What was racist about imperialism

Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Racism in U. Levine Lawrence W. University of California. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Cite Cite Lawrence W. Select Format Select format.

Permissions Icon Permissions. Article PDF first page preview. If we want to look for great silences in our history, empire is hardly the only one.

There has been a glaring hole where the history of British capitalism and the British capitalist class should be; in its place are overwrought stories of decline and of imperial finance. The neglect of the British working class is particularly stunning. Giants of anti-imperialist postwar history such as EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm made this their field, and inspired countless others in a historical endeavour that peaked in the s, but has since decayed even more rapidly than the industrial working class.

There are many aspects of British history — many dark sides, too — other than imperialism. We should not admit the framing of the debate about history as a question of a dark imperial history sullying a bright national story. To do so would be to ignore a more difficult truth: all our national history needs rethinking. Opinion Race.

This article is more than 1 year old. David Edgerton. Enoch Powell electioneering in his Wolverhampton constituency, Wed 24 Jun Lying about our history? Now that's something Britain excels at Ian Cobain. Read more. That was already there. That has not changed since It was three and a half billion people in That hundred million has largely come from a lifting up of elites in India and some of the other countries.

And there is a disconnect between the visions that existed. So in the Global North people are talking about how nature is recovering during the corona pandemic, and showing pictures of bears, and deers, and ducks. Whilst in the Global South, you had migrant workers walking thousands of kilometers, you had the dead and buried in Ecuador, you had people left destitute.

The interventions that they made, none of the countries in the Global South have. The reality of simply stark things like, you know, 28 doctors to 10, people in the Global North… 0. We forced them to reduce their public expenditure. And the Global South is in this paradox now, its economies have been built, because we shaped their economy through slavery, colonialism, for commodities. To rescue their own people, they need to, in fact, produce more commodities, need more resource extraction, to meet these multiple crises at the very same time as we need to reduce the use of resources.

So it creates a new paradigm, I think, in terms of talking about what does a sustainable economy look like, but a sustainable economy which is not bound by the nation state, but actually it is at a global level. Going forward, I would say, unless our climate response basically has at the center a fair share, to keep temperatures below 1. Those are not just the answer to the existing inequalities.

So this is a moment, I think, for a paradigm shift, for unifying of issues for a new narrative and new discourse, and concrete political demands that unite our movements—to build a movement of movements—that is transformative, but is based in the realities of the Global South and not the realities of the Global North.

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