In this ethnographic study of climate change and its impacts on Bangladesh, @CameliaDewan offers a vitally important corrective to simplistic narratives of global warming. 1/n

Thread 👇🏾 ‘Climate change’, (cc) Dewan shows, is now often used as a buzzword to attract donor funding for mitigation and resilience. Yet these projects are often based on historically shallow, Eurocentric ideas and misread the landscapes they seek to terraform. The rhetoric of cc ... 2/9

For days I've been riveted by this book, which was recommended by @GKBhambra (thanks!). She is right; this is a milestone! It tells the story of a 17th century Angolan prince who brought a case before the Vatican, detailing the abuses of slavery and seeking to ban the system. 1/4 Mendonca was at the forefront of a pan Atlantic Abolitionist movement that sought equal rights also for Indigenous peoples and 'New Christian' (Jewish converts). This movement far predated British Abolitionism and was initiated and led by Africans. 2/4

In 1936, Nehru wrote, in a letter to Lord Lothian: 'nothing astonishes me so much as the way the British people manage to combine their material interests with their moral fervour; how they proceed on the irrefutable presumption that they are always doing good to the world... "... and acting from the highest motives, and trouble and conflict and difficulty are caused by the obstinacy and evil-mindedness of others."

This is why it is so important to remember the rapacious history of the British Empire, and the Anglosphere in general.

I've long wanted to write about the historical role of Nepal in India-China-Britain relations in the form of a review of the most important work on the subject (below). Don't think I'll ever get around to it so here's a thread instead. 1/7

sup.org/books/title/?i… The reason Nepal wasn't gobbled up by the British Empire was because the East India Company didn't want to jeopardize the lucrative trade between British India and China (opium, tea etc.). The Panchen Lama asked the EIC to attack Nepal in 1788, but it refused for this reason. 2/7

Thread: The @nytimes' superb articles on slavery & capitalism made me doubly glad to receive this excellent new study of another commodity that was foundational to modern capitalism: opium, produced under duress in the narco-state that was British India. 1/4 Rolf Bauer's book is the first overview of opium production across India. He shows that Indian farmers were forced to produce opium, at a loss. But the British Raj (& many British, Indian & American merchants) made immense profits, at a terrible human cost for China & SE Asia.2/4