiled’. Independent, 21 November.
61 New Economics Foundation (2019) Change the Rules: New Rules for the Economy. London: New
Economics Foundation. Available at https://neweconomics.org/2019/11/new-rules-for-the-economy
62 Ibid., 29.
63 O’Neil and Guinan, ‘From community wealth’, 384.
64 Beckett, A. (2019) ‘The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism’.
Guardian, 25 June.
65 Jeffries, S. (2014) ‘Britain’s most racist election: the story of Smethwick, 50 years on’. Guardian, 15
October.
66 Virdee, S. (2000) ‘A Marxist critique of Black radical theories of trade-union racism’. Sociology 34(3):
545–65.
 8 Chickens Coming Home to Roost
1 Gentleman, A. (2019) The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment. London:
Guardian Faber.
2 Walker, P. (2018) ‘Theresa May calls her response to Grenfell fire “not good enough”’.
Guardian, 11 June.
3 Andrews, K. (2017) ‘Theresa May is more dangerous than Donald Trump – video’. Guardian,
12 April.
4 Andrews, K. (2018) ‘“Beware the northern fox”: keeping a focus on systematic racism post
Trump and Brexit’ in Joseph-Salisbury, R., Johnson, A. and Kamuge, B. (eds) The Fire Now:
Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence. London: Zed Books.
5 Malcolm X (1964) ‘The ballot or the bullet’. Speech at King Solomon Baptist Church,
Detroit, Michigan, 12 April.
6 BBC (2016) ‘Boris Johnson’s most controversial foreign insults’. Newsbeat, 14 July.
Available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36793900/boris-johnsons-most-controversial-foreign-insults
7 Proctor, K. (2019) ‘Boris Johnson urged to apologise for “derogatory and racist” letterboxes
article’. Guardian, 4 September.
8 BBC (2019) ‘No-deal Brexit could cause £30bn economic hit, watchdog says’. BBC News, 18
July.
9 BBC (2019) ‘Brexit: £2.1bn extra for no-deal planning’. BBC News, 1 August.
10 Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998) Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. New York: The Free
Press.
11 Ignatiev, N. (1997) ‘The point is not to interpret Whiteness but to abolish it’. Available at
https://www.pmpress.org/blog/2019/09/16/the-point-is-not-to-interpret-whiteness-but-to-abolish-it
12 Peet, R. (2007) Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO. London: Zed Books.
13 Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
14 Thatcher, M. (1978) Interview for Granada’s World in Action, 27 January.
15 Thatcher, M. (1987) included in ‘Margaret Thatcher: a life in quotes’. Guardian, 8 April 2013.
16 Mason, R. (2015) ‘Nigel Farage’s HIV claim criticised by leaders’ debate rivals’. Guardian, 3
April.
17 Andrews, K. (2016) ‘Brexit and the racial fault line awakened in Britain’. Ebony, 29 June.
18 Levy, G. (2013) ‘The man who hated Britain: Red Ed’s pledge to bring back socialism is a
homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should
disturb everyone who loves this country’. Daily Mail, 27 September.
19 Murphy, J. (2014) ‘Ed Miliband’s battle with a bacon sandwich as he buys flowers for his
wife at London market’. Evening Standard, 21 May.
20 Rawlinson, K. (2014)’Farage blames immigration for traffic on M4 after no-show at Ukip
reception’. Guardian, 7 December.
21 Jones, O. (2016) ‘David Cameron’s fatal mistakes on immigration threaten our country’s
future’. Guardian, 21 June.
22 Sivanandan, A. (2008) Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation.
London: Pluto Press, xi.
23 Cohen, M. (2020) ‘Trump: Black Lives Matter is a “symbol of hate”’. Politico, July. Available
at https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/trump-black-lives-matter-347051
24 Trump, D. (2020) ‘Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore
fireworks celebration’ at Keystone, South Dakota. 4 July.
25 Narayan, J. (2017) ‘The wages of whiteness in the absence of wages: racial capitalism,
reactionary intercommunalism and the rise of Trumpism’. Third World Quarterly 38(11):
2482–500.
26 Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk. New York: New American Library, 19.
27 Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley, Friday 22 August 1862 (clipping from New York Tribune
23 August 1862). Available at
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm
28 Guyatt, N. (2016) Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
29 Ignatiev, N. (1995) How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge.
30 Malcom X, ‘Ballot or the bullet’.
31 Brockell, G. (2019) ‘She was stereotyped as “the welfare queen.” The truth was more
disturbing, a new book says’. Washington Post, 21 May.
32 Frankopan, P. (2019) The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. London:
Bloomsbury, 14.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 43.
35 Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, xi.
36 Malcolm X (1964) ‘Speech at the Militant Labor Forum’. New York, 29 May.
37 Andrews, K. (2018) Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. London:
Zed Books.
38 Malcolm X, ‘Ballot or the bullet’.
39 Klein, N. (2020) On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
40 Malcolm X, ‘Ballot or the bullet’.
 Acknowledgements

I often joke that doing talks is like being on tour as a stand-up comedian.
We get to test out our material on an audience, sharpening our arguments.
So many people have engaged with the ideas in this book that it feels like a
collective effort, so a big thank you to every comment, question and
challenge. Lockdown brought home just how much I have been on the road
the last couple of years, which has only been possible because of the
support of my wife, Dr Nicole Andrews, who has had to put up with a lot
and hold everything together. Also a big thanks to my family, particularly
my mom and sisters for their support.
The Black Studies family at Birmingham City University have also been
a key source of strength. It is not an exaggeration to say that I couldn’t have
written the book, or stayed sane, without you. I have to send a massive
thank you to Dr Dionne Taylor who has helped to nurture Black Studies and
been a rock of support.
Thanks also to Sarah Chalfant and Emma Smith from the Wylie Agency
who championed the book and helped to shape the ideas. Maria Bedford
from Penguin and Katy O’Donnell from Bold Type really helped bring the
book together through the editing process, creating something to be proud
of. Also a big thanks to Kim Walker and Rik Ubhi who were at Zed Books
for all their work on Back to Black, which made this book possible.
If you have got this far, then thank you for reading. Another world is
possible if we accept the scale of change necessary to build it. Revolution is
not just possible, it is essential.
 Index

The page references in this index correspond to the print edition from which
this ebook was created, and clicking on them will take you to the location in
the ebook where the equivalent print page would begin. To find a specific
word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook
reader.

13th (documentary), xiii

Aborigines, 35–40
Adam Smith International (ASI), 127
Adbusters (magazine), 181, 183
Aetna (company), 60–1
Africa: Chinese role in, 141–7; colonialism in, 89–91, 93–6; corruption in,
155–61; economic growth, 153–4; impediments to African unity, 105–6;
low population, 93; natural resources, 151–2, 176; and poverty, 124;
relations with Brazil, 149; and slavery, 75–9; US military bases in, 106
African Union, 107
Africom, 106–7
Al Khwarizmi, 13
Al-Barakaat, 108
Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow, xiii
Alexandria, library of, 13
Alice Springs, Australia, 37
Allende, Salvador, 119
Al-Ma’um, 13
al-Qaeda, 107
Alvarus, Paul, 13
al-Zahrawi, Abbas (Abulcasis), 13–14
Amazon (company), 175
American Revolutionary War, 30
Amery, Leo, 101
Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 28
Angola, 70, 116, 143, 156–7, 159, 171
Antigua, 30
anti-Semitism, 132–3, 136
Anversoise Trust, 46
Apple (company), 175
Arab slave trade, 57, 79–81, 152
Arab Spring, 181, 185
Arawak people, 28
Arbery, Ahmaud, vii
Argentina, 117, 118
Armenian genocide (1915), 47
Asante people, 77
Asia, economic rise of, 202–5
Atkins, Thomas, 35
Atlantic Charter (1941), 113, 115
Attlee, Clement, 101
Aurangzeb, Emperor, 98
Australia, Aborigines, 35–40
Aztec Empire, 28, 85–6

Baghdad, 13
Balfour Declaration, 132
Bamako International Airport, Mali, 145
Bandung Conference (1955), 141, 148
Bank of England, 59
Barbados, 30, 61, 74
Bastani, Aaron, 169, 176
Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), 43, 44, 49
Beck, Glen, xxv
Beckles, Hilary, Britain’s Black Debt, 30
Begin, Manachem, 133
Belgium, 47, 51–2, 94
Bell, Derrick, xxvi
Bengal famines (1770, 1943), 99, 100–1
Benin, 93
Benn, Tony, 186
Berlin Conference (1885), xvii, 45
Berry, Elbridge, 19
Bezos, Jeff, 175
Bilal ibn Rabah, 80
Birmingham, 62, 67–8, 72, 85–6, 187
Bismarck, Otto von, 41
Black Feminism, xviii
Black Hawk Down (film, 2001), 50
Black Lives Matter, vii, 66, 83, 174, 200, 206
Black Panther Party, 142
Black Power movements, 206
Black radicalism, 206
Bolivia, 118, 119
Bolshevik Revolution, 132
Bolsonaro, Jair, 150
Bongo Ondimba, Omar, 159–60
books, Islamic, 13
Bordeaux, France, 72
Bosasa (company), 161
Boulton, Matthew, 62
Bourneville village, 86–7
Brazil, 32, 70, 86, 149–51, 153
Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire railway, Congo, 90
Bregman, Rutger, 167–8, 172, 176, 181
Bretton Woods conference (1944), 115, 194
Brexit, xv–xvi, 181, 190, 191–2, 193, 196–8
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), 147–54
Bristol, and the slave trade, 66
Britain: African colonies, 94; at the Bretton Woods conference, 115;
colonial rule in India, 96–103; colonizing of America, 29–30; Covid-19
pandemic, viii, 189; and the IMF, 116; and immigration, 195–9;
Industrial Revolution, 32, 61–4, 69; and the slave trade, 64–70, 71–3;
trade with US, 104; ‘winter of discontent’ (1978–9), 194 see also Brexit
British Commonwealth, xvi
British industry, and slavery, 59, 68–70, 86
Brokenshire, James, 198
Brown, Elaine, 142
Burundi, 53, 152
Bush, George W., 106, 108, 129

Cabral, Amical, 95
Cadbury family, 86–7
Cadbury World, Birmingham, 85–7, 88
Camara, Moussa Dadis, 159
Cameron, David, 58, 126, 197
Cameron, Samantha, 58
Cameroon, 41
Cantor, Georg, 16
capitalism, 110, 140, 170–1
Caribbean Community (CARICOM), 83
Castile, Philando, vii
Chad, 152
Cheney, Dick, 110, 129
Chile, 119
China: ‘belt and road’ initiative, 173; economic rise, xvii, 124, 138–41,
202–3, 205; presence in Africa, xi, 141–7, 152, 159; revolution, 171;
surveillance, 173–4; on the UN Security Council, 22, 114, 153
Chivington, John, 31
Christmas Rebellion (Jamaica, 1832), 57
Churchill, Winston, 82, 100–1, 113
Cisneros, Cardinal Ximenez de, 13
climate change, 165, 208
climate strike movement, 165–6
Clinton, Bill, xiii, 50
Clive, Robert, 99
cocoa, 87, 88, 90
Collins, Patricia Hill, xix
colonial nostalgia, xv–xviii
colonialism: and Cadbury’s, 85–7; and fair trade, 88; forced labour, 90–2;
and underdevelopment of Africa, 89–91
Colston, Edward, 66
Columbus, Christopher, 12, 17, 25–30, 32, 33–4, 57, 70, 79
Columbus Day (USA), 25–6
Combahee River Collective, xviii
communism, 114, 116
Congo, 90, 95–6, 143, 152, 157
Congo, Democratic Republic of (DRC), 143, 152
Congo Free State, 45–8
Corbyn, Jeremy, 167, 172, 185
Cortés, Hernán, 86
cotton, and slavery, 62–3, 67, 104
Covid-19 pandemic, vii–ix, 189
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, xix, xxii
Crime Bill (1994), xiii
Critical Race Theory (CRT), xviii, xxvi
Cuba, 62, 74, 171
Cuneo, Michele de, 29
Curaçao, 71
Cyfartha, Wales, 68

Da Gama, Vasco, 97
Dabiri, Emma, Don’t Touch My Hair, 16
Dahomey, Kingdom of, 77
Darfur, Sudan, 159
Dark Ages (European), 11–12
Darwin, Charles, 9–10
Deir Yassin massacre, 133
Deloitte, 59
Denham, Dixon, 80
Denmark, 57, 72
Denver, Colorado, 25
Department for International Development, 126
development funding see foreign aid
Diderot, Denis, 20
Diop, Cheik Anta, The African Origin of Civilisation, 15
disease, European spread of, 28–9, 36–7
Dominica, 30
Dominican Republic, 28, 105
Donham, Carolyn Bryant, xxi
Dos Santos, Isabel, 156
Dos Santos, José Eduardo, 156
Du Bois, W. E. B., 193, 200, 201
Duff, Sir James, 58
Dutch East India Company, 92
Dutch West India Company, 71
Dutty, Boukman, 74
DuVernay, Ava, xiii

East Asia, 120

East India Company (EIC), 98–9
Ecuyer, Captain, 28
education, of Africans, 94–5
Egypt, 14–15, 117
Eichmann, Adolf, 10
Elizabeth I, Queen, xx
Elizabeth II, Queen, xvi
Ellemann-Jensen, Uffe, 72
Elmina fort, Ghana, 75
Eni (company), 157
Enlightenment, xi, 1–2, 10–11, 14, 18, 23–4, 125, 155, 165, 169, 171, 180
Ethiopia, 121, 152; telemedicine project, 148–9
ethnicity, 131, 136
eugenics, 10, 48
European Research Group, 190
European Union (EU), 196, 198 see also Brexit
Extinction Rebellion, 166

Facebook, 175
fair trade, 88
Farage, Nigel, 191, 196–7, 199
Farmer-Paellmann, Deadria, 60–1
Fatiman, Cécile, 74
Fawcett & Preston (company), 62
FBI, surveillance, 174
Ferguson, Niall, 112
financial crisis (2008), 153, 181, 187, 192
Finland, 179
Firestone Company, 94
First World War, 112
Fisher, Eugen, 48
Flinders Island, 35
Floyd, George, vii, 25, 60, 83, 206
forced labour, 90, 92
foreign aid, 123, 126–30, 148–9
Foster, Georg, 5
France: African colonies, 94–5; and the IMF, 116; and the slave trade, 64–5,
72–3
freedom of movement, 176–7, 197
French, Howard, China’s Second Continent, 145
Frenssen, Gustav, Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest, 42
Friedman, Milton, 126, 179
Fukuyama, Francis, 203
Fuller, Thomas, 16
Future of Work (Vice documentary), 174

G20 forum, xvi

Gabon, 159–60
Gaddafi, Colonel, 81, 106, 107
Galton, Francis, 48–9
Gates, Bill, 123
GDP, as measure of progress, 178
genocide: Aborigines, 35–40; Armenian (1915), 47; and the Congo Free
State, 46–7; first use of term, 43; Holocaust, 43–5, 48–9; Rwandan, 49–
54; and settler colonialism, 34–6
Germany: colonialism in Africa, 41–3, 45; and the Holocaust, 43–5, 48–9
Ghana, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95, 152
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, xiv
GiveDirectly (charity), 179
Gladstone, William, 37
Glasgow, and the slave trade, 67
Global Challenge Research Fund, 127
global corporations, 175
global inequality, 182
globalization, 138, 194
Gold Rush, 32
Gordon, Arthur Hamilton, 37
Greece, 14–15
Green New Deal, 166–7, 172, 186, 188
Grenada, 171
Grenfell Tower tragedy, 190
Griffiths, Peter, 187, 195
Guam, 105
Guantánamo Bay, 109
Guatemala, 115
Guinea, 72, 95, 159, 171

Habré, Hissène, 106

Habyarimana, Juvenal, 53
Haiti: and the slave trade, 71–3; as US colony, 105
Haitian revolution (1804), 57, 58, 74
Haliburton (company), 129
Hamburg, Germany, 72
Hamitic myth, 52, 53
Harris, Sam, 123
Hawkins, John, xx
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 7, 10, 19, 52
Hemings, Sally, 17
Herder, Johann von, 8, 10
Herero people, 41–3, 45
Herzl, Theodor, 133
Hispaniola, 28–9, 32, 57
Holocaust, The, 40, 42, 43–5, 48–9, 82, 131–2
Howard, John, 36
Hughes, Billy, 36
Hughes, Everett, 43
human rights, 18–23
human trafficking, 81–2
Hume, David, 8, 9, 11, 19
Hutu people, 50, 51–3
Hypathia, 16
Ibn Khaldoun, 17, 79
Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 13
Ignatiev, Noel, 193
Imhotep (2630- c.2611), 15
immigration, to Britain, 195–9
India, xvi, 96–103, 148–9, 153, 202; economic growth, 139, 140
Indian Partition, 101
Indian Rebellion (1857), 99
Indignados (social movement), 181
Indonesia, 92, 117, 120–1
Industrial Revolution, 32, 61–4, 69, 169
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), 136
International Monetary Fund (IMF), xi, xii, 94, 114–21, 120, 143, 150, 194
‘internet of things,’ 164, 172, 173–4
intersectionality, xviii–xix, xxiii
Iraq, invasion of (2003), 107, 109, 129
Iraq War, 114
Iroquois, 31
Isabella of Spain, xx
Islamic extremism, 135
Islamic State, 107
Israel, 130, 131–6

Jamaica, 57, 74–5, 177–8

Javadekar, Prakash, 102
Jefferson, Thomas, 8, 16–17, 23
Jewish people, 44, 48–9, 82, 130, 131–3
Jim Crow laws, 201
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 101
Johnson, Andrew, 58
Johnson, Boris, viii, 191–2, 193, 198
Jolliffe, William, 58
Jonathan, Goodluck, 157
Jordan, 134
Juan, King of Portugal, 27
Kabila, Joseph, 158
Kabila, Laurent, 158
Kalinago people, 30
Kant, Immanuel, 2–7, 10, 11, 19, 20, 22, 125
Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), 157
Kendall, Mikki, xix
Kenya, 94, 179
Keynes, John Maynard, 115
King, Alveda, xxv
King, Martin Luther, xxv
Kingsley, Norman, 31
Kipling, Rudyard, 20, 122
Klein, Naomi, 166–7
Korea, 120–1
Korean war, 116, 120
KPMG (company), 129
Kraft Foods, 87

Labour Party, 167, 185

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 45, 168
Lasn, Kalle, 183
Latin America, 27–8, 118–19, 150
League of Nations, 112
Lebanon, 134
Leclerc, Georges-Louis, Comte de Buffon, 9
Legacies of British Slave Ownership (UCL project), 58–9
Lemkin, Raphael, 43, 47
Leopold II, King of Belgium, 45–8
liberal imperialism, 112
Liberia, 94, 105, 146
Libya, 106; slave markets, 81
Lincoln, Abraham, 58, 200
Linnaeus, Carl, 8, 18
Liverpool: Confederate support in the US Civil War, 104; and the slave
trade, 66–7
Lloyd’s of London, 60
Locke, John, 8, 19
London, and the slave trade, 67
Luddites, 171
Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio (Lula), 149–50
Lumumba, Patrice, 95–6, 158
Lytton, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of, 101

Madagascar, 152
Maitlis, Emily, 1
Malaysia, 92, 120
Malcolm X, xxv, 95, 96, 113, 187, 190–1, 201, 205, 207, 208
Mali, 145, 152
Mamdani, Mahmood, 52
Manchester, 67
manufacturing, decline of, 172
Mao Zedong, 140, 141–2
Maoris, 82
Maralinga Lands, Australia, 38
Marshall Plan (1948), 115
Marx/ Marxism, xix, 170–1
May, Theresa, 190–1
McDonnell, John, 186
McNamara, Robert, 124
Merthyhr Tydfill, 68
Mexico, 117, 118
Microsoft, 175
migration, 176–7
Miliband, Ed, 197
Mill, John Stuart, 10, 168
Millennium Challenge Corporation, 145
Moller, Violet, The Map of Knowledge, 12, 14
monogeny, 9
‘Monrovia bloc,’ 105
Moorish Empire, 12–13
Morel, Edmund, 47
Mountbatten, Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten, 101
Moyford, Thomas, 61
Mozambique, 116, 171
Mubarak, Hosni, 185
Mughal Empire, 98
mulattoes, 9
multiculturalism, 196
Mummy, The (film, 1999), 15
Murdoch, Rupert, 38
Muslim League, 101
Muslim learning and scholarship, 12–14
Myall Creek massacre (1838), 38

Nama people, 41–3, 45

Namibia, 41, 42–3, 45, 48
Nantes, France, 71
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 135
Nation of Islam, 83
nation states, 22–3, 112
National Health Service, 189, 192, 197, 199
Native Administration Act (Australia, 1936), 39
native Americans, 31, 45
Nazis/ Nazism, 48–9, 112
neo-colonialism, 85, 128
neoliberalism, 181, 185, 189–90, 192, 193–202, 204–5
Netherlands, and the slave trade, 70–1
Netherlands East India Company, 92
Neville, A. O., 39
New Economic Foundation (NEF), 185–6
Newton, Huey P., Revolutionary Suicide, 142
Nigeria, 93, 117, 146–7, 153–4, 157
Nixon, Richard, 180, 194
Nkrumah, Kwame, 88, 93, 95, 144
Noce, Angelo, 25
North Africa, Arab invasion, 15
North Korea, 171
North Vietnam, 171
Novara Media, 169
Ntaryamira, Cyprien, 53
Obama, Barack, 109, 181, 191
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 166
Occupy movement, 181–5, 204
offshoring, 204–5
oil, in the Middle East, 135
oil crisis (1970s), 194
oil palm, 91–2, 151–2
Olmec tribe, 27
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 120
Organization of African Unity, 83, 106 see also African Union
Organization of Afro-American Unity, 113
‘Orientalism,’ 98
Orissa famine (1866), 101
Ottoman Empire, 47

Pakistan, 101, 119

Palestine, 132–4
Pan-African Congress (Manchester, 1945), 111
Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE), 83
Patel, Priti, 126, 130
patriarchy, xix–xx
Pearson, Karl, 48
Penny, James, 67
Peru, 122
Philippines, 105, 120, 122
Pinker, Steven, 123, 125
Pinochet, Augusto, 119
Pitt, William (the Younger), 73
polygeny, 8–9
Portugal, 97; and the slave trade, 70
post-racialism, xxv–xxvii, 130–1
Powell, Enoch, 199
Preston, England, 186
Price Waterhouse Coopers, 59
prison labour, xiv, 141
private militias, 109–10
Puerto Rico, 105
Qatar, 152

Rabbit-Proof Fence (film, 2002), 39

race, concept of, 130–1
racial capitalism, xii–xv
racial patriarchy, xviii–xxv
racial science, 7–11
Ramsey, James, 5
Rand, Ayn, 180
Reagan, Ronald, 192, 201
reparations, for slave owners, 55–9, 61
Republic of New Afrika, 83
Rifkin, Jeremy, The Third Industrial Revolution, 163–4, 165, 173
Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism, xiii
Roche, John, 133
Rodney, Walter, 63, 89
Rolfe, Isaac, 132
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 113, 122, 167
Rosling, Hans, 124, 125
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20
Royal African Company, 64
Royal Sun Alliance, 59
Russia, 148, 171
Rwanda, 41
Rwandan genocide, 49–54

Saddam Hussein, 107

Said, Edward, 98
Samakuva, Isaís, 159
Samoa, 105
Sand Creek massacre (1864), 31
Sanders, Bernie, 166, 167
Sankore, University of, 14
Saudi Arabia, 135, 152
Saures, Edgar, 132
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 1–2
Schwab, Klaus, 164–5
Second World War, 111
Seko, Mobuto Sese, 96, 158
Seldon, Anthony, 2
Sepúlveda, Gines, 45
settler colonialism, in the Americas, 34–5
Sharpe, Sam, 57
Shell (company), 157
Sherman, General William, 58
Siddhartha, 13
Sivanandan, Ambalavaner, 199
Six Day War (1967), 135
slave ships, 75–6
slave trade: African collusion, 77–8; Arab, 57, 79–81; triangular trade, 63–
70; Western system, 70–9
slavery: legacies, 57–63; reparations, 55–9, 81–4; and the sugar trade, 61–2,
68, 72, 86
Slavery Abolition Act (1833), 55
Smyth, Sir James Carmichael, 56
social democracy, 187, 192–4, 195
Somalia, 50, 108
South Africa, 153, 160–1
South Korea, 120, 152
Southern Cheyenne people, 31
Spain, and the slave trade, 74
St Croix (island), 72
St Vincent, 30
Sterling, Alton, vii
Stiglitz, Joseph, 121, 122
Stop the Maangamizi march, 83
Sudan, 81, 152
sugar trade, 61–2, 68, 72, 86
Sullivan Expedition, 30–1
Sunrise Movement, 166
Surinam, 70
Sweden, 72
Syria, 134
Taino people, 28, 29
Taj Mahal, 153
Tanzania, 41, 42
Tasmania, 35
Tatz, Colin, 40
Taylor, Breonna, vii
Taylor, Keeanga Yamahtta, xix
technological revolution, 172–5
Terminator movies, 173
Thailand, 120
Tharoor, Shashi, Inglorious Empire, 100
Thatcher, Margaret, 192, 195, 196, 203
Third World debt, 120
Thistlewood, Thomas, xxiii
Threlkeld, L. E., 37
Thunberg, Greta, 165
Till, Emmett, xxi
Timbuktu, 14
Tobin, James, 5
Togo, 41
Tolbert, William, 106
Transparency International website, 156
Trotha, Lothar von, 41
Trump, Donald, viii, xiv, xvii, 25, 138–41, 172, 181, 191, 192–3, 199–200,
201
Tshombe, Moise, 96
Tubman, William, 105
Turkey, 119, 198
Tutsi people, 49–54
Twa people, 51

Uganda, 94, 126

UK Research and Innovation, 127
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 21
‘underdevelopment,’ 89–90, 93
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization), 130–1
Unicor (company), xiv
Unilever, 91
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 114
United African Company, 91
United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 196–7
United Nations (UN), xi, xii, 22, 51, 113–14; Millennium Development
Goals, 123–5; Security Council, 22, 114, 153
United States of America (USA): Bill of Rights, 19; at the Bretton Woods
conference, 115; Civil War, 104, 200; cost of poverty, 180; Covid-19
pandemic, 189; foreign aid, 129–30, 145; and the IMF, 115, 119;
imperialism of, 103–10; Marshall Plan, 115; neoliberalism, 199–202; oil
crisis (1970s), 194–5; Patriot Act (2001), 108; racism, xi–xii, 167;
reparations for slavery, 58, 82–3; rise to dominance of, 112–13; support
for Israel, 130, 134–5; trade war with China, 138–41; ‘War on Terror,’
107–10
universal basic income (UBI), 178–80
universities, and development aid, 127–9
US Virgin Islands, 105
USAID (United States Agency for International Development), 129

Vale (formerly Companhia Vale do Rio Doce), 151

Vietnam war, 116
Visigoths, 12
Voltaire, 7, 9, 19
Vorster, John, 106
Vosloo, Arnold, 15

Washington, George, 30
Washington consensus, 120, 122, 128, 142, 190
Watt, James, 62, 169
Wells, Ida B., xxi
West African Economic and Monetary Union, 94
West African Produce Control Board, 90
Wheatley, Phyllis, 16
White, Micah, 183
‘White man’s burden,’ 122, 128
Whitney, Eli, 62
#WhyIsMyCurriculumWhite campaign, 170
Wilberforce, William, 73
Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (1944), 60
Williamson, John, 122
Wilmar International, 92
Wilson, Woodrow, 112
Windrush Scandal, 190
wool industry, 67
World Bank, xi, xii, 94, 114–15, 121–2, 124
World Cocoa Foundation, 87
World Economic Forum, 165, 167
World Trade Organization (WTO), xi, 115, 143

Yahi Yana people, 31

Yale, Elihu, 19
Yale University, 19
Yuki people, 35

Za-hu-Rrellel legend, 173

Zambia, 143, 157
Zimbabwe, 94
Zionism, 131–3, 135, 136
Zong slave ship, 76
Zuma, Jacob, 160
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First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2021

Copyright © Kehinde Andrews, 2021
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Cover design: Richard Green.
ISBN: 978-0-141-99237-2
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