Some memorable reads from 2020

Although my family has been healthy and more fortunate than most through 2020, this was a year that deprived many not only of their health, wellbeing, jobs, or even their lives, but also of many of the pleasures of life. Of travel. Of meeting--outside of zoom--with friends. Of enjoying public spaces. This past year did not do wonders for my ‘productivity’ on most counts. But it did not take away my reading material, or my ability to enjoy reading at great length. I read plenty of lousy things along with the great things, but below are some of the highlights of my reading year and, as always, I’m keen for recommendations from anyone out there.
 

My “work” and “pleasure” books often overlap. This was particularly the case for a whole group of things I’ve read since March with environmental themes.

Most recently, I read Chris Otter’s Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology. Otter studies the way that foodstuffs--meat, sugar, and what--and human bodies--their metabolism and wellbeing--were altered as industrializing Britain’s habits and patterns of consumption took it far beyond its boundaries in a quest for food and the things to sustain food. Whole ecosystems--in South America, the Canadian Prairies, India, Australia--were altered to feed Britons, whose changing diets, and the technologies necessary to sustain those diets, literally altered the planet. Otter’s book not only makes a huge intervention about the relationship between food and ecology, but links this relationship to social inequality.

Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District, takes readers to an ostensibly more bucolic environment. I’ve spent a great deal of time in England’s Lake District, and enjoyed this take on attempts to build community and find meaning out of a discomfort with the sweeping global changes that Otter described in Diet for a Large Planet. The book brings together histories of families, social networks, movements, and environments.

Even more enjoyable was Patrick Barham’s Badgerlands: The Twilight World of Britain’s Most Enigmatic Animal. Barkham takes readers through a bit of the history of human’s interactions with badgers--spoiler: they have not always been regarded as cute, cuddly, and worthy of protection. But most fascinatingly, he describes his travels around Britain meeting individuals who have become fascinated by and invested in the wellbeing of these animals. Finally, the book offers a snapshot of the intense debates in Britain over the past decades about whether badgers need protecting or destroying, because of their contested role in spreading bovine tuberculosis.

Thomas Lekan studies a very different ecosystem and set of issues in Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti. Lekan examines the involvement of German zookeeper and conservationist Bernhard Grzimek in redefining for Germans and the world the value of the Serengeti ecosystem in Tanzania. Grzimek’s advocacy created a history of Western investment in Tanzania’s protected areas and wildlife that endures to the present, but steamrolled other historical uses of the Serengeti’s landscape and human-scape, and represented real hubris, informed, Lekan tells us, both by West Germans’ post-World War II history, and East Africa’s history of colonialism.

One of my grad school advisors, Tabitha Kanogo, published a short biography of Wangari Maathai in Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa series. Maathai was a Nobel Prize-winning Kenyan conservationist, and Kanogo puts her environmentalism and feminism center stage. The book is not only a great account of Maathai’s life, but also takes readers through some of the most important developments in Kenya’s history over the past century.

Grad school colleague, Bathsheba Demuth, wrote Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. I hugely enjoyed this incredibly well-written and very moving history of the people, animals, and relationships that cross over national boundaries past and present in the Arctic. I’m excited to re-read this book in the spring, when students in my environmental history class read it as a case study.

The last of the environmental-themed books that numbered among this year’s favorites was James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Scott draws on the last couple of decades of scholarship of early peoples and states to get at issues that anthropologists and others have previously raised about the origins of human settlement, hierarchy, and state-formation. Scott suggests that agriculture might have bound people less because of the bounty it represented, than because of the power it--and grains in particular--gave the powerful to consolidate their authority. This very thought-provoking read, both because and in spite of Scott’s anarchist vantage point, is another one I’m having students read in the spring.

I had a hard time keeping my “favourites” among the African history books I read the past year this short, but here’s my attempt.

In my many visits to Kenya, I’ve ridden, dodged, and watched the ubiquitous matatus (minivans that serve as mass transit). Kenda Mutongi’s Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi is a phenomenal history of the rise of the matatu, and charts public transit in Nairobi from the segregation-stained days at the end of British rule through entrepreneurial attempts by matatu owners to occupy or create markets for mass movement. The book documents strikes, organizational leadership, commuter experiences, and much more.

Paul Lovejoy uses his book Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions to argue that West African jihads on the Sahel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should take their place alongside the French and American and Haitian Revolutions of the same period for their world history significance. Lovejoy argues that many jihads or their leadership were at least partly responding to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and played a role in contesting--at least for people regarded as a part of the words of places like the Sokoto Caliphate--the endurance of that system. He also documents the role of enslaved people from areas affected by the jihads in leading anti-slavery risings in the Americas. I include this book although I think the topic and argument was somewhat let down by the editing, writing style, and density in some places. Its claims are definitely deserving of a broad audience.

Jacob Dlamini’s The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police was an intriguing meditation on memory, violence, and the logic of South Africa’s apartheid government, as it compiled details--sometimes exhaustive, sometimes contradictory--on the lives of its critics and opponents. Dlamini launches his investigation through, as his title suggests, a document or set of documents known as the Terrorist Album.

Historian Wendy Laura Belcher translated The Life of Walatta-Petros, a seventeenth century text about Walatta-Petros, an Ethiopian saint from the same era. I had previously read the full-length version, with extensive annotations and beautiful illustrations, but my students and I read the concise edition. The Life is a spectacular window into Christianity in seventeenth century Ethiopia, the lives of women, and the political dynamics of the African kingdom.

Many non-historians might be familiar with the history of the Congo during the nineteenth and early twentieth century through Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Africanist Robert Harms approaches the history of the Congo basin and its surroundings from a different direction in Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa. Harms’ magnificent book explores the final few decades of the nineteenth century through the interactions of traders, explorers, and political powerbrokers. This book also moves more from east to west, charting connections with the East African coast and Indian Ocean world. Like King Leopold’s Ghost, this is designed to be accessible to a wider audience.

A few other non-fiction things stood out this year.

With students, I read Stuart Hall’s memoir, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Hall was a British cultural theorist, and his moving memoir is a window not just into the intellectual circles in which he moved and that he helped to shape, but into a life lived, as the title suggests, between the Caribbean and Britain.

But my favourite memoir of the year was Sisonke Msimang’s beautiful Always Another Country. Msimang grew up in the community of South African exiles living in Lusaka, her father part of the African National Congress’ External Mission. Her memoir is a child’s and young woman’s perspective of the last decades of apartheid--seen from Lusaka, Nairobi, Canada, and the U.S.--and the first decades of South Africa that emerged from it. It was beautifully written and moving.

Also related to South Africa was a memoir/history from Larry Writer, Pitched Battle: in the Frontline of the 1971 Springbok Tour of Australia. Writer documents how the Australian anti-apartheid movement targeted the South African rugby team’s 1971 tour. For anyone still stubborn enough to think that sports and politics first became unnaturally entwined by Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, this should be an eye opener, particularly because the determined methods of the anti-apartheid protesters and the brutal response of authorities resemble the politics of our own era.

Distant from most of my reading about Africa and European history was Amy Offner’s Sorting out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. This elegant book focused on Colombia, and how disillusioned New Dealers took their expertise in development abroad on a quest for privatization in Latin America. American internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s is usually associated with attempts to export social democracy, but Offner shows how this was not always the case. Colombia became a proving ground for the privatization, austerity, and hostility toward social democracy that neoliberals later enshrined in the U.S.

I particularly enjoy historical scholarship on areas and periods I know less about when historians master the ability to capture a place and a time in its various dimensions. Gyan Prakash accomplishes this in Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point. The turning point in question is India’s “Emergency,” and what it meant for Indian democracy, but Prakash interweaves details of the country’s universities, automobile manufactures, sterilization campaigns, and more to create a lasting impression of the circumstances in which Indira Gandhi left her fateful marker on India’s historical trajectory.

I read three very different California-themed books. The first was Jim Newton’s Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown. Regular readers of this blog--I assume one or two might exist--will know that if he knew I existed, I would be Jerry Brown’s nemesis. This biography is nonetheless far better than others that have been produced about California’s four-term governor in recent years. While still on balance fairly uncritical in its approach, it does a really nice job of situating Brown’s life and career against the backdrop of California’s twentieth century history. In addition to learning much about Brown, readers will gain insights into cultural, economic, political, and other trends in California.

My colleague William Bauer takes a very different approach to California’s past in California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History. Using oral history projects from the New Deal era, Bauer writes a history of California that upends the usual benchmarks of time and place and source material by letting the Indigenous participants in the oral history projects, their memories, their myths, their names, and their paths guide us through the state we thought we knew. I particularly enjoyed this because many of the places Bauer and his narrators explain are ones in the northern half of the state that have played some role in my life.

The final read was also “personal,” in that northern California has been badly ravaged by wildfires in the past years. These fires are bigger, hotter, and less seasonal versions of the ones that forced my family’s evacuation on multiple occasions as a child. We thankfully had a home in the woods to return to on each occasion, unlike the residents of Paradise, California. Alistair Gee and Dani Anguiano shed light on the havoc the Camp Fire wreaked on many of the town’s residents in Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy. The book profiles a tragedy, but also the lives of people in rural and suburban northern California.

My fiction reads for the year ranged from some really superb things below, to lousy fiction I used to while away the tedium of quarantine.

Tade Thompson’s Rosewater was a sci-fi piece set in Nigeria around a team of government agents and scientists dealing with the presence of an alien biodome that has embedded itself in Nigeria’s soil. I don’t read a ton of sci-fi these days, and so I’m not sure how this measures up to other things in the genre, but I enjoyed the characters and the premise, and hope to get to the second two installments of the trilogy it inaugurates during 2021.

I enjoyed Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze when it came out some years back. The Shadow King is, if anything, better. Along with The Dragonfly Sea, this was probably the most elegantly written of the fiction I read this year. The novel focuses on Ethiopian women involved in resisting the Italian invasion in 1935. Memory, photography, and the weight of histories, personal and political alike, that different women from across Ethiopian society carried with them into the tumult of the ‘30s make the book an intense read.

Words like “lyrical,” “beautiful,” and “poetic” get overused to the point of meaninglessness by reviewers. But Yvonne Adhiambo Ouwor’s The Dragonfly Sea was all of those things, and the best novel I read this year. I don’t generally dog-ear novels the way I do books I’m using for research, but did so with this one, finding passages that elegantly captured a perspective, a fictional embodiment of some historical or contemporary event, or were just simply too perfect not to revisit. Set on Pate, and island off the coast of Kenya, the novel follows a young woman beyond the far reaches of the Indian Ocean, where she serves as the embodiment of a China-Africa relationship that slumbered for centuries. Her island community disrupted by Kenya’s participation in the War on Terror, studenthood in China, and the oceanic voyages all make for a magnificent novel.

Water is also at the heart of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Set in a dystopian future (maybe 2021 at the rate we’re going) in which water is a commodity worth killing for in the arid American west, the novel imagines the power that state water agencies would wield, the black market trade around the natural resource and its unnatural uses, and the havoc this would inflict on its characters. From a literary standpoint the book doesn’t have the virtues of some of those above, but it’s a good read.

My book club chose Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for one of the year’s reads. This poetic novel-that-reads-like-and-sort-of-is-a-memoir dealt with coming of age, migration, generation, and sexuality, in a way that made the author’s previous work as a poet entirely unsurprising. Well worth it.

At a job talk in the English department, someone mentioned Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. The short, powerful novel satirizes the self-help genre, while taking readers through in a moving way through its protagonist’s life story, and the paths taken and not taken.

Peace Adzo Medie’s His Only Wife explored the dynamics of family, social class, marital expectations, and womanhood in contemporary Ghana. In many ways unremarkable in its plot, this was nonetheless a fast-paced read that created a strong sense of pace and both a good central character and supporting “cast.”

I wanted to like Jonathan Coe’s Middle England more than I actually did. I can’t decide if it was the book that didn’t do as much for me as the earlier two installments in Coe’s fictional postwar Britain--The Rotter’s Club and The Closed Circle--or if I just didn’t like the characters as they had aged. The book was also billed as the novel to capture Brexit era Britain, and that didn’t feel quite right either. So it’s on here partly out of nostalgia for a return to characters who’ve been sitting unremembered on the shelf for a decade and a half, but also because some of the moments of absurdity Coe writes into his characters frequently bumbling lives make the book enjoyable, even if not the thing to sum up Britain’s 2020 zeitgeist.

There were a few books this year that I was particularly anticipating. One of them was Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi. In this epic, Ngugi retold the Gikuyu founding narrative in grand style. There were places where I felt things fell a little flat, or were a bit anachronistic, but even so The Perfect Nine was fantastic in capturing the energy of a world and society being made anew against a Kenyan ecoscape smoldering with magic and myth and history and human presence.

Determined to have students in my spring class read a novel, I decided on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, widely heralded as a novel that captures the dynamics of the Anthropocene. It certainly did a marvelous job of capturing a world of people on the move, willingly and otherwise. That same world is undergoing rapid environmental change, and Ghosh takes readers right to the places where these things meet.

In some ways, however, I enjoyed even more Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, set in the Sundarbans on the Indian coast. Also a candidate for class assignment, it felt a little too long and a little less on the nose, but it actually introduces some of the characters--better fleshed out--who make appearances in Gun Island. The book revolves around homecomings of various sorts, scientific study of an ecosystem in flux, and the power of the environment--amplified by human meddling--to wash away whole worlds.

The year isn’t over, and I’m currently alternating between Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age and a volume edited by three historians, Global White Nationalism: From apartheid to Trump, both of which are very promising. But in the meantime, any and all recommendations for 2021 are welcome!

Northern California voters should call time on deadbeat Doug LaMalfa and his dead-end denial

I haven’t lived in northern California for quite a few years, but I’ve been back visiting my parents this autumn. We hiked in Lassen Volcanic National Park and logging roads in Oak Run, picnicked on and kayaked from the beach at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, and sat beside the waters of Clover Creek as they ran past my parents’ house.



But alongside the beauty of the north state were signs of the toll that ecological change is taking on the region. I teach environmental history next door in Nevada. Often when I teach about the origins, trajectory, and consequences of anthropogenic--man-made--climate change, the factors and trends seem massive, impersonal, and even abstract: industrialization, agricultural revolutions, energy transitions, ecological imperialism, the nature-culture rupture.

But the emerging effects of climate change are written across the landscape of the north state, more visible here, perhaps, because these are still the places I know best. These effects of anthropogenic climate change were visible in the dry meadows and bare peaks in Lassen, and in the charred hills to the east of the park and the scorched shores of Whiskeytown Lake west of Redding. They were visible in the too-dry, dusty logging trails through the hills, and in the dead stands of pines, made vulnerable to bark beetles by declining precipitation. They will become more visible when winters come, because the long-term trends in this part of California--as distinct from changes in weather from one year to the next--mean that winters are considerably warmer and drier, and bring far less snow, than when I was a child.

The fires that burn hotter and faster and further, over a season that now extends over half of the year, destroy landscapes essential to timber and tourism, essential in turn to the north state’s economy. They also consume forests that, if left standing and cared for, serve as carbon sinks, playing a role in mitigating some consequences of climate change. The shrinking snowpack on California’s ranges will have serious impacts on water, and the various forms of life, and economic and social potential that flow from it in the state.

The scale of these problems for California as a whole, and the north state in particular, demand leadership on a similar scale. Sadly, the north state’s political leaders have been found seriously wanting. Congressman, former state senator, and former state assemblyman Doug LaMalfa is the figure who most clearly represents the inadequacy of the north state’s representation in Sacramento and Washington. LaMalfa is known for his large stature, but when measured by the scale of his imagination, intellect, and ability to deliver for the north state, he is a pint-sized poster child for the deadbeat, dead-end politics of denial.

His campaign signs have littered the north state’s highways and byways for nearly two decades, featuring a cowboy hat and his signature “He’s one of us!” slogan. The identity of the “us” is never made quite explicit, but it’s likely a jab at the diversity and supposed decadence associated with the southern two-thirds of the state. It’s certainly not the case that most of the “us” in the north state are wealthy farmers who receive massive government subsidies while railing at forms of public expenditure that benefit the majority.

LaMalfa’s slogan is a repackaging of a dog whistle in the form of an argument about the exceptionalism of the north state, and a claim that the work that other representatives seek to undertake in Sacramento and D.C.--to address economic inequality, to combat climate change, to democratize institutions, and to ensure Americans have access to healthcare and education--has no bearing on the lives of northern Californians.

In reality, of course, rural communities in the north state are buffeted by the same ills that afflict our society at large. In the small town where I grew up, there were exceptionally strong bonds, and community pride--something that can be equally true in the urban neighborhoods of other regions. However, there was also strife within households, and between neighbors. Some of that strife was violent. Families were affected by drug abuse and addiction, job losses, poor access to healthcare, and dated physical and institutional infrastructure. Law enforcement was conspicuous primarily by its indifference. In LaMalfa’s telling, these problems are urban phenomena, with no bearing on the north state. But there is no shame in recognizing that these ills--with their wider, structural causes--affect the north state as well as other parts of the state and country, and there is no shame in demanding representatives who propose to do something about this.

For all the complaints on the political right about the supposed “political correctness” and “cancel culture” of the left, it is representatives like LaMalfa who have perfected the politics of grievance-mongering and the impotent whine. He and other north state representatives are not wrong to claim that this region of the state is frequently neglected or marginalized in the course of big conversations about the state’s future, trajectory, and needs. But their politics, and the lengthy careers they have made out of impotent whining, have done more than anything else to ensure that nothing about the north state’s relationship with California as a whole changes.

LaMalfa and his brethren--the Dahles, Jim Nielsen, and in earlier times, Wally Herger, Sam Aanestad, and Ted Gaines--make careers serving as yes-men and -women for Republican leadership in Washington and Sacramento, and No votes for anything important to California’s long-term future. They sign oaths and pledges that tie their hands when it comes to raising revenue and combating climate change, forswearing the use of their thinking skills and denying themselves the opportunity to respond to events.

And they deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. As the Carr and Camp Fires tore across his district, LaMalfa gibbered that he “didn’t buy” human-made climate change. Over the short and long term alike, climate change will mean more of these fires that devour communities, timber resources, and tourism infrastructure. This will translate--absent intervention--into relocations, job loss, and the disintegration of whole industries. Over the long term the consequences are scarier still, and extend to transformations in temperature, rainfall, and landscapes on such a scale that the viability of whole modes of rural production will be called into question.

Rural economies dependent on resource extraction or production are particularly dependent on whatever forms of ecological equilibrium allow the maintenance of conditions essential to the continuity of those resources. In fifty years, the regions where LaMalfa grows rice might no longer be prime agricultural land. The same changes that might make his rice farms a thing of the past will affect every other industry in northern California that depends on the land. The disappearance or migration of whole ecological zones--and with them the modes of production they are capable of sustaining--should be a truly terrifying prospect. They could portend genuine economic and social upheaval of a sort people in this country have not previously been forced to consider.

But LaMalfa lashes out at his critics for peddling a "climate change agenda." What he and the deadbeats, dead-enders, and deniers miss, is that climate change is not an agenda: it is a reality. And failure to confront this reality is dangerous indeed. For all the talk among the dead-enders and deniers about scientists cooking the books in some implausibly global conspiracy, most of the climate scientists' predictions from decades past are unfolding on schedule.

LaMalfa may occasionally shake the can in D.C. for relief for fire victims. But if his politics remain the gold standard for the north state, the numbers of those victims will mount, while the threat from fires and drought will grow. You can't be a part of developing solutions to a massive, planetary problem, with particular local ramifications, if you aren't prepared to understand the causes of the problem, which in this case are forms and scales of consumption, production, and emission that are unsustainable if unreformed.

Another significant example of the dead-enders' intransigence revolves around the ongoing, and so-far futile quest to see a University of California campus situated in the north state. A UC campus is as big as it gets when it comes to public investment in a region. It brings jobs as well as visitors. It forges industry and institutional connections that stand to benefit the host region with other places and people. It cultivates and empowers local talent, and gives that talent a reason to stay. It diversifies economies that, particularly given the ecological change we face, are particularly vulnerable.

When community members revived the idea of a north state UC about five years ago, they emphasized the potential importance of degrees in life sciences, technology, and environmental studies for a campus situated in the north state. Such a proposal could see not just the creation of a region-altering campus in northern California, but one which would be well situated to ensure that its researchers and students were on the frontlines of seeking ways to combat climate change and its negative consequences, ensuring that the studies, solutions, and people involved were rooted in the north state.

However, this kind of massive and beneficial investment from the state remains unlikely when the region's representatives, whether in Sacramento or Congress, staunchly oppose the renewal of public funding for universities (funding relative to the student population has collapsed over the past decades thanks to Republican 'no' votes in Sacramento, particularly). Securing this kind of investment for the north state would require political leadership that was less interested in whining and denying, and more interested in the collective effort of governing California. Federal funding is hugely important to research on UC campuses, and it would take a better advocate than anyone who has represented the north state in many decades to unlock more of that potential.

The behavior over decades by LaMalfa and his Republican colleagues--starving California's most important public institutions that serve the children of Republican families as well as Democratic families, and benefit the whole state through the research they support--has ensured that the north state's representatives are marginal and impotent when it comes to influencing investment and development in the state and in Congress.

Republican voters in the north state may not agree with everything that the Democrats running in this election represent, but Audrey Denney (challenging LaMalfa) and Elizabeth Betancourt (challenging Meghan Dahle) would give the north state a seat at the table, and voices that take seriously the challenges the region faces. Legislative Democrats--who dominate Sacramento and are poised to exert even more power in Congress--would be more likely to heed the calls for investment if they come from legislators like Denney and Betancourt who are prepared to participate in the shared project of governance, than they currently do the dead-ender whining, hypocrisy, and denial that are the only tunes LaMalfa, Dahle, and Co seem to know.

I'm no longer a north state resident. But at some level, this region will always be home. And I hope, as I continue to return here in the years to come, that it will remain recognizable as such. But more important still are the living in and growing up in the region today. These are the people whose futures are most imperiled by ecological catastrophe, social and economic inequality, and the absence of collective investment. North state votes have excellent candidates in Denney and Betancourt, and I hope they turn the page on a dismal political chapter for the region.

Governor Sisolak, if "home means Nevada," let's have some leadership

Photo credit

Dear Governor Sisolak,

I was heartened this spring when, in the face of an utter lack of leadership from the White House, you joined other governors in making tough decisions about how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. While Nevada is facing new challenges as case numbers rise, the state would be in an immeasurably worse place today if you had not acted to protect the health and wellbeing of its citizens, which you rightly articulated then as your top priority.

Today, however, I am deeply disappointed by your approach to picking up the pieces of our economy and society, left shattered by the impact of the global pandemic, and exacerbated by the longer-term dysfunction of Nevada’s political economy. Our state--overdependent on gaming taxes and regressive sales taxes--appears to have learned little from the 2008 recession. While earlier generations of political leadership bear responsibility for not having reconstructed our state’s political economy sooner to make it fit for the challenges of the twenty-first century, you are failing in your current responsibility to act decisively and offer leadership where others have fallen short in the past.

The current proposals for the special legislative session involving sweeping budget cuts to education, health, and human services to make up the budget shortfalls created by the pandemic’s impact represent a calculated decision to shirk that responsibility. They instead ensure that the people least well prepared to do so bear the greatest burdens. These are precisely the areas that should be protected from budget cuts occurring in the midst of a public health and economic crisis that already inflicts the greatest harm on the most vulnerable in society: the young, the old, the sick, the poor, and the precarious. As was proven during the recession, harsh austerity measures inflict long-term harm on our social fabric and the communities and individuals whose lives comprise that fabric.

Moreover, current proposals for the special legislative session depart from the deeply flawed premise that budget cuts are the only possible solution for a revenue shortfall. The profound lack of moral imagination and political will underpinning such an approach is reprehensible. And all the more so because we live in a state in which so many possess so much wealth. I recognize that there are significant barriers to overcome in overhauling the state’s political economy which was built for another era and another set of interests, but surely it ought to be incumbent on the state’s chief executive to begin that process and to do so by offering leadership.

It is time to turn the page on the narrative Nevada created for itself as a low-tax, poor-public service state. Working people here want more for themselves and for their children, and increasingly recognize that shared efforts to build a more fair and prosperous society require investment. Nevada could and should join other states in raising revenue through a state income tax. Our state’s wealthiest residents should of course pay the most, but I and other members of the middle class should also be asked to contribute more out of a recognition that many of us can afford to do so and that all of us will benefit from such collective investment.

The prosperous and overmighty mining industry remains bizarrely protected from contributing a fair share of its wealth to the common good, something you and legislators could begin to address through initiating constitutional reform. I have seen concerned citizens, civil society groups, and public policy thinkers contribute a host of ideas in the past weeks upon which you and legislators could draw.

Your rejoinder, that you might consider a tax increase if it magically fell out of the sky wrapped up in red ribbon and hit you on the head, is an insult to Nevadans looking for serious leadership. Your repeated whining that raising taxes wouldn’t be “easy” misses what leadership is about. The fact that revenue from increased mining taxes wouldn’t roll in immediately is not a reason to avoid beginning the process of requiring that powerful and wealthy industry to pay its fair share. And saying you don’t think something is possible, or that you’re not going to take the initiative to begin a process is a curious hand to play in opening negotiations over a process that would undoubtedly be challenging. It is hardly one designed to generate good results.

Nevadans understand that you don’t possess a magic wand with which you can unilaterally enact these changes, nor is that what we are asking of you. But leadership involves having a point of view and advocating for a particular outcome tied to that outlook. You are currently behaving as though you are a spectator to the political process, commenting on the likelihood of things coming to pass, rather than a leading participant who has a significant ability to determine the outcome.

Moments of crisis--political, social, or economic--often highlight in the starkest possible terms already existing and intolerable inequalities, inadequacies, and structures. This crisis has brought many members of our community to its knees. It would be a stain on your legacy and leadership if you did not respond to the depth of this crisis and the underlying factors it has once again revealed, and seek to rebuild the state in a way that will shield its residents from future crises, invest in their education, enhance their life opportunities, care for those who are ill, and fund social services dedicated to the general wellbeing. We need deeper and more substantial collective investment rather than austerity.

I enthusiastically supported your general election campaign in 2018 against your dangerous opponent. But I will admit that I did not support you during the primary precisely because I feared that you lacked the vision and leadership to successfully address both the state’s chronic needs and crises like this one that are bound to affect our society and economy from time to time. I was impressed by your leadership in guiding Nevada through the early stages of the pandemic. I urge you to prove me wrong now and to give Nevadans the leadership they need and deserve. If “home means Nevada,” and if homes are made up of families, let’s start acting like a family that takes care of all of its members all of the time.

Sincerely,

Jeff Schauer

Swedish exceptionalism...that way ruin lies

The spread of COVID-19 as a global pandemic has provided many a tragic spectacle, some at intimately local levels, others at national scales. Some of these larger tragedies--the fumbled national responses in countries like the U.S. and Brazil--were eminently predictable. What else, after all, would you expect from a country like ours when it’s led by a willfully ignorant and calculatedly callous gibbering egomaniac? Trump’s own dismal failings are compounded by a healthcare system run on a for-profit basis, and the kind of fragmented response that is inevitable in such a federated, devolved state. And they are exacerbated by his cruel, calculated politicization of social distancing and mask wearing.

More interesting, in some ways, are the failings one might not have predicted. I’m particularly thinking, for personal and political reasons, of Sweden, where the government decided not to enact a national stay-at-home order or to offer widespread testing. The contrast with its neighbors--Norway and Denmark, as well as other European nations--could not be more stark. It’s a story told in exceptionally-high death rates, exceptionally-low testing levels, and a public health and governing apparatus that will, because of the foregoing, be exceptionally-poorly informed about the state of its national health, all while hemorrhaging public trust.

I should stress, before I continue, that I’m an informed observer--both of Sweden itself and the historical literature on the country--rather than an expert. But it strikes me that the particular way in which the Swedish state failed to rise to the occasion maps broadly onto the country’s subtle political crisis, as well as onto different schools of thought about the place often portrayed as the most enduring and comprehensive of the world’s social democracies.

When I use the term “social democracy,” I refer to a political philosophy, translated into governance, which argues that the traditional choice between different kinds of rights is a false one. This is a choice that has its origins in the 1920s and 1930s, when liberals in Europe and North America argued that the liberal state could successfully protect its citizens’ civil and political rights, but could not intervene to promote social and economic wellbeing without compromising those other fundamental rights. On the other hand, the Soviet Union and fascist states, in very different ways from each other, sought to protect or cultivate social and economic rights, but did so expressly at the expense of civil and political liberties.

During this period a growing number of countries began to reject this choice, effectively arguing that it was a false and misleading one for their country’s citizens. The U.S. shift in this direction in the form of the New Deal, proved only temporary. But not before it successfully gave the lie to claims that government intervention to protect people’s economic and social wellbeing would automatically give way to dictatorship and authoritarianism. Most European countries, within the next few decades, would go further than the U.S. in developing comprehensive systems of governance and political consensus designed to enshrine social democracy. Sweden was among the earliest and most thoroughgoing social democracies, and indeed Roosevelt’s New Dealers were dispatched to the country and wrote widely about its success in offering its citizens the good life without compromising their political freedoms.

Enough of this digression. There seem to be three broad schools of thought among those historians and popular writers documenting Sweden’s recent past and the country’s construction of an elaborate, comprehensive, and successful social democracy.

The first, which is an exclusively polemical one, argues that Sweden did not build a social democracy, but rather a dictatorship. Or rather, that social democracy invariably leads to a kind of bureaucratic dictatorship. In this telling--primarily by right-wing pundits in the English-speaking world--Sweden is inhabited by ten million unthinking, unfeeling drones, who stumble through their dreary, grim, irredeemable lives, slaves of a vast bureaucracy that squeezes the life out of them with its tentacles. This interpretation is primarily a cudgel used by right-wing provocateurs to frighten citizens in English-speaking countries, and to encourage them to maintain their low expectations of what an effective democratic government can accomplish in their name.

The second broad strand of thinking suggests that Sweden has indeed built a successful social democracy, but that if you want to look for the origins of this success, you must peer deeper into the mists of the Nordic past, and locate it in early-modern or even medieval forms of social solidarity, proto-democracy, and ethno-linguistic homogeneity. Occasionally, proponents of this scholarship will suggest that origins can be found in early-twentieth century features of culture or forms of social organization. But no matter the precise origins of Swedish social democracy, they are cultural and, in this telling, it would be a fruitless endeavor to seek to replicate them or learn particular lessons from them.

Thus, some Swedes tell a story of national exceptionalism rooted in culture and in different scales of solidarity and homogeneity. At its most benign, this story simply promotes a search for roots in Sweden’s early history. At its most malign, this story underpins the fascism of the far right Swedish Democrats, who argue that they are the best defenders of the Swedish welfare state precisely because they will only allow those who are properly (i.e. ethnically) Swedish to access its benefits, lest its “mongrelization” by migrants invite decline. Whatever the intentions of this narrative, and whomever the tellers, it suggests that Sweden’s social democracy is a product of and therefore works best in the context of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, or sameness.

There are any number of problematic features of this grand narrative. If we can imagine ourselves as time-travellers to 1950s or 1960s Sweden, and in conversation with the ageing, leading lights of the Social Democratic Party, which governed the country uninterrupted between 1932 and 1976, we might also imagine the response of those figures if we put to them the suggestion that they had it easy in constructing Sweden’s remarkable social democratic state because of the marvellous cultural and social homogeneity the country enjoyed.

Such a narrative would likely seem wildly misplaced to social democrats who labored between the 1910s and 1940s to build public trust in their program. It would have seemed wildly misplaced because to them for many years the differences in social class--between the middle and working classes, never mind elites--seemed at times insurmountable. And it would have seemed wildly misplaced because to them for many years the differences in occupation within those classes--between urban and rural workers--seemed unbridgeable. Their social democratic framework did not slip magically into place because of the structure of Swedish society and the elements of Swedish culture. It did so in spite of those things, and because of the hard and imaginative political work the party and its allies performed.

This particular flaw of the account of Swedish social democracy that finds origins in Swedish cultural and social exceptionalism demonstrates the limits of anachronistic historical thinking. That is, we run into problems of accuracy and interpretation when we read our own categories and interpretations of the world seamlessly back into the past. The assumption of scholars promoting this Swedish historical exceptionalism is that because their country did not confront the racial differences that have shaped the emergence or absence of social democracy in the U.S., Sweden did not confront the overriding source of social differentiation that affects nation-building and -maintenance. Racial thinking was far from absent in nineteenth and twentieth century Sweden (just ask Sami communities in the country’s north), but there were other categories that in that time and place mattered more, and social class and occupation were seen as the core and most potentially destructive divisions that social democrats needed to confront.

This flawed narrative of cultural exceptionalism, deliberately or otherwise, also seeks to generalize the origins of social democracy, and portray them as a slow, steady, organic, and perhaps even inevitable development. Such a narrative removes Swedish social democracy from its broader European and global context and also ignores how strenuously many in Sweden fought its emergence and endurance: rival political parties who bitterly contested its implementation; central bankers and industrialists who created a new Nobel Prize to undermine social democratic economic credibility; American presidents who associated it with cultures of permissiveness; neo-fascists who seek to undermine its commitment to civic rather than ethnic nationalism.

So what does all of this have to do with the Swedish response to COVID-19? The response of the government--a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, relying on votes from the centre-right Liberal and Centre parties--was to promote business as usual. It promoted this response relying on a narrative of Swedish exceptionalism. Sweden, the logic went, possessed an exceptional culture, in that natural solidarity and deeply-enshrined cultural habits would see them safely through the pandemic without the need for activist intervention from the government. Other countries might require strict guidelines and a massive testing regime. Not Sweden.

Swedes, after all social distance naturally, treasuring their personal space; frowning on small-talk on public transit; peering through apartment peepholes to avoid chance encounters with neighbours in landings or stairwells; etc. [Q: How do you identify a Swedish extrovert? A: They’re looking at your shoes!] Hi-tech workplaces would be easily converted to see some of their members work from home. Swedes could, in other words, do what no others could, and ease through the pandemic unscathed: not by virtue of harnessing the country’s robust healthcare structure, powers of redistribution, or public trust for proactive measures, but by simply being Swedish.

But of course there is the third way of thinking about the origins and trajectory of social democracy in Sweden. It involves not the dishonest abuse of Swedish history and contemporary society to frighten FOX viewers and Daily Mail readers. Nor does it involve imagining Swedish social democracy as emanating from an ethno-cultural past (whether or not the invocation of that past is designed to accomplish sinister ends).It involves thinking about social democracy in Sweden, as elsewhere, in several ways.

As particular, in the sense that it grew out of specific periods with their own pressures and contexts, global as well as national. As contingent, in the sense that the social democratization of Sweden was not inevitable, and that the project can be undone. As the product of labor and argument and contestation and battles lost as well as won. And as ideological, in the sense that it was motivated by specific ideals about how to organize the relationship between politics and economics to make a better world.

The creation of the country’s robust social democratic framework required alliances between the Social Democratic Party and the agrarian party that has since shifted to the right. It required a form of corporatism that saw the state referee durable agreements between workers’ and employers’ associations. It required resisting the orthodoxy which saw other left parties remain tied to representing only particular classes, with the economic stasis or inflexibility in the face of global changes that sometimes came to imply. And it required the active and consistent reimagination of the political and economic modernity with which the party was able to brand itself and its political work for decades.

Governing with a conscious nod toward this historical interpretation would have seen social democrats turn not toward cultural exceptionalism. Rather, it would have been based on high levels of trust by the public in the state; on considerable state capacity; on a welfare structure comparatively well-endowed when it comes to weathering a crisis of this sort; on powers of redistribution; and on a tradition of state activism in pursuit of the greater, public good. 

This makes the current Social Democrat government’s decision to forswear the use of the systems and structures at its command to address a dangerous pandemic all the more tragic. It is a decision which, consciously or otherwise, relies on a misplaced narrative of cultural and social exceptionalism. And it is in keeping with the state of the Social Democratic Party, which struggles to govern in the spirit of its predecessors.

But there’s a reason it is out of practice. For the last six years or so the Social Democratic Party has governed Sweden with its coalition partners as a minority government, reliant now particularly on votes from the right. The neo-fascists in the far right Swedish Democratic Party fulminate in vain despite their comparatively strong electoral performance. But the centre-right parties which prop up left-leaning coalitions while extracting considerable concessions have figured it out: the best way to exercise power in pursuit of their aims is to do so wherever possible without assuming responsibility. [As a Californian, I am familiar with these methods: for many years the Republican Party was a small minority of the state's legislature, but it used supermajority rules to ensure that, in a state with a population growing in numbers and complexity, it could control the budget and taxation process and starve the state into austerity with a mere 35% of the vote, while handing Democrats the blame for a process they couldn't control.]

The concessions their agreements with the governing parties have extracted have set Sweden on autopilot toward austerity. Not, to be sure, the dramatic, slashing kind that Britain and other countries’ right-wing parties, as well as many U.S. states governed by both parties, inflicted in the aftermath of the recession. Sweden’s path to austerity--or the Americanization of its social and economic structures, if you will--will be slower and subtler. It will be longer in the making. It will be harder to allocate blame. From day to day the changes might seem so small as to be hardly worthy of consideration.

There might not be a direct line to draw between historical and contemporary narratives of cultural exceptionalism, the strange approach of the current Swedish government to combating a global pandemic, and the country’s broader crisis of social democracy. But it is hard for me to believe they are unrelated. Generations of social democrats in Sweden have built something important: a comprehensive social democratic framework that offers the country's citizens an impressive quality of life, and which served for many years as a durable example of civic nationalism in action. My fear is that the response to the pandemic offers some insight into how and why it might crumble.

Changing Mascots Doesn't Erase History

UCI's laid-back mascot

I expect that I'm not alone in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) community in having received a furious email from a campus alum, angry about the university's decision to remove a statue of its mascot from a central location and to consider looking again at the future of the mascot. The writer quotes Orwell, alleges that this all amounts to some kind of historical erasure and enforced groupthink, and suggests that it is a prelude to the mass censorship of films, books, etc.

Sadly, I suspect that university administrators who took the commendable decision to remove the statue, are receiving a considerable volume of this kind of emotionally overwrought drivel in their inboxes. Pressure from alumni was, after all, one of the things they cited when they resisted lobbying from students, faculty, and community members to change the mascot several years ago. 

The mascot, for the uninitiated, was first a canine confederate soldier, and then a frontiersman, still in confederate garb and still known by the rebel designation. Proponents of the mascot argued that the "rebel" referred exclusively to the academic insurgency against the power center in the north of the state that UNLV's founding represented. But of course several questions remain. Why is it necessary to invoke the struggle of the Civil War and to associate with the white supremacist South in order to make that point? And why does a frontiersman who committed horrific violence against Nevada's indigenous inhabitants represent an improvement? Why, if growing numbers of students are uncomfortable with the violence embodied in these figures, is it necessary that they be required to cheer these symbols at every campus event?

But the larger point to be made about the angry alum's complaint is that removing a statue doesn't erase history. His or her complaint is akin to that of people who say that taking down a statue to a treacherous, slave-defending rebel general in a southern city is somehow eviscerating "history."

It should first be pointed out that a confederate statue coming down does not somehow make every word of history written in a textbook about the Civil War slide off of the page into a great dustbin in the sky. Nor does replacing UNLV's mascot initiate some sinister memory wipe among nostalgic alumni or remove references to the mascot from histories of the campus. 

Statues, after all (and mascots fall into the same territory), are not "history." They are public celebrations of particular figures. They are an association of a place, a people, or an institution like a university campus with the values associated with that figure. They represent snapshots of values and symbols rather than the change over time that constitutes history. They are generally designed to encourage uncritical veneration rather than the inquisitive, critical, and open-minded approach that constitutes historical thinking. 

UNLV's decision therefore simply represents a new generation of the campus community making an informed determination about the symbols and values with which they hope to associate themselves, something entirely natural in an institution that is growing and changing alongside its city.

I, for one, applaud the university administration for removing the statue. And I hope they take the plunge and change the mascot. This set of developments is a testament both to the ways in which growing numbers of Americans are becoming conscious of the pernicious power of many of the symbols that populate our public spaces, and their relationship to troubling power structures on the one hand, and to the long-term work and activism of southern Nevadans who have been calling for this change for quite some time.

Maybe it's just because I'm an Anteater alum (Zot! Zot!), one step down in hippy-ness from my sister whose college mascot was a Banana Slug, but I can't find it in me to get worked up in defense of a mascot, particularly one that represents some nasty bits of history that demand historical inquiry but certainly don't seem worthy of veneration. Why not a roadrunner? Then UNLV could run rings around the wolfpack, since what are wolves anyway but a bunch of overgrown coyotes?

Beware Defenders of the British Empire

Periodically, those of us who study the British Empire run across an attempt, either by a colleague in the historical field, or popular writers, to resuscitate the British Empire as one of history’s “Good Things.” One of the latest comes from Richard Tombs, a British historian of France who took umbrage at, among other things, the British Labour Party’s promise in a recent election manifesto to “audit” the British Empire to better understand the relationship between colonial rule and the unstable politics of some of those parts of the world formerly ruled by Britain.

Tombs, who on the basis of his essay hasn’t read much scholarship generated in the past half century on the British Empire, decided that what was needed was an essay titled “In defence of the British Empire,” published in the Spectator.

Tombs gets quite a few facts wrong--more on this below--and uses some curious lines of logic to mount his defence of Britain’s multi-century experiment in governing vast swathes of the world without the consent of the governed.

One claim is that in Britain’s Empire, there were winners and losers. That is, some of the people over whom Britain governed benefited from the upending of older social and political relations, and the redirection of economic networks. This is true of most historical phenomena. And historians spend quite a bit of time examining the diverse experiences of colonialism, or the factors that motivated some people to cooperate with colonial rule. There is a whole swathe of scholarship--of which Tombs seems blissfully or perhaps willfully unaware--on “intermediaries.” But that hardly necessitates writing a “defence” of the British Empire. There were winners and losers in Nazi Germany, but you won’t find many people writing a “defence of fascism” for that reason. There were certainly people who benefited from the Atlantic Slave Trade, but you won’t find people who consider themselves to be serious historians writing a “defence of the Middle Passage.” Scholars study the complexities of these phenomena, but recognizing that they were complex doesn’t mean that we can’t also condemn them for the horrific violence at the heart of their project, or compel us to pen emotionally overwrought “defences” of them based more on a squealing dissatisfaction with the myth of “political correctness” than on actual knowledge of the phenomena in question.

Tomb’s other point is that, in the long run, Britain may not have benefited from having an empire. The British, he argues, may have spent more on maintaining their empire than they gained from it. This fits into a wider strand of apologist historical writing that argues that the British were bumbling, amateur colonizers; that empire was a project by do-gooders who were too piecemeal and hodgepodge in their efforts to have exploited anyone even if they wanted to.

It must firstly be said that if the British Empire was unprofitable, it was not for a want of trying. Britain fought wars to access mineral deposits or to support profitable drug-running operations. The British government provided compensation--painstakingly documented by historians--to former slave owners to ensure that introducing a modicum of justice (slavery generally gave way to other forms of unfreedom in the empire) didn’t affect the bottom line too badly. Colonial administrators expended huge effort seeking to map out the best ways to make colonies profitable. Colonial development, which Tombs pitches as a sign of British benevolence, had its origins in seeking to make the empire pay for its own exploitation.

Secondly, the “the Empire wasn’t very good at exploiting people” is not much of a defence. The fact that a burglar was only mediocre at his work, or that a murderer was inefficient in his mayhem, is highly unlikely to make the victims of said exploiters sympathetic. Tomb’s argument is akin to saying “the South may not have benefited in the long run from initiating secession and civil war in defence of slavery, so we must pen a defence of the Confederacy” or “Germans may not have benefited in the long run from embarking on the experiment in fascism with Hitler, so therefore we can’t condemn Nazism.”

Tombs then has the temerity to suggest that because some societies “asked” to join the British Empire, it can’t have been such a bad thing. I’m not quite sure what he’s referring to there, but it might be the protectorates, a particular category of colony in the Empire. To hear Tombs describe it, this world sounds like one of white fences, verdant lawns, and tea parties, where some people peered over their fence and saw how wonderful things were in neighboring British territory, and how fabulous life could be there, and so asked to pop on over to join the tea party, or to take down the fence so their grass could become as green. In reality, no instance I can think of where some territory’s leadership exercised agency in joining the Empire consisted of a free choice. The situation was generally more analogous to having your house broken into simultaneously by two burglars, the larger and better armed of whom says that if you ask the other one to clear out and accept his presence there, he won’t blow your brains out. Coercion was always essential to colonial conquest.

Similarly, Tombs cites the fact that colonial subjects fought for Britain in world wars as a sign that the empire was a grand experiment of harmonious anti-authoritarianism. This rose-tinted assessment ignores the massive and violent labour conscription during these wars, the deployment of colonial soldiers as cannon fodder, and the bargain that many colonial subjects believed themselves to be participating in when they signed up to fight for the empire. Many of them hoped that fighting for Britain would finally give them the equal status within the empire, so frequently promised in rhetoric, and so seldom delivered in reality. It also ignores the fact that many people resisted--peacefully or violently--having their co-subjects and populations being conscripted to fight for wars that had nothing to do with their own wellbeing. That Britain so resolutely refused to let the sacrifice of colonial soldiers during the wars transfer into the wellbeing that participation secured for soldiers from Britain itself was responsible for a new and more aggressive stage of anti-colonialism.

Tombs argues that because British taxpayers contributed to the upkeep of the Empire, it can’t have been too bad a thing, and claims that because Britain spent money on the “defence” of the empire, it wasn’t motivated by self-interest. The fact that imperial defence was so costly to Britain suggests that not all of the people living in its Empire were thrilled by the prospect, and that a good many of them spent a good deal of their time resisting forced incorporation into that Empire. There were moments during the Second World War when Churchill was more focused on keeping British soldiers in India to suppress anti-colonial resistance than on sending them anywhere to fight Nazis. You would hardly need to expend so much treasure and develop so many inventive forms of violence and coercion to police an empire of the willing.

Tombs’ narrative needs additional correcting. It is important to recall the sheer violence of the colonial conquest, which was actually genocidal in many places, the stout efforts of Liberal Party partisans in Australia’s History Wars notwithstanding. Tombs glosses over the example of the British theft of the Benin bronzes (he deplores the idea that they might be returned to Nigeria, from where they were plundered), suggesting it was a part of Britain’s campaign against the slave trade. But British accounts of the sack of Benin are blood-curdling in their detail of the violence and chaos the campaign embodied. Political leaders far from even remote association with the Atlantic Slave Trade--in southern and eastern Africa--and who had the temerity to resist British armed conquest were subjected to horrific violence, designed by its very brutality to shock opposition out of the system of its objects. And when it suited them, the British cooperated with agents of the slave trades they were ostensibly (by the late-19th century) committed to wiping out.

Among the destructive forces of colonialism were incidences of famine. Most famines in human history are man-made in one of two senses. Either in that people--inadvertently or otherwise--created the conditions for the absence of food. Or that the absence of food reached famine proportions because of deliberate political decisions made. The British Empire was culpable in this latter regard in famines in Ireland and India in at least three ways: in dismantling institutions for famine relief that existed in pre-colonial states; in prioritizing the supply of food to one part of its territories or the world over that part facing shortages; and in embracing during the nineteenth century a liberal political economy in which government foreswore the use of its redistributive capacities, and assumed that shortage would be rectified, if indeed it was in need of being rectified, by the all-knowing invisible hand of the market. The poor, in this formulation, were often regarded as deservingly so, by virtue of supposed social defects.

Tombs sings the praises of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, as part of a larger social democratic project, and claims that the history of these projects has been erased. This is simply untrue. The real issue may be that the histories of colonial development don’t fit well with the successes and generosity that Tombs assumes should populate them. Colonial development enterprises stemmed from several impetuses: to make the colonies more effectively pay for themselves; to make the colonies bolster a damaged British economy after two world wars; to create a space for social and scientific experimentation; and to pay some lip service to the rhetoric of trusteeship in a world where Britain’s Empire was subjected to greater international scrutiny.

Moreover, the colonial development of the interwar and postwar years is associated with what scholars call the ‘second colonial occupation.’ The changes in colonial governance and the developmentalism associated with them in the interwar years marked the deepest intrusion of colonial rule into the daily lives of colonized peoples. Colonial experts came into the bedroom, the hospital, the agricultural field, the family unit, the school, using coercive, illegitimate power to alter people’s lives without their consent. Often these interventions were based on totalizing claims about culture, landscapes, and society, utterly ignoring colonial subjects who farmed or fished or lived in the way they did based on an actual understanding of their social and ecological environments, and therefore failed spectacularly.

Predictably, Tombs cites the wonders of colonial infrastructure, but as actual scholarship on this infrastructure points out, it was built to service exploitative, extractive colonial economies. After decolonization, new nations had to expend enormous effort and seek new allies (to escape entanglements with intransigent British interests) for development in order to construct new infrastructure that allowed those nations to escape the logics of colonial infrastructure and build transportation networks--for goods and people--that reflected the actual economic needs of nations and the people inhabiting them. In cases where new governments proved slow to decolonize useless public transit infrastructure, local entrepreneurship, tolerated by national governments where it had been suppressed by colonial authorities, stepped into the breach.

There has long been a strand of pseudo-scholarship arguing that among Britain’s greatest gifts to its colonised people were the rule of law and forms of parliamentary governance. Such a claim rests on a dismal failure to understand what colonial governance actually looked like. Colonial rule in most parts of the British Empire was deeply authoritarian, divided by the mid-twentieth between a near dictatorial “Administration,” comprised of paternalistic generalists who ruled geographic fiefdoms backed by police and military might, and technical departments, which embodied aspirations of development, but were deeply intrusive, unaccountable to colonial subjects, and often saw Africa as a laboratory for cultural, social, agricultural, economic, and other forms of experimentation.

Democracy was slower to come to Britain itself than is often recognised, but Britons enjoyed far more democratic institutions than did people in their colonies, and Britons would not have been able to find the democratic features of their society in the authoritarian apparatus they bequeathed to colonies as they turned into nations. Emergency laws, state infrastructure primed to deploy violence, a mighty and penetrative executive, censorship apparatuses, winner-take-all ethnically-oriented politics, wide latitude for extralegal violence by the powerful, and contempt for the governed: these were the practises of statecraft and habits of official mind “gifted” by Britain to its colonies.

These were accompanied by the forms of violence pioneered in British and other colonial contexts. The systematic and deliberate use of torture, internment and concentration camps, the psychological violence of “rehabilitation”, forced villagization, aerial bombardment, and the logic of forced removals, and the segregation underpinning white supremacy, were all forms of coercion honed in colonial contexts. They were then transplanted between colonies, or even exported globally.

Indeed, it could be argued that from the late-nineteenth century onward, the British Empire helped to facilitate the emergence of an authoritarian international. Both within its empire and in its collaboration with other empires, Britain facilitated the globalization of authoritarian security services, intent on suppressing pro-democracy activists on multiple continents, and to disrupt the links that those activists increasingly sought to construct between the struggles of colonized and oppressed people in different parts of the world.

Tombs says that it’s “ideological” to say that the British Empire was exploitative. I’d say it’s accurate. It doesn’t require belief in a conspiracy of leftist elites intent on distorting real British history into ideological propaganda to prove as much. It simply requires reading the records that officials, settlers, and other agents of empire left behind. Historians can then--and they have, in contrast to Tombs’ rather pitiful characterization of scholarship--spill a great deal of ink exploring the reasons for that exploitative character, the wide cast of characters who benefited from the exploitation of others, the belief systems that underpinned it, the limitations to its exploitative character, or the ways in which the colonized as well as dissenters in British society resisted exploitation. The scholarship on the British Empire is vast and complex. [Tombs is an historian at a prestigious institution with one of the world’s best libraries at his fingertips, so I am not going to provide for him a bibliography, but if anyone reading this would like recommendations of scholarship dealing with any of these themes, I’d be happy to provide it.]


Tombs concludes by citing the following experience: "I remember after speaking at a school being approached by a sixth former of East-African Asian descent who told me she did not feel that her family fitted into British history. But, as I said to her, they are part of that history: she and her family saga embody one of its great themes." In that regard, at least, he is right--although not in the way that he thinks. The first South Asians living in East Africa during the colonial era were brought there to labour on the construction of a railway that was bulldozing its way through African societies alongside the violent conquest of their territory by British armed force.  In many British colonies in Africa, South Asians were subjected to fierce discrimination, to the point that the activism that brought down the British Empire in India had its origins in anti-racist organizing in South Africa. But in the calculated manner of much of colonial rule, Asians in Africa were given an elevated status relative to Africans themselves, and sometimes used as a useful category of intermediaries.

After independence, to varying degrees in East Africa, Asians found themselves subjected to new forms of discrimination that grew from resentment of their favored if still-subordinate status under British rule. In some cases their decisions to depart East Africa were the result of vicious and violent persecution. In other cases they bridled at being asked to live equally with African neighbours. But when they arrived in Britain, they suffered persecution and discrimination anew, this time from the most pro-Empire elements in British society, now furious at being asked to "walk the walk", and angry that there was actually some danger of some element of their storybook Empire--based on equal, multi-ethnic societies--becoming real.

Above all, what Tombs’ schoolboy version of history does is to mask the reality that the British Empire was at every stage of its development based on a notion of hierarchy among peoples; a hierarchy which allowed some people to rule over others and to do things to them, their societies, their economies, their cultures, and their ecologies, without their consent, in ways that they couldn’t have done in most instances to people in metropolitan Britain. Sometimes the British Empire was about unclothed and unalloyed exploitation, without any attempt to mask this reality. Sometimes it was based on the ideas that Britain and British people were more developed (sometimes based on scientific racism, sometimes on social Darwinism) than other peoples, and thereby had rights and obligations to rule those people and decide their destinies. But in each of these cases it was based on the premise that might made right, and that some people should have--by social convention or by nature itself--power over others. That hardly seems like a project worth defending, although it is certainly worth one studying.

My case for Elizabeth Warren

Nearly ten years ago Elizabeth Warren was awarded the Mario Savio Free Speech Award at UC Berkeley. When I sat down in the audience I knew only a little bit about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency Warren had created with the support of President Obama, and in which she was serving as an interim director. I did not know much about Warren.

In the next hour she laid out a cogent and historically-grounded account of the origins of the financial crisis, and outlined her conviction that if President Obama gave her the ability to work in this small corner of the vast federal government she could do important work to protect American citizens from the predatory structural forces at work in our highly unequal and unfair society.

In other words, unlike the right-wing of the Democratic Party and Republicans, Warren understood the crisis as a structural one that represented a major problem with how power and wealth were allocated in the United States, rather than one stemming from the moral failings of individuals. And unlike the center of the Democratic Party, the space claimed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden as they powered up their administration, Warren was prepared to deploy--in her own small way--the power of a democratically-elected state to tame capitalism and subordinate it to the public interest.

That evening Warren expressed her hope that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would not just serve consumers, but could be an opportunity to “show that government can do it right, can fix one part, can belong to the people.” I left the Savio lecture convinced of two things: that with Warren at its helm this small agency would punch far above its weight; and that Elizabeth Warren should someday run for president.

In as good an endorsement of the potential of her agency as she could have imagined, Republicans quickly demonstrated their terror of both the CFPB and Warren, and made it clear to the Obama administration that they would not approve her as its director. Nonetheless, Warren used her interim position to create a workable agency to pass to its first full director, and put her skills to work in hearings around the financial crisis holding bankers and too-timid Obama administration officials to account in ways that generated memorable public moments which helped to highlight the need for more concrete action and in themselves helped to generate momentum for greater regulatory reform. In watching Warren eviscerate Michael Bloomberg earlier this week, I was reminded of her grilling of Timothy Geithner, who looked like he wet his pants as Warren laid into him for failing to move forcefully enough against the financial criminality behind the recession.

I write at length about these early episodes because to my mind they--along with Warren’s work in the senate, frequently in the minority--show how well Warren understands power, something essential for whomever next occupies the Oval Office. She made clear at that lecture in Berkeley that she sweats the details, and the relationship between those details and the big picture. And that she understands the relationship between the big picture and the lives of working class and middle class people. You will not hear from her the absurd claim that most Americans love their insurance company, or that the Obama years, however much promise they contained, were some kind of golden age for the middle and working class.

There are several strands of criticism frequently directed at Warren’s campaign for the presidency. Two are critiques that you also hear directed at Bernie Sanders, namely that she hasn’t accomplished anything of substance as senator, and that her ideas are too far to the left for most Americans’ taste.

I invite the first line of critics to compare the debates between Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2007/8 with those today, or listen to Hillary Clinton’s speeches after she won the 2016 nomination. The series of debates over the last several months demonstrate that the entirety of the party is now talking about issues that were not on the table in 2007/8, or in ways that seemed politically unimaginable in 2007/8. And even if Warren or Sanders do not win this year’s nomination, it will not be possible for the eventual nominee to talk in the limited and technocratic terms that Clinton did about her ambitions.

The shift of the conversation in this direction, and the fact that even Donald Trump has to lie about his commitment to social security and welfare provisions for white Americans is a testament to the work that Warren, Sanders, a handful of other elected officials, and millions of energised Americans have done to shift political discourse and invite Americans to imagine, and then to demand, a better life with fewer of the cruelties, uncertainties, inequalities, and injustices of the broadly neoliberal world that defined the parameters of the possible from the Reagan administration on. Changing the direction of the politics of an entire country is no small accomplishment, and demonstrates how these two candidates in particular have been prepared to play a very long game.

It will certainly be the case that Republicans will seek to portray Warren’s ambitious plans for the economy, for social life in the realms of education and healthcare, for combating climate change, and for reinvigorating the labor movement behind the labor force, as radical innovations that threaten the foundations of American life. But I think that Warren will be adept at reminding Americans--and here she will have the support of her supporters and should have the support of all Democrats and many others--that there is nothing threatening or radical about such proposals. These were the elements of the New Deal, that earlier moment in our country’s history when rather than tinkering with the margins, a president determined that the public interest and the public wellbeing had to come first. This was an era in which elected officials decided that the myths told by elites about the fairytale economics of the “free market” had to be banished by the introduction of a dose of reality, and that those elites could not make government dance to their tune at the expense of the majority of Americans. It was an era, to borrow a phrase from David Goldfield, when “government was good” and did good.

In this way, Warren is clearly a social democrat. Social democracy was and is an ideology which argues that it is possible, if a democratic government works in the service of the public that trusts it with power, to create a society that is fair and equitable and maintains its democratic character. This ideology emerged at a moment in the twentieth century when it seemed only possible to live in two kinds of societies. In the first, places like the United States and Britain, government protected people’s civil and political rights (equal status before the law; the right to vote and participate in politics), but didn’t believe it possible to also guarantee people a meaningfully good or secure or healthy life. In the second, places like the Soviet Union or Germany, government sought to engineer economic and social wellbeing, either for all of its citizens or for those of its citizens who its racial laws defined as “pure,” but did so at the explicit expense of the civil and political rights which protected people from the government’s misuse of power or abuse of people’s individual dignity and personhood, something which occurred in profound and horrific ways in many parts of Europe during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

But during that same era, another form of government began to emerge in some places. It briefly took hold in the United States, found an early start in places like Sweden, and for much of the period after World War II defined the politics of most Western European countries and to varying degrees countries in many other parts of the world. This was social democracy and it represented the idea that it was eminently possible, and indeed entirely desirable, to create a system of political organization that didn’t force people to choose between legal and political freedoms on the one hand, and social and economic justice and relative equality on the other.

In countries with these systems, where the middle class pays slightly higher taxes and millionaires and billionaires pay far higher taxes, there are fewer people like Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump. But there are also far fewer people who are destitute and hungry. There are far fewer people who remain sick because they can’t afford treatments. There are far fewer people without a roof over their head. There are far fewer people bankrupt because of student or housing debt. Some of these societies are among the most entrepreneurial in the world because in them, going out on a limb for a good idea will not leave you destitute if things don’t work out. Collective investment in institutions designed to guarantee wellbeing means that people who stumble in life for whatever reason will be helped to their feet and assisted in finding a new path. Far from creating a society of slackers, these social democratic systems have historically created a better and healthier work-life balance and high rates of participation in the workforce.

I have some first-hand experiences of such societies having lived in the UK--an early strong social democracy, but one in which that system has been partially eroded over the last several decades--and having spent considerable time in Sweden, in many ways the most ambitious social democracy and the one with its system still most intact. I also teach European history, meaning I know a little bit about the founding and trajectory of these social democratic systems.

In these societies people pay more in taxes than they do in the United States. But those higher taxes are far more than offset by what they did and in most cases continue to purchase for the collective: virtually free healthcare, of a quality comparable to if not better than what the majority enjoys in the United States; tuition-free college and university; free or nearly free childcare; between several months and multiple years of paid leave for parents when their children are born; generous policies of paid vacation; more equitable systems of public K-12 education; robust systems of mass transit; and more.

And these countries possess political systems at least as representative and in some cases far more, than in the United States, and are unburdened by anything as un-democratic as the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, or the vast and irresponsible power wielded by corporations and the super-wealthy that we experience. As a result of the marginalization of the same special interests that essentially run the United States, these countries have been able to move more aggressively over a longer period of time to reduce or reimagine energy consumption, something essential to combating climate change.

To one degree or another, these kinds of social and political innovations--making life better, fairer, and more equal for Americans and re-democratizing our political system--are at the heart of Elizabeth Warren’s project of governance. And they are urgently needed in the United States.

The case for Warren’s project and the good it would do is primarily a moral one, of course. Our family, friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens do not deserve to live difficult, uncertain lives. Children should not be born in poverty and live in a country where their fate is largely determined by the circumstances into which they were born. People should be able to expect to be able to live a life that consists of a decent balance between work and play, and we should be obligated to care for each other because in our economic and social lives we depend on one another. Real freedom should be understood as the ability to live a life without worrying what a sudden illness, decision to study or work in a particular field, or other misfortune over which we have no control will mean for our safety and security.

But there is also a practical, realpolitik case for Warren’s project of governance. This country needs a new nationalism. At its basic level (the word can also mean pride in one’s country), nationalism is the way that people who live in this country decide and define what it means to be American. Donald Trump has reanimated frightening ideas from the American past and worked to define belonging in our country as being based on race and religion. Because we are a diverse country, that is dangerous: it puts a target on the backs of American families who do not fit Trump’s definition of who gets to be American, and sinister elements in American government and society have already been firing legal, rhetorical, and literal shots at those American families, committing acts of appalling structural and physical violence.

The moderate wing of the Democratic Party objects strenuously to the Republican Party’s profound racism, but does not recognize that the economic and political inequalities in our country, created by the empowerment of vast corporations and the super-wealthy under successive administrations from Reagan to Trump, has played a role in energizing Trump’s toxic vision. They propose making America more “decent,” without recognizing the relationship between material conditions and political discourse. Their naivete is perilous, and represents a reckless gamble with the lives and wellbeing of too many Americans to be conscionable.

The social democracy that Warren hopes to build in the United States promises in most cases that all Americans will contribute to the collective coffers, and that all Americans will be guaranteed access to the same set of benefits. This is important, because too many of the various pieces among the patchwork of benefits that currently comprise the tattered American social safety net are allocated based on income level, region, race, gender, occupation, employment, or other social or economic characteristic. These benefits have been proven to be easily undone, to be vulnerable to claims of various kinds of unfairness.

Universal benefits--in the realm of healthcare, education, childcare, etc--are far less likely to be dismantled because they create a culture in which people of different backgrounds are all benefiting, and as importantly are seen to be benefiting, from their collective investments. They mean that people from different backgrounds share institutions and are more likely to rub shoulders within them and think of each other as social equals. No group--because all groups are guaranteed the same kind of access to the same institutions--is likely to try to dismantle the system out of a sense that it’s only benefiting someone unlike them. Such a system, in other words, makes the civil and political rights that we enjoy meaningful, because they are connected to other real, tangible benefits that create a good life. Such a system, in other words, gives teeth to the idea that being American is a genuinely shared social and economic experience, and is open to new members because those members will contribute and benefit in equal measure, rather than one defined by one’s race, religion, gender, class, or sexuality.

The other big objection raised against Warren’s campaign to begin the work of creating such a world is that it is all beautiful, but represents a political pipe dream. Unless Democrats win whopping congressional majorities, and unless a substantial number of people are prepared to raise their expectations of what government can and should do for our society, these big dreams and structural overhauls are unlikely to occur.

To those objections I offer two thoughts. Firstly, politics is always a bargain. It is far better, in my mind, to begin with a big ask and to meet the opposition part-way than to ask for very little and get far less. And Warren has proven in other ways to be skilled in the exercise of power, balancing command of the details with an eye for the big picture. She also sits firmly in the Democratic Party, and however flawed and culpable that institution is, it is changing, and someone who defines herself as a proud member is more likely to bring its representatives behind her vision than someone who, with whatever good reason, demonstrates contempt for its institutions and members. A President Warren is unlikely to be able to implement her policies to the letter, but I think she is the candidate best placed to enact some version of a platform likely to lead to a dramatically better life for Americans.

Secondly, Warren cannot be expected to do this alone. Poll numbers for candidates and support for policy ideas fluctuate wildly, and candidates and people have agency in this process. Much of the writing and thinking about the “horse race” in 2020 has so far revolved around the premise of a static and inert electorate in which politics themselves play no role. Such a mode of interpretation is wildly ahistorical, and I have confidence that Warren’s forceful eloquence, powers of persuasion grounded in her work as an educator, and compelling policy platform can and will shift people’s thinking and calculations, both in the course of this election and beyond.

And I have confidence that in a campaign of this nature, with these stakes, members of the public--whether they define themselves as Democrats, Warren supporters, social democrats, leftists, working class, or people just looking for something that will allow them and their family and neighbors to live free from fear of poverty or uncertainty--will play a role in shifting people’s views about how best to create a fairer and more equal society.

I look forward to caucusing for Warren this morning in Nevada, and I hope that people living in states that will vote in the coming weeks and months will pay close attention to her candidacy and the possibilities it represents for Americans to not only combat the forces for hate and inequality embodied by the Trump administration, but to create a national community committed to looking after each of its members.