Leopold II: the gift that keeps on giving.

From the annals of confirming the obvious: "The genetic and demographic impact of European contact with Native Americans has remained unclear despite recent interest. Whereas archeological and historical records indicate that European contact resulted in widespread mortality from various sources, genetic studies have found little evidence of a recent contraction in Native American population size. In this study we use a large dataset including both ancient and contemporary mitochondrial DNA to construct a high-resolution portrait of the Holocene and late Pleistocene population size of indigenous Americans. Our reconstruction suggests that Native Americans suffered a significant, although transient, contraction in population size some 500 y before the present, during which female effective size was reduced by ∼50%. These results support analyses of historical records indicating that European colonization induced widespread mortality among indigenous Americans."

Actually, I suspect that Ferguson knows _all too well_ what "western civilization" has historically meant...

"Most histories of nineteenth-century Afghanistan argue that the country remained immune to the colonialism emanating from British India because, militarily, Afghan defenders were successful in keeping out British imperial invaders. However, despite these military victories, colonial influences still made their way into Afghanistan. Looking closely at commerce in and between Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar, this book reveals how local Afghan nomads and Indian bankers responded to state policies on trade. 
British colonial political emphasis on Kabul had significant commercial consequences both for the city itself and for the cities it displaced to become the capital of the emerging Afghan state. Focused on routing between three key markets, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan challenges the overtly political tone and Orientalist bias that characterize classic colonialism and much contemporary discussion of Afghanistan. "

I will be very disappointed if this doesn't quote the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" dialogue.

Not what you expect to see on a baseball blog.

My father's mother, and much of that side of my family, would be among those Indians raised speaking English instead of more-remotely-ancestral languages (in her case, Tamil).

"There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best."

Really great post by John Emerson on the roots of the Mongol Empire; the combination of the long-standing aptitudes of the steppe nomads with hundreds of years of intense warfare/competition among central Asian states & tribes which combined nomad components with civilized skills in varying proportions, with the Mongols.

17th century Netherlands edition.

This looks extremely promising, not least because Barfield was studying Afghanistan _before_ 2001: "introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite [their[ regional, cultural, and political differences.... [G]overning these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite ... delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed...."

It's a start, but: where's China? Russia? The Ottomans and the Habsburgs? The US? Japan? Holland? (Also: what're the units, area or population?)

"In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof."

full text free on-line

A review of Newt Gingrich's ph.d. thesis on the colonial Belgian educational system in the Congo.

But it's true, we're not human. We are simply biding our time until you go extinct, when we will fight it out with the cockroaches.

Marx as the prophet of the industrial revolution and globalization. (It really is remarkable how much he sounds like, say, _The Economist_ --- except for the bit about how the benefits of technology and globalization won't be truly realized until they're brought under human control, of course.)

"On this day in 1692, Don Diego de Vargas Zapata Luján Ponce de León, the governor of the Spanish colony of New Mexico, arrived at the town of Santa Fe, formerly the capital of the province but held since 1680 by the coalition of Pueblo Indians who revolted against the Spanish in that year and managed to drive them out of the area entirely."

100 page denunciation of our "Founder and Benefactor", printed at Pittsburgh in 1899, for the sins of opposing imperialism, opposing annexing the Philippines, and - not supporting the troops. I'm very proud.

Just read it.

"Reform is hard. Promoting reform is harder. Promoting reform in the name of cheap oil and military domination is almost certainly impossible."

Of Bush: "May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague."

'Cause what Iraq needs is a luxury hotel in the Green Zone. (I don't know whether to be relieved or depressed that our imperialist fantasies are so petty.)

I knew Fulbright was against the Vietnam War, but - this was a _United States Senator_ saying these things, in _1966_. Could we produce anyone like this today? (Minus the Dixiecrat crap, thx.)

Shorter Matthew Yglesias: For McCain, endless imperialist wars aren't a bug, they're a feature.

Latin American sovereign debt premiums as a function of imperialist and neo-imperialist interventions. Cute.

Ripping into Thomas Barnett