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The West and the Rest: Eurocentrism, Colonialism, and Global Social Problems
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Race is a Western political project. Religious freedom is a Christian political project. The linkages between the two enabled European nations and their settlers across the globe to condemn natives, slaves, and non-European immigrants to inferior status, and in turn legalize control of their lands and bodies. ¹ The consequent race-religion systems of power and privilege, which inform Rabiat Akande's thesis, offer valuable insights into the racialized boundaries of contemporary Palestine-Israel discourse in the United States. ² Specifically, the racialization of Muslims and Arabs as terrorism supporters and presumptively anti-Semitic subjects them to censorship, harassment, and discrimination when they advocate for the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This essay argues that infringements on Muslims and Arabs’ dissenting speech and political activism is another way in which the racialization of religion produces a mutually constitutive form of discrimination.
This paper assesses claims that, prior to the 19th century, around 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty (defined as the inability to access essential goods), and that global human welfare only began to improve with the rise of capitalism. These claims rely on national accounts and PPP exchange rates that do not adequately capture changes in people’s access to essential goods. We assess this narrative against extant data on three empirical indicators of human welfare: real wages (with respect to a subsistence basket), human height, and mortality. We ask whether these indicators improved or deteriorated with the rise of capitalism in five world regions - Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and China – using the chronology put forward by world-systems theorists. The evidence we review here points to three conclusions. (1) It is unlikely that 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty prior to the 19th century. Historically, unskilled urban labourers in all regions tended to have wages high enough to support a family of four above the poverty line by working 250 days or 12 months a year, except during periods of severe social dislocation, such as famines, wars, and institutionalized dispossession – particularly under colonialism. (2) The rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, key welfare metrics have still not recovered. (3) Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began several centuries after the rise of capitalism. In the core regions of Northwest Europe, progress began in the 1880s, while in the periphery and semi-periphery it began in the mid-20th century, a period characterized by the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements that redistributed incomes and established public provisioning systems.
The COVID‐19 health crisis has imposed extensive shocks to many global systems, particularly the UK food production chains, further challenging Eurocentric development discourses and stereotypes. Thus, this paper investigates how the pandemic has challenged the UK's development status by analysing how the pandemic has impacted the country's food industry. A literature review was conducted and used to identify, select and critically appraise publications between 2000 and 2021 discussing the challenges in the UK food system. The findings reveal that the UK's food industry is unsustainable as there are significant flaws in the system, that is food insecurity and food waste that go unaddressed. The impact of the pandemic has exacerbated the social and economic impacts of operating with such a system. Compounded with the geopolitical adjustments caused by Brexit, the UK is faced with the challenge of restructuring and developing new frameworks such as policies, regulations, schemes and partnerships to support the food industry's sustainability. Lastly, the findings reinforce that ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations encounter similar food challenges, which manifest differently in various landscapes and contexts. Therefore, the world (not just the UK) needs to shift away from Eurocentrism, moving towards a universal but equally personalised development outlook. This review provides an outline of the major problem areas in the UK food system and presents potential solutions aimed at helping guide the government's decision‐making process. The COVID‐19 pandemic reinforced the reality that the UK's Food system is unsustainable The findings provide a unique insight on the UK food system from a Global development lens. Bridges the gap between pre‐pandemic literature and emerging post‐pandemic research. The research encourages new innovative ways to conceptualise and measure Development.
Western biomedicine has begun a reckoning with its inconvenient pasts, from dethroning medical heroes to an increasing awareness of how doctors have treated enslaved and colonized populations, like gynecologist J. Marion Sims. Medical students are rewriting their Hippocratic Oaths to include social justice and professional medical associations declare structural racism a public health crisis. These are not isolated fragments but elements of a single story--the past, present and future of race and colonialism in medicine. In this essay we consider how colonialism deforms medicine, especially in the example of "Arab syphilis." History shows how racism persists (often invisibly) in medical structures long after colonialism and slavery have ended, and history suggests strategies for anti-racist intervention in the present.
Respectful and reciprocal relationships with land are at the heart of many Indigenous cultures and societies. Land is also at the core of settler colonialism. Indigenous peoples have not only been dispossessed of land for settler occupation and resource extraction, but the transformation of land into property has created myriad challenges to ongoing struggles of land repatriation and renewal. We introduce several perspectives on land rooted in diverse Indigenous worldviews and contrast them with settler colonial perspectives rooted in Eurocentric worldviews. We then examine several examples in Canada where Indigenous nations attempt to reconnect with their homelands, protect them, and/or engage with them for economic development. We look at land relationships rooted in historical treaties, contemporary comprehensive claims/self-government agreements, the Indian Act, and the defence of unceded territories. The Indigenous communities we look at include the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Nisga’a Lisims Government, the Westbank First Nation, and the Wet’suwet’en. We contend that a complex configuration of settler colonial institutions challenges long-term efforts for Indigenous land reclamation, protection, and sustainable development, however, Indigenous nations remain steadfast in asserting their self-determination in diverse relational ways inside and outside of settler state systems.
Since granting independence to her former colonies (especially the countries in the West and Central Africa subregions), France has maintained tight economic, political, and to a great extent, social control over their internal and external affairs. These continued ties with France have become the subject of contentious debates (previously considered taboo) among scholars in recent times, evidenced in the development of activism in Africa and continental Europe where the former has been sensitized or radicalized about France's exploitative approach to economic partnership. The economies of these African nations have suffered stagnation and retrogression in contrast to their non-French-influenced neighbors. This essay employs a literature review to assess the impact of French hegemony over these former colonies, therefore providing a cogent argument for the abolition of the monetary agreement in favor of a local currency, and cessation of political dependencies that also carry a negative stigma. Intellectuals and politicians have argued that the continued use of the CFA franc currency (a relic of colonialism with a different twist) is exploitative; recognized even by French politicians who have appealed to their government to employ moral and ethical considerations to desist from the persistent exploitation of Africa. Social movements have developed today in demanding that African nations still using this currency should withdraw from the agreements due to the severe negative effects on economic development.
Indigenous peoples worldwide face barriers to participation in water governance, which includes planning and permitting of infrastructure that may affect water in their territories. In the United States, the extent to which Indigenous voices are heard—let alone incorporated into decision-making—depends heavily on whether or not Native nations are recognized by the federal government. In the southeastern United States, non-federally recognized Indigenous peoples continue to occupy their homelands along rivers, floodplains, and wetlands. These peoples, and the Tribal governments that represent them, rarely enter environmental decision-making spaces as sovereign nations and experts in their own right. Nevertheless, plans to construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline prompted non-federally recognized Tribes to demand treatment as Tribal nations during permitting. Actions by the Tribes, which are recognized by the state of North Carolina, expose barriers to participation in environmental governance faced by Indigenous peoples throughout the United States, and particularly daunting challenges faced by state-recognized Tribes. After reviewing the legal and political landscapes that Native nations in the United States must navigate, we present a case study focused on Atlantic Coast Pipeline planning and permitting. We deliberately center Native voices and perspectives, often overlooked in non-Indigenous narratives, to emphasize Indigenous actions and illuminate participatory barriers. Although the Atlantic Coast Pipeline was cancelled in 2020, the case study reveals four enduring barriers to Tribal participation: adherence to minimum standards, power asymmetries, procedural narrowing, and “color-blind” planning. We conclude by highlighting opportunities for federal and state governments, developers, and Indigenous peoples to breach these barriers.
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion. Deeply researched and passionately written, Seeing Red will command attention from readers who are invested in the enduring issues of equality, equity, and national belonging at its core.
David Stannard's book focuses on the larger social and cultural issues involved in the invasion of America by European nations. The first two chapters of the book describe the Americas prior to this invasion and detail the variety of rich cultures that existed then. Another chapter deals with the Spanish and Portuguese invasion of Central and South America and describes the devastation left inthe wake of these invasions. A fourth chapter describes the effects of English invaders in North America and of the further suppression of native peoples in American colonial times. In the final section, titles ‘Sex, Race, and Holy War,’ two chapters examine the kind of people who waged these "holy" wars and focus on the cultural sources and the ideological content of their invasion efforts. There is also an Epilogue, and an Appendix titled ‘On Racism and Genocide.’ This is a highly controversial book that is certain to have a major place in the Columbus Anniversary discussions next year. It is an angry, provocative book. In contrast to other recent books on the subject, however. Stannard's book is by a recognized scholar (who has already written a well-received monograph Before the Horror on the South Pacific aspects of the subject) and has based his study on wide historical research.
This book is concerned with the social science of poverty and covers topics ranging from the intricacies of measuring poverty using objective quantitative, income-based measures, to the interrelationships between structural violence, poverty, and social suffering; capability deprivation as the basis for analyzing poverty; ideologies and beliefs about poverty; how politics and institutions shape poverty and inequality; and the effects of poverty on child development. The book also explores the link between gender and poverty; the historical origins of poverty in developing countries; poor neighborhoods in the metropolis; how segregation perpetuates disadvantage; the association between nonmarital family structures, poverty, and inequality; whether social ties matter for poor people who are seeking employment; the link between poverty and education; intergenerational mobility; hunger and food insecurity; and the relation between crime and poverty.
Despite taking on several forms throughout history such as colonial medicine, tropical medicine, and international health, the field of global health continues to uphold colonialist structures. History demonstrates that acts of colonialism inevitably lead to negative health outcomes. Colonial powers promoted medical advancements when diseases affected their own people, and only did so for locals when in the colonies’ best interests. Numerous medical advancements in the United States also relied on the exploitation of vulnerable populations. This history is critical in evaluating the actions of the United States as a proclaimed leader in global health. A significant barrier to progress in the field of global health is that most leaders and leading institutions are located in high-income countries, thereby defining the global standard. This standard fails to meet the needs of most of the world. In times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, colonial mentalities may be more evident. In fact, global health partnerships themselves are often ingrained in colonialism and may be counterproductive. Strategies for change have been called into question by the recent Black Lives Matter movement, particularly in evaluating the role that less privileged communities should have in their own fate. Globally, we can commit to evaluating our own biases and learning from one another.
Tracing the history of Palestine from the Ottomans in the nineteenth century, through the British Mandate, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent wars and conflicts which have dominated this troubled region, Ilan Pappe's widely acclaimed A History of Modern Palestine provides a balanced and forthright overview of Palestine's complex history. Placing at its centre the voices of the men, women, children, peasants, workers, town-dwellers, Jews and Arabs of Palestine, who lived through these times, this tells a story of co-existence and co-operation, as well as oppression, occupation, and exile, exposing patterns of continuity as well as points of fracture. Now in an updated third edition, Pappe draws links between contemporary events, from war in Lebanon, violence in the Gaza Strip and the Arab Spring, with the long history of Palestine, taking into account the success of Israel without neglecting the on-going catastrophe suffered by Palestinians, leaving hope for a better future for all who live in, or were expelled, from Palestine.
Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation’s capital on January 6, 2021. And bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; “Jesus Saves” and “Don’t Tread on Me”; Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus’s name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Gorski and Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism. In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; and where it’s headed and why it threatens democracy. They explain what makes white Christian nationalism “white.” They show how it took shape over three centuries ago. And how it has influenced American politics over the last three decades. Throughout American history, white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It enables white Christian Americans to demand “sacrifice” from others in the name of religion and nation, while defending their “rights” in the names of “liberty” and “property.” The future of American democracy, they argue, will depend on whether a broad spectrum of Americans—stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals—can unite in a popular front to combat the threat to liberal democracy posed by white Christian nationalism.
Israel and Empire introduces students to the history, literature, and theology of the Hebrew Bible and texts of early Judaism, enabling them to read these texts through the lens of postcolonial interpretation. This approach should allow students to recognize not only how cultural and socio-political forces shaped ancient Israel and the worldviews of the early Jews but also the impact of imperialism on modern readings of the Bible.
Perdue and Carter cover a broad sweep of history, from 1300 BCE to 72 CE, including the late Bronze age, Egyptian imperialism, Israel's entrance into Canaan, the Davidic-Solomonic Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Greek Empire, the Maccabean Empire, and Roman rule. Additionally the authors show how earlier examples of imperialism in the Ancient Near East provide a window through which to see the forces and effects of imperialism in modern history.
This commentary presents the position that modern medicine is a colonial artefact in the sense that the type of scientific thinking that underpins modern medicine emerged from western knowledge structures based on a history of colonialism. The author suggests the colonial roots of Western-based modern medicine must be re-examined. While there are various critical theories that may be applied in this reexamination, most do not adequately account for intersectional, intergenerational, and sociohistorical inequities encountered in the multiplicity of global contexts in practice teaching and research within medicine. The author presents decoloniality as a theoretical perspective from which to interrogate sociohistorical, geopolitical, and economic perspectives on gender, race, and heteropaternalistic influences in medicine emanating from a basis in colonially developed systems of knowledge production. The author offers definitions of relevant theoretical terms and suggests that decolonial praxis begins with an initial realization or awareness of one's position within the colonial matrix of power followed by the reflecting or deliberation, or a grappling with real-life struggles that are encountered in confronting the oppressive operations of the colonial matrix of power. Decolonial praxis involves action through challenging mainstream foundational theories-the questions they generate, the research methods they support, and the writing styles they employ. In medical education this may involve changing powerful actors, such as medical journal editors and researchers, with historical privilege; shifting the balance of power in research spaces; and dismantling physical and intellectual structures and institutions established on colonial epistemologies.
Settler colonialism is an ongoing system of power that perpetuates the genocide and repression of indigenous peoples and cultures. Essentially hegemonic in scope, settler colonialism normalizes the continuous settler occupation, exploiting lands and resources to which indigenous peoples have genealogical relationships. Settler colonialism includes interlocking forms of oppression, including racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. This is because settler colonizers are Eurocentric and assume that European values with respect to ethnic, and therefore moral, superiority are inevitable and natural. However, these intersecting dimensions of settler colonialism coalesce around the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ lands, resources, and cultures. The evolving field of settler colonialism studies arose from scholarship in Native American and indigenous studies that engages with postcolonial studies and critiques the post- in “postcolonial” as inappropriate for understanding ongoing systems of domination in such places as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where colonialism is not a thing of the past because the settlers have come to stay, displacing the indigenous peoples and perpetuating systems that continue to erase native lives, cultures, and histories. Foundational theories in settler colonialism studies distinguish settler colonialism from classical colonialism through work that demonstrates that settler colonizers destroy indigenous peoples and cultures in order to replace them and establish themselves as the new rightful inhabitants. In other words, settler colonizers do not merely exploit indigenous peoples and lands for labor and economic interests; they displace them through settlements. In his groundbreaking theory of the “logic of elimination,” Patrick Wolfe shows that settler colonialism is a system, not a historical event, and that as such it perpetuates the erasure of native peoples as a precondition for settler expropriation of lands and resources, providing the necessary conditions for establishing the present-day ideology of multicultural neoliberalism.
Taking America Back for God conclusively reveals that understanding the current cultural and political climate in the United States requires reckoning with Christian nationalism. Christian ideals and symbols have long played an important role in public life in the United States, but Christian nationalism demands far more than a recognition of religious heritage. At heart, Christian nationalism fights to preserve a particular kind of social order, an order in which everyone—Christians and non-Christians, native-born and immigrants, whites and minorities, men and women—recognizes their “proper” place in society. The first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States, Taking America Back for God illustrates the scope and tremendous influence of Christian nationalism on debates surrounding the most contentious social issues dominating American public discourse. Drawing on multiple sources of national survey data collected over the past several decades and in-depth interviews, Whitehead and Perry document how Christian nationalism radically shapes what Americans think about who they are as a people, what their future should look like, and how they should get there. Regardless of Americans’ political or religious characteristics, whether they are Ambassadors, Accommodators, Resisters, or Rejecters of Christian nationalism provides powerful insight into what they think about immigration, Muslims, gun control, police shootings, atheists, gender roles, and many other political issues—even who they want in the White House. Taking America Back for God convincingly shows how Christian nationalists’ desire for political power, rigid social boundaries, and hierarchical order creates significant consequences for all Americans.
This book considers the cultural legacy of the Keynesian Revolution in economics. It assesses the impact of Keynes and Keynesian thinking upon economics and policy, as well as the response of the Chicago and Austrian schools, and the legacy of all three in shaping economic life. The book is a call to restore economics to its roots in moral and cultural knowledge, reminding us that human beings are more than consumers. The Keynesian Revolution taught us that we should be happy if we are prosperous, but instead we feel hollow and morally anxious – our economy feels empty. Drawing on paradigms from earlier historical periods while affirming modern market systems, this book encourages a return to a view of human beings as persons with the right and responsibility to discover, and do, the things in life that are intrinsically good and enduring. Because in the long run, the legacy of our choices will continue long after “we’re all dead.”
The phrase “traditional medicine” is commonly used to refer to medical traditions originating outside the West, and still practiced either as alternatives to or alongside Mainstream Medicine. Hard and dismissive attitudes to traditions with non-Western origins are obviously insensitive. It is clear that power and knowledge are intertwined. What counts as knowledge is partly determined by who has power. Moreover, medicine is clearly imbued with cultural influence. Yet if we reject medical relativism, we cannot accept that medicine is simply a cultural expression. We must consider which of two conflicting traditions, or two incompatible prescriptions, is correct (if either is). Medical Cosmopolitanism is a tool for negotiating the opposing temptations of excessive tolerance and dogmatism, and for understanding how one might “decolonize” medical knowledge. The chapter suggests that developments of the notion of decolonization can prevent a collapse into medical relativism, espousing “critical decolonization.”
On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States' conquest of Native America's peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872-73, one of the nation's costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war. The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a "peace policy" toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country's past.
From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans and Native Americans were enslaved and traded by European settlers in the Americas. This story of slavery, colonialism, and emerging capitalism—and their handmaiden, white supremacy—is integral to that of modernity itself.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.