Wilderness wildfires

"Beyond introducing foreign species to the landscape, the settler population sought to rid the land of any trace of what had existed before. Prior to the Nakba, the area of the Jerusalem Hills that last week’s fires tore through was heavily populated, with many villages spread across the landscape. Indeed, the expansive "Ayalon-Canada" forest, planted by the KKL in 1972 and now nearly entirely burnt to the ground, had already suffered two waves of devastation, albeit of another kind, in both 1948 and 1967.

"Beneath the remains of its trees may be found the ruins of four Palestinian villages: approximately 6,000 people once lived, farmed, and played there. With olive groves, fruit orchards, fields of grain, terraced farms and vegetable plots aplenty, the Jerusalem Hills were quite productive."

https://vashtimedia.com/land-tells-truth-jerusalem-wildfires/ @palestine @israel

"Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century
[…]
• Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
• The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is 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, wages and/or height have still not recovered."

Sullivan, Hickel, 2022 : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169

@histodons

“In her magisterial book The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan offers a sobering conclusion: The Partition of 1947 is also a loud reminder, should we care to listen, of the dangers of colonial interventions and the profound difficulties that dog regime change. It stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths. Partition is a lasting lesson of both the dangers of imperial hubris and the reactions of extreme nationalism. For better or worse, two nations continue to live alongside each other in South Asia and continue to live with these legacies.”
―Caroline Elkins, "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire"

“For nearly a thousand years, communities on the Indian subcontinent had coexisted in a cultural melting where religious identity was less salient than ethnic or linguistic identity. “A hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged,” according to the historian of India William Dalrymple. “In the nineteenth century, India was still a place where traditions, languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and where people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith.” Much as communities had negotiated means of coexistence in pre-Mandate Palestine only to see them unravel during British rule, the subcontinent’s communal arrangements corroded when the full weight of Britain’s colonial state bore down on them. The Raj’s divide and rule policies produced a chemical-like reaction, shattering long-standing traditions of coexistence and interacting with local personalities who had their own ambitions, passions, and allegiances. It was another liberal experiment in empire gone horribly wrong, and on a scale so epic that once history’s chain of contingent events combusted, no one could contain it.”

Excerpt from Caroline Elkins' #book, "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire"

@bookstodon hat-tip @markvonwahlde

Long read: British rule in Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s enabled Zionist colonisation at the expense of Palestinians.

A.Bustos, "How Britain supported Zionism and prevented Palestinian freedom": https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-britain-supported-zionism-and-prevented-palestinian-freedom/ @palestine @histodons