In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbook.”

We speak with two scholars to explore two historic examples: the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America, which historian David Stannard has called the American Holocaust and in India, the 1943 famine in Bengal. According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. (The United Kingdom lost 450,000 lives during that same war.) [SEE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT BELOW.]

Although disease, environmental disasters and famine were features of life before colonialism, decades of research has shown how these occurrences were manipulated by colonial powers to prolong starvation and trigger chronic famine. In other words, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, acquire land and the wealth that comes with that. This colonization was accompanied by an “entitlement approach” and the belief that Indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer.

According to scholars, prior to the arrival of colonialists, both populations at the heart of today’s episode were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied colonial powers accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition.

As the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, famine is a function of repression. It springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food. Imperial policies such as the Boat Denial Policy and Rice Denial Policy meant that, as curator Natasha Ginwala wrote: “freshly harvested grain was set on fire, or even dumped into the river.”

Joining on this episode were two experts on the North American and Bengal famines.

James Daschuk is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life.

We also spoke with Janam Mukherjee, an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. Mukherjee was recently a primary historical advisor on the BBC Radio 4 series “Three Million,” a five-part documentary on the Bengal famine of 1943.

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You can read the transcript of this episode here:

THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

Vinita Srivastava: For centuries, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, to acquire land, and the wealth that comes with that.

This colonization was accompanied by an entitlement approach, the belief that the indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer. So today we’re looking at two historic examples, the decimation of indigenous populations in North America, what has been referred to as a cultural genocide, or the American Holocaust, and the famine in Bengal, India, in 1943 under British rule.

According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side during the Second World War. Of course, these are two vastly different populations that were decimated by a complex set of factors. But both populations had a few things in common.

They were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied that they accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition. In other words, as the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, chronic famine springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food.

With us today are two experts on the famines I just mentioned. James Daschuk is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. And Janam Mukherjee is an associate professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, and the End of Empire.

Thank you so much both for being here.

INTERVIEW

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita.

James Daschuk: Thank you.

Vinita Srivastava: So, today’s conversation is a bit of an experiment, and something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And that is, can we talk about the tools of colonialism as a playbook across different regions? So, let’s give it a try, and let’s jump into this conversation.

James, in your book, you mention a scholar who describes what happened in North America as an American Holocaust. This is a very complicated history with many different factors impacting things. But can you describe generally what this means?

James Daschuk: I think standards approach to American holocaust talk about the apocalyptic events that happened after the arrival of Europeans.

So not only was, They’re the displacement of indigenous people, but the diseases that came with them, unbeknownst even to the Europeans themselves, it was before the days of germ theory or anything like that. So I think the arrival of Europeans and, and all the baggage, the biological baggage they brought with them brought such monumental events that’s standard to use that term, like you said, an American Holocaust.

Vinita Srivastava: I remember reading in the very beginning of your book that stayed with me is that The indigenous population declined by almost 90 percent and that they were basically destroyed, as you’re saying. I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about what contributed to that decline of population.

James Daschuk: It’s more than biology, for sure, but I think one of the things to think about is, Indigenous people in North America and other places around the world that didn’t have a long tradition of, for example, uh, domestication of animals.

We know now in the 21st century that animals are the reservoir of diseases. So because indigenous people in America didn’t domesticate animals, they hadn’t had the, the biological experience of passing germs or viruses between animals and humans. Europeans arrived with endemic smallpox, the people who they encountered had no biological resistance.

There’s a new interpretation that it’s more than just that. It was, it was the violence enacted by the Europeans, by the new arrivals. But I think those two things combined to create standards, Holocaust like situation.

Vinita Srivastava: One of the things I really liked about reading your book, James, is that every single thing is, is really sourced. You provide all of this information. It’s like thousands of years, like 2000 years, and you take us through this history. And one of the most famous lines that’s quoted from your book is this line that the first prime minister of Canada said, which is that we’re doing all we can basically to refuse food to Indians who are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense. So first of all, hearing that quote, it might explain why we had this problem with statues of John A. Macdonald in Canada, why they were being asked to be taken down, why some of them were taken down. But can you explain a little bit more in the context of that very famous quote? Now, what was happening at that time?

James Daschuk: For sure. This wasn’t me being a conspiracy theorist. This was me cutting and pasting from Hansard, the official record of the house of commons. One thing we don’t tend to think about is that really provocative statement by Prime Minister Macdonald about keeping people on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense.

He was being criticized by the Liberal Party for spending too much money on food. So, there didn’t seem to be too many sympathetic actors in 19th century Canadian Parliament with regard to the well being of Indigenous people. I think he was bragging that he was controlling the population, weaponizing food, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it.

He was actually quite proud that he was able to control 20, 000 Indigenous people as cheaply as possible. He wasn’t wasting the taxpayers money, which is a very cynical thing to say. What that did was, that food as a, as a means to control the population, ensured the, the quick construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which is the backbone of the nation, especially here in Western Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: So he sacrificed Indigenous populations to build a train across Canada and to help settlers come into this nation, into this land.

James Daschuk: Yeah. And once you had an industrial means of bringing settlers in, they were coming in potentially by the hundreds every week. So the population here in Saskatchewan. Rose like a rocket over the decades after that, First Nations people were barred from leaving their reserves with a pass system. They were excluded from the commercial economy with a permit system that lasted until the 1960s. So that hunger, the initial hunger was institutionalized for decades.

And the abduction of children into the residential schools program, which we all know about. The hunger was institutionalized to such an extent that tuberculosis broke out almost universally in those kids. And Ian Mosby from Toronto Metropolitan has, has written that things were so institutionalized in the mid 20th century that there were nutritional experiments undertaken on residential school children by Canadian government physicians and scientists.

Vinita Srivastava: I saw that instead of feeding the children, they, or instead of feeding indigenous populations, they decided to study the impact of hunger and starvation. Janam, moving forward into a different time period, but also a different continent, You’ve researched and published a book about the 1943 Bengal famine in India.

Even though there’s now books published on the famine, it’s still a relatively unknown history that in the 1940s that more than 3 million people died in eastern India. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. I know it is complicated, but I’m wondering if you could help unpack what happened in that era.

Janam Mukherjee: I think the prevailing condition of India at the inception of World War I is colonialism. Colonialism is the most dominant force politically, societally, geopolitically, etc. So we have to see colonialism itself as a sort of authoritarian regime with resort to famine throughout the colonial period.

Famine is used throughout the colonial period as a way to subjugate the colonized population. And then in particular, the other main vector creating famine in Bengal in the 1940s is war itself. So the pressures of war, particularly on Bengal in Eastern India, once Japan takes Burma and India becomes the front of the war against the Axis powers, tremendous pressure to produce for the war effort is made in Bengal.

So there’s a huge extraction of goods, uh, commodities, resources, as well as people, that puts tremendous economic pressure. And then the colonial system overlaying it. So in the name of war, they’re also claiming certain emergency powers that amount to a totalitarian state. They’re also facing armed rebellion and active rebellion from the Bengali population in particular.

So famine is a very. Useful tool in a sort of collective punishment of Bengal and India at large. So if we see these two factors of colonialism and then empire at war as being the kind of concrete context of famine, we can expand that and look at famine around the world and see the relationship between authoritarianism, war and famine quite broadly.

And I think explains a lot of modern famines.

Vinita Srivastava: Many of us are a victim of a lot of brainwashing. You know, we’ve been taught certain things in school. We’re talking about John A. Macdonald in the case of Canada, similar to what John A. Macdonald said. There’s a famous quote by Winston Churchill, who lays the responsibility of the famine on the too high population of Bengal.

That’s been a standard trope in the West that people in the Global South starve because they’re just simply too many people. And what you’re saying, I think is something very, very different that famine across the board, almost you can point to certain factors. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, like responsibility behind the famine, who was responsible for it.

Janam Mukherjee: I think famine is, is most commonly seen as a kind of by product of various systems, whether that’s economic systems or environmental systems or political systems. When you have empire at war, the kind of will towards power becomes totalitarianism, as Winston Churchill famously called the war effort, a total war.

During total war, extreme measures are taken, and those extreme measures are also categorical. I believe that famine defines a certain category of people who are beyond the pale of our humanity, who are outlined and then marked as outside of human life itself. Authoritarian regimes often resort to famine and torture.

These are the most direct, biopolitical, Aspects of a structural violence on population. And I think famine has to be seen not as a consequence of certain orders of power, but it’s really necessary of certain power structures to delimit a population that is beyond human concern or compassion or life itself, because to starve a population is a collective act, whereas torture, for instance, is an act upon individual parties.

Famine is a collectivization of a kind of torture of populations. So you starve an entire population, which is a collective punishment, whereas torture is an individualized punishment.

Vinita Srivastava: In your book, you said, the mute complicities of an increasingly callous society at large grew more indifferent month after month and year after year.

Janam Mukherjee: So, because famine, as I say, delimits a population that is understood through public discourse to be outside of human concern. I think this is why famine is allowed to occur in the world in places like Yemen today, which has been suffering a famine situation for many years. And the concern of the world is not there.

And in kind of solidarity with the people of Yemen or the people of Sudan or the people of Afghanistan, for that matter, as well as Gaza, starvation in being seen as a consequence of certain orders of power and of war is seen as an incidental. I think it needs to be seen rather as a part and parcel of certain orders of power and authority and in relation to conflict occupation and territorial expansion, as in the case in North America.

Vinita Srivastava: James, I see you nodding your head. I wonder if you want to jump in.

James Daschuk: I think here in the Canadian West, it was, it was more of a slow burn, but I’m thinking of the idea of settler colonialism. It’s not an event. It’s a structure. And here in Western Canada, our founding mythology of the Canadian society is that we’re the breadbasket of the world and we’re a haven for dispossessed European peoples and people came here to have a good life and that may all well be true, but that society is founded on the institutionalized structural In position of, if not outright starvation, of generational food insecurity that continues into the present.

We’ve got hungry kids going to bed without supper here in Saskatchewan every single night.

Vinita Srivastava: Last week on this podcast, Hilal Elver, who is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, talks about the famine in Gaza. And then she talks about the lingering intergenerational impacts of starvation.

Not only are people living through it in the present day, but she talks about the impact on future generations. She talks about especially the impact on children. How three months or longer of malnutrition can impact so much in one’s little body. James, you write extensively about this, the lingering effects from the North American famine. That’s one of the reasons you wrote your book. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of those lingering effects?

James Daschuk: Yeah, for sure. Well, I teach in the Faculty of Health Studies. We use as an interpretive model the social determinants of health. One thing to think about, across Canada, a former federal government cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, in 2018, said there was a 15 year life expectancy between Indigenous people and the rest of the population in Canada.

So what that means is, if you’re Indigenous, you can expect to lead a shorter, sicker, hungrier life. And it’s really based on poverty. There’s no biological difference. What it is, is it’s the social forces, the structures that have kept people poor, that have created that intergenerational trauma. Think about a hundred years of a family having their children taken away from them, abducted by the authorities, sent to a place where they’re institutionally malnourished, potentially abused.

They have their language taken away from them, generation upon generation. And actually, there’s a class action lawsuit. That, that’s being organized for the survivors of intergenerational trauma. So not only are the, the survivors of schools going through that, the legal system, now the children of, of, of those people are, are starting the process of restitution.

You can physically see the impacts of two generations, three generations later. And I want to turn to Janam to talk a little bit about it because you, you talk about in your book, how directly tied you are personally to the Bengal famine. It’s part of the reason you started your research there. Your dad lived through it. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?

Janam Mukherjee: My interest in the, in the spirit of time in India, in Bengal, the 1940s is the period of my father’s childhood. He was born in 1932. I was born in the U. S. in my own childhood. I heard these stories that were very disconnected from my own reality about the things that my father had seen when he was a child, and that was aerial bombardment by the Japanese on Calcutta.

His house was very close to the docks that were bombed, and he remembered the foundation cracking, The sound of the bombs, the famine, and then the civil war between Hindus and Muslims in India at the end of colonial rule. So that’s essentially what I knew of India, but famine itself in particular, I found when much later in life, I began researching it and traveling to Calcutta to do that research.

Had written a deep script in Bengali population at large. The 1943 famine was told about by parents and then grandparents and now great grandparents. It had influenced the culture of Bengal in deep ways and abiding ways in terms of aesthetics, art, food, culture, et cetera. So famine is very much with Bengali people.

I think it will remain as such in many ways. It’s also a collective experience, often of populations. You see that in Ireland. You see that in Ukraine with the Holodomor famine, where, you know, it is also a cultural foundation or, or starting point and often a nationalist, uh, starting point, it triggers off resistance and collective understanding of a collective plight, uh, so famine has that boomerang effect.

Vinita Srivastava: You said it. Resistance. I have to say that since I’ve been thinking about this, I just keep writing down in a piece of paper resistance and putting a big square around it. How do we start to talk about resistance?

In your book, Janam, there’s a scholar that talks about How people in Bengal, quote, died without a murmur. James, in your book, you talk about the collective punishment that would happen if there was resistance, that food would be withheld for a whole week. The ration of food would be withheld on that reserve. So I do want to ask you both about if you can think about instances of resistance that you can draw from in your work and in your research about these famines. Janam I can start with you and then go to James.

Janam Mukherjee: What I really aim to detail is that the Bengal famine was resisted at every stage. You can’t expect people in the last throes of starvation who are walking skeletons, who are ridden often with madness because of the condition, their physiological condition is such.

that you can’t really expect resistance from already starving masses. What you see is resistance to the policies that lead to starvation. Often those policies, particularly in the context of the Bengal famine, were related to war. So the wartime efforts to appropriate rice were resisted. The efforts to collectively punish various parts of the population were resisted in the form of armed resistance often.

So these all have to be seen as part and parcel of resistance to the power structure that is exacting famine. So resistance, I think has to be seen more broadly, but it often does delineate the power structure itself. It sheds light on the power structure. It, in a sense, exposes its weakness. Because famine is often the result of a dying power structure, of a power structure in a desperate attempt to maintain its order of power.

It’s often a last ditch of empire in particular. So we see famines at the end of many of the colonial states as empire is coming apart and colonialism is being ejected from the colonized world.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think?

James Daschuk: I think the resistance was at a different level here in Canada. With the Indian Act, during the patriarchal system, adult male First Nations people were made wards of the state.

So they had the legal sanctions of children. So instead of having an organized campaign, as Janam just mentioned, I think the, the resistance was more at the community level, at the family level. One of the things that comes to mind is a film that a friend of mine, Floyd Favel just produced. Ashes and embers.

And in 1948, the residential school children made a plan and burned the school down. They warned all the other kids when it was time to make a break for it, and they burned the school down. And there are plenty of instances of that without the structure actually changing. And I think at the end of the Second World War, there was an inordinate amount of First Nations men that volunteered for service, probably to get out of reserve conditions, whatever it might be.

Also to, to get back to traditional warrior societies, that kind of thing. But when they came back, they were fighting in the same trenches as non Indigenous people. And they organized politically and worked very hard and ultimately successfully to gain recognition. You know, that recognition is still coming, but you know, these things take time.

I think it’s important to talk about resistance and all, even if it’s like, as you say, kind of an everyday in community resistance, it’s, it’s it’s very challenging to talk about what we’re talking about. You guys have both written books, but these are very challenging things to engage with. I’m wondering, how do you both see these two very different chapters of history intersecting?

Janam Mukherjee: You know, I think the way you began, the question of territorial expansion, the question of control of populations, the role that food distribution and starvation play into those orders of colonial power. are certainly in conversation with each other and are related. I always see famine as delineating the other, the colonized other, more clearly than any other act of state.

It is to make of the colonized people, the wretched masses that the colonizer wants to understand them as. It’s actually to make them physically that. And the intergenerational connection then of devitalization, of impoverishment, of the long trajectory of slow famine, that also has close similarities in the North American as well as in the Asian context.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think learning about the history of this famine, starving, clearing the plains you talk about, what do you think it can teach us?

James Daschuk: Well, the stories we’ve heard about Canada being, you know, one of the kindest nations in the world probably isn’t so true. But one thing, and this is in conversation with Janam and, and, and other scholars, is the British empire, when we were kids, when I was at the French school back in my hometown, we had that, to that map with all of the pink countries, that sort of, the sun never set.

Different manifestations of colonialism, different uses of food as a weapon, uh, it wasn’t just them. You know, all different strategies. And I guess we’re coming together to deconstruct that myth of the British empire, the benevolence of the British empire. We have a long way to go down that trail, but there are actually scholars now trying to defend the British empire and receiving a backlash.

I’m thinking of Nigel Biggar, a retired professor from Oxford, who’s written a book called the Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning in an attempt basically to explain the mixed legacy of colonialism. So in one sense, the anti anti colonialists getting organized is a sign that, uh, that we’re doing our job.

Janam Mukherjee: Good point.

Vinita Srivastava: I want to turn to the current situation in Gaza and I’m wondering if you think that there’s anything to learn from these chapters of history and can we apply it to the current situation in Gaza where experts are saying famine is imminent?

James Daschuk: I’m just a simple Canadianist. But on the radio, Antonio Guterres was speaking about there are truck convoys full of food, there’s a fence, and there are people who are in imminent danger of starving to death.

That’s not an absence of food. That is the organizing principle I’ve been looking at, that Janam been looking at, and that other scholars have been looking at.

Vinita Srivastava: That there is no lack of food, basically, that famine is a structure.

James Daschuk: Absolutely. And no matter what the geopolitical implications are, children should not be starved.

Janam Mukherjee: As is also well outlined in international law. I think all famines are very specific and as a historian, I always argue for the historical specificity and not to make too gross generalizations, but we can learn from previous famines about orders of authority, occupation, and war in particular. I would suggest that famine is not a consequence of war.

It’s incidental to war. Famine is the handmaiden of war. It has been for centuries. It is part and parcel of war, no matter what legislation is made to outlaw the directed use of starvation as a weapon of war. It seems that those international laws have not worked. And famine remains part and parcel of how war is fought.

Practiced on the face of the earth. So the question of the orders of authority that war allows and the decisions made in terms of sacrificing large populations of people and subjecting them to hunger remains with us. And I think there’s a lot to learn from history in that regard. And there’s unfortunately a lot to be seen in the present in that regard as well.

Not just in Gaza, but also in Yemen and also in Sudan and in other parts of the earth as well. So you still have one out of two people living in India under the nutritional kind of global standards or one half of this hungry people on earth live in India. So these orders of power still exist.

Vinita Srivastava: I think they exist right in Saskatchewan, as James was saying, too, where he says children are going hungry and this just seems to be unacceptable that if it’s about control, then it’s unacceptable.

Janam Mukherjee: And it’s about war and it’s about winning. The ideology of war is in the modern age, regardless of all kind of Codes of conduct otherwise, it’s still what it’s always been. It’s a brutal attack on whole populations that does not discriminate well or often between enemies and civilians. And we see that collapsing in all the wars around us. Those questions of who is the enemy and the civilian population most often becomes the enemy in relation to the opposing sides in conflict.

James Daschuk: It’s really interesting to have both of us, Vinita, because in Janam’s case, it’s a conflict. In my case, it’s the establishment of what is thought of as a peaceful society and it can structures continue.

I don’t know if they diverged food insecurity, famine, that whole continuum. In the case of my research is the structure of our province and potentially Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: I thank you both very much for taking the time to have this conversation. I appreciate your time today.

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita, and nice to meet you, James.

James Daschuk: Thanks, Vinita.

OUTRO

Vinita Srivastava: That’s it for this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient. You heard me say at the beginning that this was a bit of an experiment from us, and I would love to know what you thought. You can reach the team at dcmr@theconversation.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram. @dontcallmeresilientpodcast.

Don’t Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation. This series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Our associate producer is Ateqah Khaki. Our student journalist is Husein Haveliwala. Krish Dineshkumar does our sound design and mixing, and our consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Lisa Varano is the managing editor of The Conversation Canada, and Scott White is the CEO. Zaki Ibrahim wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast. The track is called Something in the Water.

We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes.

Join the Conversation on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and use #DontCallMeResilient.

Resources

“When Canada used hunger to clear the West” (by James Daschuk, July 19, 2013)

Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Indigenous Life (by James Daschuk, 2013)

“Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952” (in Social History by Ian Mosby, 2013)

“Proposed class action seeks damages for intergenerational trauma from residential schools” (CBC News)

Ashes and Embers: Stories of the Delmas Indian Residential School (by Floyd Favel)

Churchill’s Secret War (by Madhusree Mukerjee, 2010)

Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (by Janam Mukherjee, 2015)

“Three Million” (The documentary podcast by the BBC)

“Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship” (Journal of Visual Culture by Tanushree Ghosh, 2019)

“We are about to witness in Gaza the most intense famine since the second world war” (The Guardian, March 21, 2024, by Alex de Waal)

Ateqah Khaki, Associate Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation and Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In recognition of Arab American Heritage Month and in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, UM-Flint, in partnership with the Arab American Heritage Council, invited historians Juan Cole, University of Michigan Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, and Melanie Tanielian, U-M associate professor of history, and Muna Tareh, a UM-Flint alum and political scientist, to provide context for understanding the region.

University of Michigan-Flint Video: “Palestinian History: Understanding the Past, Engaging with the Present” | April 15, 2024

Juan Cole, “As Palestinians continue to die, the history of their betrayal by the ‘Free World’ tells us why” at Scheerpost

“You have this exchange of populations, this ethnic cleansing: Jews sent to Israel and Palestinian sent out of Israel. But the Palestinians that were sent out of Israel didn’t have a stable framework for their lives, they became stateless people, for a while,” Cole said.

In terms of the Palestinians as victims of colonialism, Cole said, “The Palestinians are among the great unresolved problems created by the modern era of this industrial ethnic nationalism and settler colonialism that came together in Palestine in this very unfortunate way.”

Featured Image: Digital, Dream/ Dreamland 3.0.

StayTunedNBC: “Juan Cole on Ridley Scott’s depiction of Napoleon in Egypt”

I wrote a book about Bonaparte in Egypt for those of you who want to know more about the first major Western colonial war in the Middle East:

Juan Cole. Napoleon’s Egypt. Click here.

[Those who donate $100 to our annual fundraiser at IC will get a signed copy of Napoleon’s Egypt:

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed) ]

Here is an account of the invasion by eyewitness Pierre François Xavier Boyer, an aide to Bonaparte, translated by the British, who intercepted it and other correspondence between Cairo and Paris.

From: Copies of original letters from the army of General Bonaparte in Egypt, intercepted by the fleet under the command of Admiral Lord Nelson. With an English translation (London, J. Wright, 1798-1800, 3 vols.), vol. 1, pp. 147-162.

TRANSLATION.

Grand Cairo, July 28th.

My dear Parents,

OUR entrance into this city furnishes me with an opportunity of writing to you(1); and as my design is to make you fully acquainted with an expedition no less singular than astonishing, I shall take the liberty of recapitulating our achievements since the day we left Toulon.

The land army, composed of 30,000 men, embarked at Marseilles, Toulon, Genoa, and Civita Vecchia, set sail on the 19th of May, under the convoy of 15 sail of the line (two of which were armed en flute[2]) 14 frigates, and several smaller ships of war. The convoy altogether formed a total of more than 400 sail; and never perhaps, since the Crusades, has so large an armament appeared in the Mediterranean.

Without calculating the dangers of the element on which we were embarked, or those which we had to apprehend from an enemy formidable at sea, we steered with a favourable wind for Malta, where we arrived on the 10th of June. The conquest of this important place cost us but a few men. It capitulated on the 12th—the Order was abolished, and the Grand Master packed off to Germany with a budget of fine promises; in a word, every thing succeeded to our wish. Time, however, was precious—we had no leisure to amuse ourselves with calculating the advantages to be derived from the possession of Malta; for an English squadron of 13 sail of the line, commanded by Nelson, was at anchor in the Bay of Naples(3), and watched all our motions. Bonaparte, informed of this, scarce gave us time to take in water: he ordered the fleet to weight immediately, and, on the 18th of June, we were already in full sail for the second object of our expedition. We fell in with Candia on the 25th, and on the 30th our light vessels made Alexandria.

Admiral Nelson had been off the city on the noon of this very day; and proposed to the Turks to anchor in the port, by way of securing it against us; but as his proposal was not accepted, he stood on for Cyprus; while we, profiting by his errors, and turning even his stupidity to our own advantage, made good our landing on the 2d of July, at Marabou. The whole army was on shore by break of day, and Bonaparte putting himself at their head, marched straight to Alexandria, across a desert of three leagues, which did not even afford a drop of water, in a climate where the heat is insupportable.

Notwithstanding all these difficulties, we reached the town, which was defended by a garrison of near 500 Janizaries. Of the rest of the inhabitants, some had thrown themselves into the forts, and others got on the tops of their houses. In this situation they waited our attack. The charge is sounded—our soldiers fly to the ramparts, which they scale, in spite of the obstinate defence of the besieged: many Generals are wounded, amongst the rest Kleber—we lose near 150 men, but courage, at length, subdues the obstinacy of the Turks! Repulsed on every side, they betake themselves to God and their Prophet, and fill their mosques—men, women, old, young, children at the breast, ALL are massacred(4). At the end of four hours, the fury of our troops ceases—tranquility revives in the city—several forts capitulate—I myself reduce one into which 700 Turks had fled—confidence springs up—and, by the next day, all is quiet.

It will not be amiss, I think, to make a short digression just here—for the sake of informing you of the object of this expedition, and of the causes which have induced Bonaparte to take possession of Egypt.

France, by the different events of the war and the Revolution, having lost her colonies and her factories, must inevitably see her commerce decline, and her industrious inhabitants compelled to procure at second hand the most essential articles of their trade. Many weighty reasons must compel her to look upon the recovery of those colonies, if not impossible, yet altogether unlikely to produce any of the advantages which were derived from them before they became a scene of devastation and horror; especially, if we may add to this, the decree for abolishing the slave trade.

To indemnify itself, therefore, for this loss, which may be considered as realized, the Government turned its views towards Egypt and Syria; countries which, by their climate and their fertility, are capable of being made the storehouses of France, and, in process of time, the mart of her commerce with India. It is certain, that by seizing and organizing these countries, we shall be enabled to extend our views still further; to annihilate, by degrees, the English East India trade, enter into it with advantage ourselves; and, finally, get into our hands the whole commerce of Africa and of Asia.

These, I think, are the considerations which have induced the Government to undertake the present expedition against Egypt.

This part of the Ottoman dominion has been for many ages governed by a species of men called Mameloucs, who, having a number of Beys at their head, disavow the authority of the Grand Seignior, and rule despotically and tyrannically, a people and a country, which, in the hands of a civilized nation, would become a mine of wealth.

To gain possession of Egypt, then, it is necessary to subdue these Mameloucs(5); they are in number about 8000—al cavalry—under the command of 24 Beys. It is of consequence to give you some idea of these people, their manner of making war, their arms, defensive and offensive, and their origin.

Every Mamelouc is purchased—they are all from Georgia and Mount Caucasus—there are a great number of Germans and Russians amongst them, and even some French. Their religion is Mahometanism: exercised from their infancy in the military art, they acquire an extraordinary degree of dexterity in the management of their horses, in shooting with the carabine and pistol, in throwing the lance, and in wielding the sabre; there have been instances of their severing, at one blow, a head of wet cotton.

Every Mamelouc has two, three, and sometimes four servants, who follow him on foot wherever he goes; nay, even to the field. The arms of a Mamelouc on horseback, are two carabines, carried by his servants—these are never fired but once—two pair of pistols stuck in his girdle; eight light lances in a kind of quiver, which he flings with admirable dexterity; and an iron headed mace. When all these are discharged, he comes to his last resource—his two sabers: putting, then, the bridle of his horse between his teeth, he takes one of them in each hand, and rushes full speed upon the foe, cutting and slashing to right and left. Woe be to those who cannot parry his blows! For some of them have been known to cleave a man down the middle. Such are the people with whom we are at war! I shall now proceed with my narrative.

Having organized a government at Alexandria, and secured a communication(6) with the read of our army, Bonaparte ordered every man to furnish himself with five day’s provisions, and made preparations for passing a desert of twenty leagues in extent, in order to arrive at the mouth of the Nile, and ascend that celebrated stream to Grand Cairo—the prime object of his expedition. We began our march on the 5th of July, and reached the river by easy stages, falling in, on our route, with some detached parties of the Mameloucs, who retired as we advanced. It was not till the 12th, that General Bonaparte learned that the Beys were marching to meet him, with their united forces, and that he might expect to be attacked the next day: he marched therefore in order of battle, and took the necessary precautions.

Bonaparte sent me forward to gain intelligence, with three armed sloops; with this little flotilla I advanced about three leagues in front of the army. I landed at every village on both sides of the Nile, to gain what information I could respecting the Mameloucs; in some I was fired at, in others received with kindness, and offered provisions. In one of them I met with an adventure as laughable(7) as it is singular: the Cheik of the place having collected all his people to meet me, came forward from the rest, and demanded to know by what right the Christians were come to seize a country which belonged to the Grand Seignior. I answered him, that it was the will of God and his Prophet to bring us there. But, rejoined he, the King of France ought at least to have informed the Sultan of this step. I assured him that this had been done; and he then asked me how our King did? I replied, very well; upon which he swore by his turban and his beard, that he would always look on me as his friend. I took advantage of the kindness of these good people, collected all the information I could, and continuing my route up the Nile, came to anchor for the night opposite a village called Chebriki, where the Mameloucs were collected in force, and where the first action took place.

I sent off my dispatches to the Commander in Chief that night; in these I gave him all the information I had been able to obtain respecting the Mameloucs.

As soon as the day broke, I clambered up the mast of my vessel, and discovered six Turkish shalops bearing down upon me; at the same time I was reinforced by a demi-galley. I drew out my little fleet to meet them, and at half after four a cannonade began between us, which lasted five hours; in spite of the enemy’s superiority, I made head against them, they continued nevertheless to advance upon me, and I lost for a moment the demi-galley, and one of the gun-boats. Yielding, however, was out of the question, it was absolutely necessary to conquer;–in this dreadful moment our army came up, and I was disengaged. One of the enemy’s vessels blew up. Such was the termination of our naval combat.

While this was passing, the Mameloucs advanced upon our army; they rode round and round it, without finding any point where an impression might be made, and, indeed, without any attempt at it. I presume, that, astonished at the manner in which our columns were drawn up, they were induced to put off to a future day the decision of their fortune and their empire. This affair was trifling enough in itself, the Mameloucs only lost about 20 men, but we reaped a considerable advantage from it, that of having given an extraordinary idea of our tactics to an enemy acquainted with any; who knows of no other superiority in arms than that of sleight and agility; without order to firmness, unable even to march in platoons, advancing in confused groups, and falling upon the enemy in sudden starts of wild and savage fury.

After the retreat of the Mameloucs, we advanced upon Cairo, where the decisive action took place. It was, in fine, on the 22d of July, that the army found itself at daybreak about three leagues from Cairo, and give from the so much celebrated Pyramids. Here the Mameloucs, commanded by the famous Mourad, the most powerful of the Beys, awaited us: till three in the afternoon the day was wasted in skirmishes; at length the hour arrived! Our army, flanked on the right by the Pyramids, and on the left by the Nile, perceived the enemy was making a movement. Two thousand Mameloucs advanced against our right, commanded by General Desaix and Regnier. Never did I see so furious a charge! Giving their horse the rein, they rushed on the divisions like a torrent, and pushed in between them. Our soldiers, firm and immoveable, let them come within ten paces, and then began a running fire, accompanied with some discharges of artillery; in the twinkling of an eye more than 150 of them fell, the rest sought their safety in flight. They returned, however, to the charge, and were received in the same manner. Wearied out at length by our resistance, they turned, and attacked out left wing, to see if fortune would there be more favorable to them.

The success of our right encouraged Bonaparte. The Mameloucs had thrown up a hasty entrenchment in the village of Embabet, on the left bank of the Nile, in which they had placed thirty pieces of cannon, with their valets, and a small number of Janizaries to defend their approaches—this entrenchment the General gave orders to force; two divisions undertook it, in spite of a terrible cannonade. At the instant our soldiers were rapidly advancing towards it, six hundred Mameloucs sallied from the works, surrounded our platoons, and endeavoured to cut them down;–but, instead of succeeding, met their own deaths. Three hundred of them dropt on the spot; and the rest, in their attempt to escape, threw themselves into the Nile, where they all perished. Despairing now of any success, the Mameloucs fled on all sides; set fire to their fleet, which soon after blew up, and abandoned their camp to us, with more than four hundred camels loaded with baggage.

Thus ended the day, to the confusion of an enemy who were possessed with the belief that they should cut us in pieces; and who had boasted that it was as easy to cut off the heads of a thousand Frenchmen, as to divide a gourd or a melon(8).

The army marched on that night to Gizeh; the residence of Murat, the Chief of the Mameloucs. The next day we crossed the Nile in flat-bottomed boats, and entered Cairo without resistance.

Here ends the narrative of our military operations. I propose now to give you some account of the miseries we underwent in our march, together with a brief description of the country we have traversed, and of the inhabitants.

Let us return to Alexandria.—This city has nothing of its antiquity but the name—if there be any other relicks(9) of it, they remain utterly unregarded and unknown, among a people, who appear to be scarce conscious of their own existence. Figure to yourself being incapable of feeling, taking events just as they occur, and surprised at nothing; who with a pipe in his mouth, has no other occupation than that of squatting on his breech before his own door, or that of some great man, and dreaming away the day, without a thought of his wife or family. Figure to yourself too, a number of mothers strolling about, wrapped up in a dirty black rage, and offering to sell their children to every one they meet;–Men half naked, of the colour of copper, and of a most disgusting appearance, raking in the puddles and kennels like hogs, and devouring every thing they find there;–houses of twenty feet in height at the most, of which the roof is flat, the interior a stable, and the exterior four mud walls.—Figure to yourself all this, I day,and you will have a pretty correct idea of the city of Alexandria. Add, that around this mass of misery and horror, lie the ruins of the most celebrated city of the ancient world, the most precious monuments of the arts.

Leaving this city to ascend the Nile, you cross a desert, bare as my hand, where every three or four leagues you find a paltry well of brackish water. Imagine yourself the situation of an army obliged to pass these arid plains, which do not afford the slightest shelter against the intolerable heat which prevails there! The soldier, loaded with provisions, finds himself, before he has marched an hour, overcome by the heat, and the weight of what he carries, and throws away every thing that adds to his fatigue, without thinking of tomorrow. Thirst attacks him! He has not a drop of water; hunger!—he has not a bit of bread. It was thus that amidst the horrors which this faithful picture presents, we beheld several of the soldiers die of thirst, of hunger, and of heat; others, seeing the sufferings of their comrades, blew out their own brains; others threw themselves, loaded as they were, into the Nile, and perished in the water.

Every day of our march renewed these dreadful scenes; and, what was never heard of before—what will stagger all belief; the army, during a march of seventeen days, never tasted bread—the soldiers lived during the whole of this time on gourds, melons, poultry, and such vegetables as they found on their route. Such as the food of all, from the General to the common soldier,–nay, the General was often obliged to fast for eighteen to twenty hours, because the privates generally arriving first, plundered the villages of every article of subsistence, and frequently reduced him to the necessity of satisfying himself with the refuse of their hunger, or of their imtemperance!

It is useless to speak of our drink. We all live here under the law of Mahomet, which forbids the use of wine; but, by way of indemnity, allows us as much Nile water as we can drink.

Shall I give you some account of the country between the two branches of the Nile? To do this properly, I must lay before you a topographical chart of the course and direction of the river.

Two leagues below Cairo it divides itself into two branches; one of which falls into sea at Rosetta; the other at Damietta: the intermediate country is called the Delta, and is extremely fertile. Along the outer sides of the two branches, runs a slip of cultivated land, broader in some places than in others, but no where more than a league: beyond this are the Deserts, extending on the left to Lybia, and on the right to the Red Sea. From Rosetta to Cairo, the country is well peopled, and produces a good deal of wheat, rice, lentils &c. The villages are crowded together-their construction is execrable, being little more than heaps of mud trodden into some consistency, hollowed out within; and resembling, in every feature, the snow heaps of our children. If you recollect the shape of those oven-like piles, you have a perfect idea of the palaces of the Egyptians!

The husbandmen, commonly called Fellas, are extremely laborious; they live on little, and in a state of filth and degradation that excites horror. I have seen them swallow the residue of the water which my camels and horses happened to leave in their troughs.

Such is this Egypt, so celebrated by travelers and historians! In despite, however, of all these horrors, of the hardships we endure, and of the miseries the army is condemned to suffer, I am still inclined to think that it is a country calculated above all others to give us a colony which may be productive of the highest advantages(10); but for this, time and hands are necessary. I have seen enough to be convinced, that it is not with soldiers as ours! They are terrible in the field, terrible after victory(11), and, without contradiction, the most intrepid troops in the world: but they are not formed for distant expeditions. A word dropt at random, will dishearten them—they are lazy, capricious, and exceedingly turbulent and licentious in their conversation—they have been heard to say, as their officers passed by, “there go the Jack Ketches of the French!” and a thousand other things of the same kind.

The cup of bitterness is poured out, and I will drain it to the dregs. I have on my side firmness, health, and a spirit which I trust will never flag: with these I will persevere to the end.

I have yet said nothing of Grand Cairo. This city, the capital of a kingdom, which, to borrow the language of the Savans of the country, has no bounds, contains about 400,000 souls. Its form is that of a long shaft or tunnel, crowded with houses piled one upon another, without order, distribution, or method of any kind. Its inhabitants, like those of Alexandria, are plunged in the most brutal ignorance, and regard with astonishment the prodigy who is able to read and write! This city, however, such as I have described it, is the centre of a considerable commerce, and the spot where the caravans of Mecca and India terminate their respective journies (My next will give you some account of these caravans).

I went yesterday to see the installation of the Divan, which Bonaparte has formed. It consists of nine persons(12). And such a sight! I was introduced to nine bearded automatons, dressed in long robes, and turbans; and whose mien and appearance altogether, put me strongly in mind of the figures of the twelve apostles in my grandfather’s little cabinet. I shall say nothing to you of their talents, knowledge, genius, wit, &c.—this is always a blank chapter in Turkey. No where is there to be found such a deplorable ignorance as in every part of that country—no where such wealth, and no where so vile and sordid is a misuse of the blessing.

Enough of this. I have now, I think, fulfilled my intentions: many topics have been doubtless overlooked; but these deficiencies will be well supplied by the dispatches of General Bonaparte.

Do not entertain any uneasiness on my account. I suffer, it is true, but the whole army suffers with me. My baggage has reached me in safety; I have, therefore, in the general distress, all the advantages of fortune. Once again, be easy; I am in good health.

Take care of your healths; in less than a year I hope to have the happiness of embracing you. I know how to appreciate that happiness in advance, as I will one day shew you.

I embrace my sisters with the sincerest affection, and am with respect,

Your most obedient son,

BOYER.

I thought I would share this account, given that Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon, is being released this weekend and readers may be interested in this little-known episode. Bonaparte took Egypt in the summer of 1798, likely in an attempt to grab its grain and other exports for Revolutionary France and possibly also to cut Britain off from its Indian colony. The British, however, sank the French fleet soon after it cast anchor off the coast of Alexandria. Bonaparte and the French army were conquerors of Egypt but were also stranded there.

The following spring, General Bonaparte marched into Ottoman Palestine, then under the rule of an Ottoman vassal Cezzar Pasha. The British navy, however, intercepted the heavy artillery that had to be sent by sea from Alexandria to the Palestinian coast. The French could take overland only light artillery. They besieged Cezzar’s capital of Akka March through May but could not breach the fortified city walls. They then retreated, as described by Berthier. His letter was intercepted by the British along with a good deal of other French correspondence, and the British gleefully translated these letters and published them the following year in London.

I wrote a book about Bonaparte in Egypt for those of you who want to know more about the first major Western colonial war in the Middle East:

Juan Cole. Napoleon’s Egypt. Click here.

[Those who donate $100 to our annual fundraiser at IC will get a signed copy of Napoleon’s Egypt:

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed) ]

Now, on to Berthier:

From: An Account of the French Expedition in Egypt; Written by Bonaparte and Berthier; with Sir William Sidney Smith’s Letters. With an English translation (London, Edward Baines, 1800.), pp. 33-36.

[ALEXANDER BERTHIER, General of Division, Chief of the Staff of the Army, to the Minister at War].

Prairial 1.—The enemy, who had been bombarded and cannonaded by a very severe fire, and who saw the destruction of the palace of Dgezzar [Ottoman vassal ruler Jazzar, Cezzar Pasha], of that part of their fortifications which had not yet been attacked, and of all the public edifices, attempted another sortie at the 1st Prarial, at day break; they were again repulsed.

Although the French army could not breach the city walls, they could bombard it with artillery. They fired shells at the palace of Cezzar Pasha and at civilian buildings, wreaking great destruction on habitations.

At three in the afternoon they rushed forward, and attacked every point. They availed themselves of the reinforcements they had received, and their object was to throw themselves into our batteries. This attack was made with more than their usual ferocity; they were, however, repulsed on all sides, except at the turn of the glacis, near the breach tower, of which they took possession; but it was soon retaken by General Lagrange, who attacked the enemy with two companies of grenadiers, and even pursued them into their external armed post, of which he made himself master, and compelled the enemy to retire into the place.—The enemy, in that reconnoiter, lost a considerable number of their bravest troops.

Bonaparte reluctantly gave up on taking Akka at that point and gave the order to retreat back to Egypt.

The whole of the siege artillery was now removed. It was replaced in the batteries by some field piece. What was useful was thrown into the sea. By means of a mine, and sapping, we destroyed an aqueduct of several leagues in length, with which Acre was supplied with fresh water; all the magazines and the harvest in the environs of Acre were reduced to ashes.

In a scorched earth policy, on their way out the French attempted to deprive the people of Akka of potable water by blowing up an aqueduct. This was sheer colonial spite, since it was not done in hopes of taking the city. That goal had already been given up on. It was just a goodbye “screw you!” from a disappointed would-be colonizer. – JRIC

At nine in the evening of the 1st Prairial, the drums were beat to march, and the siege, which lasted sixty-one days after the opening of the trenches, was raised. When they had passed the bridge, the division of Kleber began likewise to move. It was followed by the cavalry, who left 100 dragoons dismounted to protect the workmen employed in destroying the two bridges. They had orders not to quit the banks of the river till two hours after the last of the infantry had crossed. General Junot, with his corps, had proceeded to the mill of Kerdanna, to cover the left wing of the army.

The enemy continued to fire upon our parallels during the whole night, and did not perceive till next day that the siege was raised. They had suffered so much, that they did not attempt any movement to follow us.

The army conducted the march with the greatest order. On the 2d we arrived at Cantoura, a port which had been our landing place for the articles coming from Damietta to Jaffa, and where it had been landing our besieging artillery, and the Turkish field pieces taken at Jaffa. This artillery, consisting of forty pieces, had been, from time to time, carried to the camp of Acre, to supply the place of the French field-pieces which we were obliged to employ as battering pieces in the siege. Bonaparte had not horses sufficient to draw this immense quantity of Turkish artillery. He preferred the mode of carrying off by sea to Jaffa his sick and wounded. He resolved to carry off only twenty Turkish pieces. He caused twenty to be thrown into the sea, and burnt the carriages and cases on the harbor of Cantoura.

On the 3rd the army slept upon the ruins of Cesarea. The following day several Naplousians [fighters from Nablus] appeared at the port of Abouzaboura. Some of them were taken and shot; the rest retired. Their purpose was to plunder the stragglers who are to be found about an army.

On the 4th the army encamped four leagues from Jaffa, up on a river which formed a kind of creek. Detachments were sent to burn the villages which had sent parties to harass our convoys during the siege. The grain was burnt, and the cattle carried off.

The French, of course, could not know from which villages the fighters came that harried them as they retreated. They likely burned villages indiscriminately and stole their cattle, in a bid to frighten others into leaving them alone as they withdrew.

On the 5th the army arrived at Jaffa. A bridge of boats had been thrown over the little river of Bahahia, which is with difficulty passed at a ford along the bar, formed at the place where it falls into the sea. On the 6th, 7th, and 8th, the army stopped at Jaffa. This interval was employed in punishing the villages which had conducted themselves improperly. The corn, as well as the cattle, was carried off. The fortifications of Jaffa were blown up. The merchants of Jaffa paid a contribution of 150,000 livres.

Even as they were leaving, the French plundered villages for corn and cattle, damaged the fortifications of the city of Jaffa that protected it from rural raiders, and shook down the merchants of Jaffa for a large sum of money. The annual income of a well-off noble family just before the revolution was 150,000 livres. Bonaparte was famed for making the people he conquered pay for the conquest, but here he made the people who had resisted him successfully pay for his defeat.

General Dugua wrote to Bonaparte from Egypt, informing him that symptoms of revolt had manifested themselves in the provinces of Benisness [Beni Suef?], Carkie [Sharqiyyah], and especially in that of Bahire [Beheira]; that the English had made their appearance at Suez: that the Mamelukes who were driven from Upper Egypt, and who had descended into the provinces of Lower Egypt, made several attempts to stimulate the people to insurrection; but every thing was quieted by the activity of the troops; and the vigilant conduct of the generals, but that the city of Cairo, and the other principal cities of Egypt, had remained in the most perfect tranquility.

These insurrections were a ramification of the plan of a general attack, which was to have been made upon the French in Egypt, and that at the time Dgezzar was to go into Syria, and when the Anglo-Turkish fleet was to present itself before Damietta.

The army set out on the 9th; Regnier’s division forming the left column, marching by Ramie, with orders to burn the villages, and destroy all the harvest. The head quarters, the division of Bon, and that of Lannes, took the central road, and likewise burnt the villages and the corn harvest. A column of cavalry was detached to the right along the coast. They scoured the downs, and drove in all the cattle that had there been collected.

The French appear to have wrought widespread devastation as they retreated, torching fields and villages and leaving people to starve without shelter. They confiscated all the cattle they could find, turning themselves into a sort of weird French cowboys and cattle rustlers in Palestine.

Kleber’s division formed the rear guard, and had orders not to quit Jaffa until the 10th. In this order the army marched as far as Jounisse; that immense plain presented but one blaze of fire; so dreadful was the vengeance inflicted for the assassinations committed on our troops, and for the very frequent attacks on our convoys, while this severe measure, rendered necessary by the laws of war, deprived the enemy of all means of furnishing magazines and securing provisions.

Although Bertier attempted to excuse these atrocities, which turned the fertile plains of Ottoman Palestine into enormous conflagrations that appear to have encompassed entire groups of villages, even in the eighteenth century this behavior was considered outrageous.

The army encamped on the 10th at Mecheltal, and arrived on the 11th at Gaza, form which it moved again on the 12th. That city had conducted itself very peaceably: it was therefore entitled to protection of persons and property. The fortress was blown up, and three of the rich inhabitants, whose conduct had been very hostile, we taxed with a contribution of one hundred thousand livres.

Ironically, the French generally spared Gaza the sort of vengeful devastation they wrought elsewhere in Palestine. But even there they blew up the city’s fortress, leaving it defenseless before bedouin raids, and they shook down three large merchants for enough money to keep an Ancien Regime noble family in style for a whole year.

Kleber’s division continued a day’s march behind. The army arrived at Kan-Jounesse on the 12th, and again pursued their march on the 13th. They entered the Desert, followed by an immense quantity of cattle which they had taken from the enemy, and with which they intended to provision El-arisch. The desert between this place and Kan-Jounesse comprises a space of eleven leagues, inhabited by the Arabs, who had frequently attacked our convoys. We burnt several of their camps; we carried away a great number of their cattle and camels, and set fire to a small harvest that was collected in some parts of the desert.

Sony Pictures Entertainment: “NAPOLEON – Official Trailer (HD)”

On the 14th, the army stopped for the day at El-Arisch. Bonaparte there left a garrison. He ordered new works to be constructed for the defense of the fort. He caused it to be supplied with stores and provisions. The army continued its march to Cathich, where it arrived on the 19th. The divisions, although marching successively, sustained great inconvenience from want of water. The desert is 22 leagues in extent, in which there is no supply to be had, except about half way, where there is a bad well of brackish water.

On the 18th the army continued its march. The head quarters were removed on the 19th, in order to proceed to Salchich. The division of Kleber marched to Tiach, to embark for Damietta.—The rest of the army was collected at Cathich, where it remained for some time, and then proceeded to Cairo, where it arrived on the 26th. The natives were astonished to see the army in the same state as it just came out of barracks. The soldiers considered themselves as it were in their native country in returning to Cairo, and the inhabitants received us as their compatriots.

The army engaged in the Syrian Expedition, in four months lost about 700 men by disease, 500 killed in battle, and about 1000 wounded, 90 of whom underwent amputation, and were rendered incapable of serving but in the invalids. Almost all the other wounded men are cured, and have joined their corps.

(Signed)

Alexander Berthier.

General of Division, Chief of Staff.

Cairo, 6 Messidor, Year 7.

(The Conversation) – The western world’s support for Israel as it attacks Gaza has provoked fury across the Arab world and much of the Global South.

This situation undermines the West’s international standing and offers opportunities for China to enhance its regional and global diplomatic influence. Whether and how it will seize them remains to be seen.

Led by the United States, the West has presented itself as following a “rules-based liberal international order” that ostensibly protects human rights and international norms.

On this basis, the West has opposed Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine. However, it isn’t applying these rules to Israel and Palestinians.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. supports a humanitarian pause but not a ceasefire. The White House says Israel has now agreed to four-hour daily pauses in military operations in Gaza.

Children’s ‘graveyard’

Most western governments have thrown their support behind Israel as it launches a devastating attack on Gaza. In response to Hamas’s brutal attack and hostage-takings on Oct. 7, Israel has bombed schools, hospitals, ambulances, refugee camps, bakeries, mosques, churches, flattened neighbourhoods and killed thousands of people, possibly 40 per cent of them children.

UN Secretary General António Guterres has said “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” About 1,300 children are believed buried under rubble. Hospitals are collapsing. The perception in the Global South is that Palestinian lives are virtually worthless to the West.

“Enough Is Enough, Says Chinese Envoy To UN At UNSC’ | Israel Gaza | Dawn News English

Some western governments’ efforts to censor and criminalize public demonstrations supporting Palestinians adds another perceived dimension of hypocrisy to the West’s actions.

Even mild statements of support for Palestinians can be enough to endanger peoples’ careers, especially in the U.S.

A boon to China?

In this environment, the war in Gaza provides China with diplomatic and political opportunities.

From the Chinese perspective, one political benefit is that the U.S. has lost any credibility in its criticism of China’s treatment of the Uyghur people.

The U.S. argues that Israel has the right to protect itself from terrorism. China has claimed the same right in its oppression of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.

China’s actions against the Uyghurs are certainly disturbing, but they aren’t as devastating as what Israel is doing to Palestinians. And unlike Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, Xinjiang is China’s sovereign territory.

China also has a strong interest in promoting peace in the Middle East given about half of its imported oil comes from the region. China helped Saudi Arabia and Iran normalize their relations.

Four Middle Eastern countries have joined BRICS, the international forum representing the world’s rising powers founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Saudi Arabia is also considering selling China oil in its own currency, the yuan.

Bypassing Palestinians

Ongoing American efforts under President Joe Biden to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel were partly motivated by fear of China’s diplomatic and economic progress in the Middle East.

Some have argued this American attempt to bypass the Palestinians may have played a role in Hamas’s attack on Israel. The U.S. has fomented conflict in the Middle East to keep the Islamic world divided and empower Israel, in contrast to China’s imperative for regional stability.

The U.S. has promoted the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor to enhance its presence in the Middle East, more fully integrate Israel into the regional economy and counteract China’s growing regional influence.

But Arab states don’t share the American desire to contain China. They prefer a multi-polar world where they can leverage several larger powers against each other and increase their own global geopolitical influence.

The longer Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, the higher the civilian death toll climbs and the more politically difficult it will be for the Arab world to co-operate with Israel or the U.S. That will push the Gulf states even closer to China.

In the current Gaza conflict, China has emphasized the need to avoid civilian casualties while rejecting Israel’s demand that it specifically condemn Hamas. China’s position reflects the consensus of the Global South, which considers the recent historical context of the conflict and Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Americans distracted

The Israel-Gaza war is also distracting the U.S. from the Indo-Pacific region, further working to China’s advantage.

The U.S. is mired in the Middle East. Biden’s administration supports the two-state solution to the conflict, but that solution may no longer be viable.

The U.S. appears unprepared to use its leverage over Israel to force it to accept a two-state solution. Any Israeli government that tried to move huge numbers of illegal settlers out of their settlements would face massive domestic criticism, even a potential civil war.

China’s diplomatic successes in the Middle East have involved reconciling states that were already inching towards restoring relations. Nonetheless, China could position itself as the superpower that champions the interests of the Arab world and the perspective of the Global South in future negotiations.

China will therefore likely be much more even-handed in its approach to the conflict than the U.S.

Is China willing to play a more active role in the Israel-Palestine dispute? It may be tempted to let the U.S. stew in a problem of its own making, but regional peace and stability benefits China’s economic development.

While some scholars are skeptical of China’s potential role in any ceasefire or peace negotiations, the Chinese have more credibility in the region than the Americans do.

The U.S. has mismanaged and damaged the Middle East for decades. It would benefit the region if a superpower more inclined towards diplomacy than violence played a balancing role.

Shaun Narine, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, St. Thomas University (Canada)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – After the death of British monarch Elizabeth II in September 2022, then president of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta ordered 4 days of national mourning. The president’s decision was not well-received among many sectors of the Kenyan population. Elizabeth II was already queen during the Mau Mau Uprising, a rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s that was suffocated at the cost of 11,503 official deaths but up to three hundred thousand dead and missing according to historian Caroline Elkins in her book “Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.”

Last October, Elizabeth’s son and current monarch Charles III visited Kenya. While in the Eastern African country, King Charles offered no direct apology or reparations. The closest he came to condemning British colonialism in Kenya was saying that “there were abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans” during their fight for independence.

The territory we now know as Kenya moved to British hands after the creation of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888. By the point the Imperial British East Africa Company was created, the company represented nothing but a short chapter in Britain’s centuries-long history of combining private capital and royal prerogatives to expand its imperial designs around the world. This is a history whose origins and development are covered in depth by Philip J. Stern in his recently published book “Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism.”

Stern, an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, explains that British corporations, whose origins lay between the end of the 16^th century and the beginning of the 17^th century, represented the foundations of British colonialism. The corporation emerged as a particular legal entity funded by the joint stock of its members who, upon being granted the power by a royal charter, were allowed to engage in “overseas trade, exploration, predation, and settlement,” writes Stern.[1]

The men behind these corporations were a mixture of entrepreneurs, explorers, and dispossessors of natives, although not necessarily in this order. Whereas many of those who pushed the corporations further never left Britain and their contributions were merely financial, others came to settle and live in lands stolen from the native populations. The corporations first set their sights not far away from home, in Ireland, but they were soon securing royal charters to depart for Russia, Western Africa, or Northern America.

Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism. Harvard University Press, 2023. Click here.

Some of these charters still help understand the political geography of the United States. In 1632, for instance, King Charles I granted a charter to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. The new colony established by Cecil Calvert was named Maryland after the wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria of France. In the US State of Maryland, Baltimore is the most populous city.

British corporations expanded their reach around the world through a process that was neither linear nor free of complications. Instead, it was a complex dynamic dominated by competition against the companies and imperial projects of other European countries and between British corporations themselves. The royal court became an arena for different corporations to challenge each other’s rights over certain economic activities and geographical areas. As Stern explains, this was somehow inevitable because overseas charters given to corporations “were not terribly well-written ones. They were remarkably ambiguous, aspirational, and open to interpretation.”[2]

New corporations were constantly founded while others disappeared, sometimes to re-emerge under a different name and supported by a new royal charter. The political uncertainty of 17^th-century England, with its Civil War and the Glorious Revolution in 1688, led to unease among those invested in the corporations. Nevertheless, the process of further intermeshing between British corporations and imperialism continued unabated.

There is probably no greater exponent of this sometimes-uneasy alliance than the East India Company (EIC), to which Stern dedicated a book in 2011 aptly titled “The Company State.” Because the EIC became indeed the perfect hybrid between the commercial and the political. The Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke famously described the EIC as “a state in the disguise of a merchant.”

When the British first arrived in India in the early 17^th century, the Mughal emperor Jahangir presided over one of the largest empires in human history. By 1815, the EIC had assembled an army of a quarter of a million men and claimed hegemony in the Indian subcontinent. The company’s trajectory was not without its setbacks, however. In 1772, the EIC had incurred enormous debts, and the directors of the company asked the British government for a £1.4 million loan, an extraordinary sum at the time. The government obliged as the EIC was so closely intertwined with the British domestic economy that it had become “too big to fail”, explains Stern.[3]

In Empire, Incorporated, Stern always remains in the realm of history. However, the enormous economic power of the EIC at that time, together with the company’s practice of bribing British parliamentarians to secure a favorable political environment, can only bring to mind the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and its strong connection to the governmental deregulation of financial markets. The EIC survived its biggest crisis thanks to the government’s bailout but, in exchange, the British parliament enforced “a new principle of government oversight” on the EIC.[4] The company would finally be nationalized after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the EIC.

Around the time India was put under the direct rule of the Crown, corporate imperialism, which had previously already shown its adaptive capabilities, underwent a process of formalization. With the passing of new legislation by the British parliament, “incorporation had now become a bureaucratic process not a political one.”[5] It was this new/old corporate imperialism that would fuel the expansion of the British Empire in Africa and Australasia and put Britain, at the end of the First World War, in control of around a quarter of the world’s population and territory.

It would take another world war for the formal dismantlement of the empire to begin. Stern describes how “there was no single corporate reaction to the impending end of empire.”[6] Many corporations lobbied against de-colonization. Others waited until the emergence of politically independent countries to engage in the recolonization of the newly nationalized companies seeking capital and commercial partners. And, in a good number of cases, “formerly colonial corporations still endured in some shape or form.”[7]

Unilever, the modern British multinational behind many household brands, built its Western Africa business after the acquisition of the United Africa Company, which in turn was founded in 1929 as a result of the merger between different companies, among them the Royal Niger Company, which played a fundamental role in imposing Britain’s rule over what is today Nigeria.

“Empire, Incorporated” is the result of painstaking research by a historian who impressively explores how Britain’s empire and its corporations became almost undistinguishable. And yet, as Stern himself explains in the introduction, there are no clear historical turning points in the book. The history of the British Empire, for all the suffering it caused, was not the result of any grand design, and there is more messiness than order in it. This is obviously not Stern’s fault, but it helps explain why the book is not an easy read and might be more appealing to historians than to the general reader.

The book could also have benefited from a more comparative perspective, for instance in regard to the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602. We are left to wonder how unique the British alliance of corporation and empire was as compared to other European imperial projects. If we are to focus on one key insight of the book that advances our general understanding of the British Empire, this is that the British Empire as we know it was “an incorporated empire, built in no small part by absorbing and assimilating those corporations and other forms of non-state enterprise that often laid the foundations of the colonial enterprise.”[8]

[1] Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2023), p. 7.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, p. 177.

[4] Ibid, p. 183.

[5] Ibid, p. 256.

[6] Ibid, p. 315.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, p. 10.

Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – There were elements in Ireland whose anger against Britain overwhelmed any other sentiment. Three hundred years of settler colonialism, dispossession and denigration of language, culture, and religion, left a legacy of deep-seated resentment.  I was born in Donegal, part of the province of Ulster, and often heard my father’s smoldering resentment at the historical traumas still raw in Ulster up to the 1998 Peace Accord when the Easter Friday agreement allowed Indigenous Irish Nationalists to experience the same civil rights as British Loyalists.

I had rebelled at my father’s one-sided view of history, which considered one nation as the source of all evil as it pertained to Ireland. But after reading and reflecting on 17^th century Irish history that involved three invasions from England resulting in a 40% reduction of the native population and then a million Irish starving to death in the Great Hunger of the mid-19th century in a famine that could have been averted if not for the English policy of “laissez-faire”. I then read insightful books by Caroline Elkin on Britain’s colonialism in Kenya and Thomas Dalrymple on Britain in India and gradually came to a better understanding of my father’s perspective.

It was not until the late 19^th century that Prime Minister Gladstone helped to enact legislation to free the indigenous Irish from the onerous and exacting rents that had supported a landlord system which had seen the majority of the wealth of the country siphoned into British and Anglo-Irish hands.

It was during the WWI postwar period that Britain enacted the Balfour Declaration which gave tacit approval to Zionism, thus allowing an influx of Jewish immigrants into Israel. In the Declaration only a couple of phrases were given over to acknowledging that the Indigenous Palestinians needed to be treated fairly. 

By 1930 the Jewish population was one third of the population of Israel but only owned 7% of the land. By 1935 Haifa had a majority Jewish population. In the early 1930s PM Ramsey McDonald admitted that Jewish settlements in Palestine was the purpose of the League of Nations Mandate. 

David Ben-Gurion in 1934 stated: “The Palestinian Arabs will not be sacrificed so that Zionism might be realized. According to our conception of Zionism, we are neither desirous nor capable of building our future in Palestine at the expense of Arabs…”

With the onslaught of WWII and the tragedy of the holocaust, funds from Europe and an annual subsidy of $3 billion worth of weapons from the U.S. Israel population substantially increased. But this was not the case with the Palestinians. Their land continued to contract as dispossession became normalized.  The result was a further marginalization of the Indigenous Palestinians and their desperation as the Jewish leadership, in league with the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, found even more ways to expropriate Palestinian land.

As was the case in Ireland and the Americas in the 17^th and 18^thcenturies, the victims of land expropriation were blamed for resisting or fighting back. In Israel’s case any criticism concerning the dispossession of Palestinian land was seen as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic.  Peace groups, such as Gush Shalom, founded in 1993 by Uri Avnery, have decried the illegal taking of land by settlers in the West Bank. Gush Shalom does not believe in the “so called national consensus” which it considers to be based on misinformation. It wishes “to establish an independent and sovereign State of Palestine”. 

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister suggested in a 1918 book that the “fellahin [indigenous rural villagers] are descended from ancient Jewish and Samaritan farmers”, In more recent years, genetic studies have demonstrated that, at least paternally, “Jewish ethnic divisions” and the Palestinians are related to each other. Genetic studies on Jews have shown that Jews and Palestinians are closer to each other than the Jews are to their host countries. Given this genetic proximity to each other, one would think that fair dealing and genuine rapprochement would be honored and encouraged. 

The Israeli historian, Ihan Pappe, who explored Palestinian issues, wrote in “The Forgotten Palestinians”:  that “the policy towards the Palestinian minority was determined by a security minded group of decision makers and executed by Ben Gurion’s unfailingly ruthless advisors on Arab affairs, who were in favor of expelling as many Palestinians as possible and confining the rest within well-guarded enclaves”.

In the present time we are faced with the brutal attack by the extremist militant group, Hamas, who emerged from Gaza with incredible fury and slaughtered hundreds of Israeli people. These horrific acts have brought upon themselves, and hundreds of thousands of civilians, terrible consequences, as Israeli military forces, supported by American weapons, have caused death and injury to many innocent victims; 40% are estimated to be children. Did Hamas really consider the terrible retribution that would be exacted when they undertook their fool-hardy act? 

The historical causes of conflict in Gaza still have to be faced despite this atrocity. But this disproportionate bombing of civilians in response to Hamas horrific acts, do not take into account the children of Gaza, who have already been traumatized by ten Israeli military assaults between 2006 and 2023. In just one of these assaults in 2008 1,417 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths took place.  

Thousands are now suffering injury and death in Gaza. It was estimated that at least 500 children have died from Israeli air strikes on Gaza. This disproportionate response to Hamas may also have the purpose of compelling Palestinians to leave their ancestral land. Dispossession by whatever means is an ancient tactic, whether taking place in Ireland or in the expropriating of Indigenous land from Native Americans. 

In the 21^st century reconciliation groups have sprung up all over the U.S. and Canada to help redress and atone for the deep traumas caused by dispossession, as well as by the Residential school system. Israel still has time to change its policies and follow the recommendations of Gush Shalom: to “safeguard the security of both Israel and Palestine by mutual agreement and guarantees”

Still, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a catch. If you don’t sell a pile of products or sign up a ton of friends to do the same, the odds are that you’ll end up losing money, no matter how hard you work, especially if you take out loans to build your “business.”

The founders of multi-level marketing schemes always make a lot of money. Some of their friends become wealthy, too. But 99% of those who sell the products, whether cosmetics or dietary supplements, lose money. That’s worse than a conventional pyramid scam, which fleeces only nine out of every 10 people involved.

Now, imagine that you’re a poor country. The international financial institutions (IFIs) promise that, if you follow a simple formula, you, too, will become a wealthy nation. In a fit of desperation or madness, you take out loans from those same IFIs and commercial banks, invest in building up your export industries, and cut back on government regulations. Then you wait for the good news.

But of course, there’s a catch. You have to sell a staggering number of exports to actually make money. Meanwhile, you have to repay those loans, while covering the compounding interest payments that accompany them. Soon you’re caught in a debt trap and falling ever further behind the wealthy countries of the north. The main winners? The corporations that flooded into your country in search of tax incentives, cheap labor, and lax manufacturing and mining regulations.

The nation-states that founded the modern global economy have indeed made tons of money, as have some of their friends and allies. Despite the devastation of World War II, for instance, Japan was able to scramble up the ladder again to join the treehouse club of powerful nations. Meanwhile, in a single generation, South Korea’s economy was transformed from the per capita gross domestic product of a Ghana or Haiti in 1960 into one of the world’s most powerful by the 1980s. In Latin America, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica all managed to join South Korea in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a collection of the planet’s 38 most prosperous countries.

But in 2023, there’s a catch to climbing that ladder into the industrialized world. As the board of directors of the club of the wealthy points out, the classic ladder of development, industrialization itself, has become rickety and ever more dangerous. After all, it requires energy traditionally supplied by fossil fuels, now known to radically heat up the planet and endanger the very survival of humanity. Today, countries aspiring to join the charmed circle of the wealthy can no longer hope to climb that ladder in any usual fashion, thanks in part to the carbon-neutrality pledges virtually all nations made as part of the Paris climate accord.

The Global South is divided on how to respond. For instance, as the world’s second-largest consumer of coal and third-largest consumer of oil, India wants to grow in the old-fashioned fossil-fuelized way, becoming the last one up that ladder, even as its rungs are disintegrating. Other countries, like renewables-reliant Uruguay and carbon-neutral Suriname, are exploring more sustainable paths to progress.

Either way, with global temperatures setting ever more extreme records and inequality worsening, poor countries face their last shot at following South Korea and Qatar into the ranks of the “developed” world. They may fail, along with the rest of us on this overheating planet, or perhaps one or two might get lucky and make it into the club. However, with some clever negotiating, judicious leveraging of resources, and a lot of solidarity, it’s just possible that they could team up to rewrite the very rules of the global economy and achieve a measure of prosperity for all.

Growing Inequality

The boosters of globalization point to a steady decline of inequality among nations between 1980 and 2020, largely because of the explosive economic growth of China and other Asian countries like Vietnam. However, those boosters often fail to mention two important facts: in 2020, such inequality was still roughly the same as it had been in 1900 when colonialism was in full swing. Meanwhile, in recent decades, inequality within countries has skyrocketed. Since 1995, in fact, the top 1% of the wealthiest among us have accumulated 20 times that of the bottom 50%.

The Covid pandemic only made matters worse. According to one estimate, it threw 90 million people into extreme poverty, while increasing the wealth of billionaires more rapidly in just two pandemic years than in the previous 23 years combined.

And mind you, the super-rich no longer reside only in the prosperous “north.” China and India now have the most billionaires after the United States. The consolidation of obscene wealth alongside abject poverty is one reason inequality has risen more rapidly within countries than between them.

But something else strange is happening. In addition to making the ladder of fossil-fuelized industrialization more difficult to climb, climate change has been pushing the architects of the global economy to rethink their animus toward state intervention. Accelerating as it is due to a fundamentalist faith in markets, climate change may also be delivering the coup de grace to neoliberalism.

Climate Debts

During the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing century and a half of global economic expansion, the countries of the North grew wealthy by exploiting oil, natural gas, and coal. In doing so, they pumped trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Poorer countries generally supplied the raw materials for that “miracle of progress” — at first, involuntarily thanks to colonialism and then more-or-less voluntarily through trade.

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From 1751 to 2021, the United States was responsible for fully one-quarter of all carbon emissions, with the members of the European Union in second place at 22% (followed by China, India, Japan, Russia, and other major powers). On the other hand, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Oceania have collectively contributed only a tiny fraction of those emissions over time. Of the existing carbon budget — the amount the world can emit without crossing the 1.5C degree red line set by the Paris climate accord — only 250 gigatons remain. That’s approximately what China alone had emitted by 2021 while muscling its way into the clubhouse of the rich and powerful.

The wealthy club members have all now embarked on transitions to “clean energy.” The European Union’s “Fit for 55” aims to reduce its carbon emissions by 55% by 2030. The Biden administration pushed through the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act to incentivize states, corporations, and individuals to move away from fossil fuels, so that the United States could become carbon-neutral by 2050. In both cases, the state is playing a much more active role in guiding the transition than would have been tolerated in the heyday of Thatcherism or Reaganism (or, today, Trumpism).

The Global South, which bears little responsibility for the climate mess the planet faces, doesn’t have the necessary billions of dollars to devote to “clean energy transitions.” So, because climate change knows no borders, in 2010, the richer countries promised to contribute $100 billion a year to fund “mitigation” (emissions reductions) in the Global South. However, that promise has proved to be — the perfect image for our overheated moment – mostly hot air. Ten years later, according to Oxfam, the wealthy nations have managed to mobilize at most $25 billion in real assistance annually.

Meanwhile, climate change is wreaking havoc in the here and now. Though Canadian wildfires and European heat waves have dominated the climate headlines in the north this summer, the effects of climate change are actually being disproportionately felt south of the equator. According to one estimate, by 2030, developing countries will be hit with climate bills of between $290 billion and $580 billion annually.

Last year, rich countries made another pledge of money, this time to a “loss and damage fund” to compensate poor nations for the ongoing impacts of climate change. Those funds, however, have yet to come into existence, while the desperately poor countries of the Global South await the next round of climate negotiations — in oil-rich Dubai of all places — to find out how much is involved, from whom, and for whom.

Promises, promises.

So far, the poorer countries have been shaking their tin cups outside the meetings of the powerful, hoping that some loose change will eventually trickle down to them. But there may be another way.

Global Just Transition

The fossil-fuel-free future the Global North is touting depends on critical materials like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements to build electric batteries, solar panels, and windmills. Most of these essential assets are located in the south. In one of those ironies of history, the economic development of the north once again depends significantly on what lies beneath the ground (and the oceans) south of the equator. In this brave new world of “green colonialism,” the north is maneuvering to grab such needed resources at the lowest price possible in part by perpetuating for the poor the very neoliberal model of “less government” that it’s begun to abandon itself.

There’s also a Cold War twist to this tale. According to policymakers in Brussels and Washington, the “clean energy” transition shouldn’t be held hostage by China, which mines and processes many of its critical minerals (producing 60% and processing 85% of all rare earth elements). China might one day decide to shut down the supply chain of such critical minerals, a foreshadowing of which took place this summer when Beijing imposed export controls on gallium and germanium in response to a Dutch ban on certain high-tech exports to China. The Chinese leadership will undoubtedly continue out-negotiating the West to gain privileged access to what it needs for its own high-tech industries.

A new “mineral rush” is underway. The European Union (EU) is now debating a “Critical Raw Materials Act” meant to reduce dependency on Chinese inputs through more mining closer to home, from Sweden to Serbia, not to speak of more “urban mining” (that is, recycling materials from used batteries and old solar panels).

Europe is also locking in deals with mineral-rich countries in the Global South. The EU typically negotiated a trade agreement with Chile that ensures EU access to that country’s lithium supplies, while making it more difficult for Chile’s government to supply its own manufacturers with cheaper inputs.

Washington, meanwhile, put a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure that electric car manufacturers source at least 40% of their batteries’ mineral content from the United States or U.S. allies (read: not China). That percentage is to rise to 80% by 2027. Washington is not only scrambling to secure its own critical minerals, but forcing allies to cut ties with China and compete for sources elsewhere in the world.

Such an effort to “secure supply chains,” while a blow to China, represents a possible boon for the Global South. A country like Chile, which commands so much of the lithium market, can theoretically negotiate more than just a good price for its product. It could leverage its mineral riches to acquire valuable technology, intellectual property, or greater control over the overall supply chain. Collectively, those mineral suppliers could also take a page from the playbook of the oil producers. Indonesia, for instance, has already floated the idea of a nickel cartel.

Such strategies, however, face a threefold challenge. The United States and Europe are already boosting mining at home to become more self-sufficient. Then there’s the prospect that such minerals will be rendered obsolete by technological advances, much as the United States created a synthetic substitute for rubber when supplies became tight during World War II. Scientists are now racing to invent electric batteries that don’t depend on lithium or cobalt.

Even more worrisome are the environmental consequences of such mining. The countries of the Global South could indeed use “ladders” made of lithium, cobalt, or nickel to climb into the club of the wealthy. But they would be hard-pressed to do so without creating “zones of sacrifice,” destroying communities and ecosystems around mineral extraction sites.

So, let’s take a fresh look at the cartel idea. Venezuela originally proposed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (or OPEC) as a method of reducing oil consumption. The problem Venezuela grasped 70 years ago was not just the low price of what the then-Venezuelan oil minister called “the devil’s excrement” but the unsustainable nature of a global dependency on fossil fuels. OPEC was to help conserve resources. Could a mineral cartel serve that very purpose?

Breaking the Cycle

The central problem facing the planet is not just carbon emissions and climate change. They’re both, in their own fashion, symptoms of an even larger crisis of the overconsumption of resources, including energy. Consider one minor example: the amount of stuff Americans buy at Christmas and then return without using amounts to $300 billion a year. That’s more than the economic output of Finland, Peru, or Kenya.

That gives “shop ’til you drop” a new meaning.

Rather than building a different ladder to climb into prosperity, the countries of the Global South could take the unprecedented challenge of human-induced climate change as an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the global economy. Instead of dreaming of consuming at the same rate as the Global North — inconceivable given the planet’s shrinking resource base — the Global South could use its mineral leverage to effectively lessen inequality on a planet-wide basis. In practice, that would mean forcing the North’s middle class to begin trimming its consumption by reducing the supply of fossil-fuel energy to the addicted.

In a referendum in Ecuador last month, its citizens voted to keep the oil in the Yasuni National Park beneath the ground. A number of countries in Oceania — Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Tonga — have similarly endorsed a “non-proliferation treaty” for fossil fuels that would phase out oil, gas, and coal production. Great Britain and the EU have considered rationing plans for fossil fuel.

Nor can the rich be allowed to sit on their billions while the planet burns. The wealth taxes that some countries have implemented — and others like the United States are now considering — would go a long way toward shifting funds from the super-rich to the greatest victims of climate change and biodiversity loss. Consider this slogan for our changing times: more butterflies, fewer billionaires.

The global economy is essentially on a downward debt spiral for the poor and an upward consumption spiral for the rich. In short, it’s a rigged game. The solution is not to usher a few lucky countries into the world of unsustainable excess, which would just be a new version of green colonialism.

Rather, it’s time to flip the game upside down and end that very green colonialism by requiring a southernization of the north — forcing the latter to reduce its consumption of energy and other resources to meet that of the Global South. The inequality of industrialization got us into this crisis. Addressing that inequality is the only way out.

Copyright 2023 John Feffer