NM's blog

“Investigation finds one of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious universities benefited from transatlantic slavery and was haven for white supremacist theories .”

Europeans began to see themselves as "white" primarily during the early modern period, especially from the 17th century onward, in the context of colonial expansion, Atlantic slavery, and the development of racial thinking. Key Phases in the Construction of Whiteness: 1. Medieval Period (before 1500s): Europeans did not have a unified concept of "race" as we understand it today. Identity was based more on religion, ethnicity, language, and region (e.g., Christian vs. Muslim, English vs. French, noble vs. peasant). The idea of being “white” did not function as a self-identifier or category of solidarity. 2. 16th–17th Centuries: Early Colonialism and Slavery As Europeans colonized the Americas and encountered Indigenous peoples and African slaves, new hierarchies were constructed. The transatlantic slave trade and European justifications for slavery helped formalize distinctions between Europeans (later “whites”) and Africans or Indigenous peoples as “non-white” and i...

—Siyavash Shahabi  on  March 26, 2025 Recommended  Liberalism – A Counter-History by Domenico Lesurdo

A very good piece by the historian Vincent Brown

“My examination of the limitations of the racial binary of black vs. white as an analytical category to address the racialization of migrants in the North African context allows for a more nuanced approach to racial categorizations—one that challenges these simplified binaries without erasing the psychic violence of racial labeling or the historical stigmatization of blackness produced by the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and the project of nation-building. This approach is necessary to challenge the construction of migrants as the ‘racial other’ and to support their human right to mobility and belonging.” Contemporary notions of race in Morocco A photo by Chermiti Mohamed

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution

‘That reality can’t be negotiated with’

On 1 January 1804, the Republic of Haiti declared independence. “Haiti offered asylum to enslaved people who could reach its shores. The Haitian Revolution inaugurated an independent Haitian trade, which sent free Haitians on business around the Caribbean and encouraged enslaved sailors to desert to freedom. Enslaved people also escaped to Haiti by other means. For example, in the Bahamas in 1822, slaveholders complained that more than 100 enslaved men and women from the island of Grand Caicos had overwhelmed their drivers and overseers, taken their children with them, and stolen open boats to flee to Haiti. Once on land in the Black republic, any person of African descent was free and eligible for citizenship. It was Haitian policy never to permit the re-enslavement of Haitian citizens or refugees. Robin Blackburn writes that ‘Haiti had saved the honor of the New World revolutions’, coming closer to realising the universal rights proclaimed by American revolutionaries than American fo...

"Even though slavery was abolished, it truly was just a transfer of ownership from chattel slavery and private ownership to literally state-sanctioned slavery," says Savannah Eldrige from the Abolish Slavery National Network. "The United States of America has never had a day without codified slavery.”

  If the queen had apologized for slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism and urged the crown to offer reparations for the millions of lives taken in her/their names, then perhaps I would do the human thing and feel bad. As a Kenyan , I feel nothing. This theater is absurd. Criticism of British empire intensifies Related Dozens of staff at King Charles’s former residence told they could lose jobs

What are the historical links?

This book is definitely a must read. It implies though that there is no alternative to capitalism. State intervention should remedy the ills of the system. The review concludes with a typical misleading suggestion: “If Biden truly intends to establish a more just and egalitarian economic order, he would do well to consult both the achievements and the tragedies of U.S. development documented in Levy’s book.” The use of the comparative form implies that there is already a sort of ‘just and egalitarian economic order’, which an absurd thing to say. Biden could make that order more just and egalitarian. Why does one not just state: “if Biden truly intends to establish a just and egalitarian order...”? Portrait of the United States as a Developing Country

“ The report minimises and at times denies the existence of institutional racism in Britain, despite the fact that, as the government now acknowledges, several witnesses  gave detailed evidence  of the forms of institutional and structural racism that they feel do operate within the UK. It was produced by a commission led by figures who had rejected the concept of institutional racism years before they began work. Arguably it has achieved exactly what the government wanted, adding credence to the false binary that underpins  their culture war agenda : that the nation faces a choice between addressing racial inequalities or class disadvantage.” A poisonous patronising report

Malcolm X’s family is calling for his murder investigation to be reopened after new evidence emerged linking the NYPD and FBI. The ghost of Macolm X Related Martin Luther King was a radical

  Marx’s debt to people of African descent Related The Africana paradigm in Capital

  Free State of Jones

“ Production of chlordecone was stopped in the United States - where it was marketed as Kepone - as far back as 1975, after workers at a factory producing it in Virginia complained of uncontrollable shaking, blurred vision and sexual problems. In 1979, the World Health Organization classed the pesticide as potentially carcinogenic.   But in 1981 the French authorities authorised chlordecone for use in banana plantations in the French West Indies - and even though it was finally banned in 1990, growers lobbied for - and got - permission to carry on using stocks until 1993. It was only in 2018 - after more than 10 years of campaigning by French Caribbean politicians - that President Emmanuel Macron accepted the state's responsibility for what he called ‘an environmental scandal’. Martinique is an integral part of France, but one of the island's MPs, Serge Letchimy, says it would never have taken the state so many years to react if there had been pollution on the same scale in Bri...

 The Good Lord Bird

Historian Raj Pal to the BBC: We have a myth of ‘Britannia rules the waves’ and making Britain ‘Great’, but we don’t want to address the fact that Britannia ruling the waves is to do with the slave trade, colonialism, empire and massacre, as well as trade in tobacco, sugar and salt. Almost a third of stately homes owned by the National Trust have links to slavery or colonialism...