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Exterminate All the Brutes - open access copy of Sven Lindqvist's book 

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Exterminate All the Brutes - open access copy of Sven Lindqvist's book 

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https://archive.org/details/exterminateallbr00lind

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“Exterminate all the brutes” : Lindqvist, Sven, 1932- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Exterminate All the Brutes is a unique study of Europe’s dark history in Africa, written in the form of a travel diary and a historical examination of...

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Which Kind of Climate Activist Are You? - infographic on the many roles we play (more suggestions welcome!)

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Which Kind of Climate Activist Are You? - infographic on the many roles we play (more suggestions welcome!)

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Which Kind of Climate Activist Are You? - DevelopmentEducation.ie

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From scientists to culture jammers and visionaries that bring solutions home, explore 10 climate activist roles in our infographic

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Podcast: How can the language of Human Rights challenge Injustice? 

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Podcast: How can the language of Human Rights challenge Injustice? 

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• By Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast

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Still I Rise: How Can the Language of Human Rights Challenge Injustice? by Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast

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What do #TakeAKnee, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have in common? In this episode, we explored ongoing debates surrounding the place of rights in redressing structural injustice. We talked about the language of rights, as used by both social movements and institutions, as well as social media and le…

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Are Human Rights "Real"? (with Dr Sharath Srinivasan) by Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast

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Are Human Rights "Real"? (with Dr Sharath Srinivasan) by Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast

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Where do rights come from, and what's the point of talking about them? In our very first episode, the panel meets with Dr Sharath Srinivasan, director of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights. No one understands these important, foundational questions of human rights better than him. Trust us, we've checked.

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Global Issues - pt 1 Human Development - with links

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World Leaders are Failing Human Rights. Here's Why. | NYT Opinion

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http://www.elenahermosa.com/

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Elena Hermosa I PHOTOGRAPHER & VIDEOGRAPHER

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Full text of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women)

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Full text of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women)

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https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-elimination-all-forms-discrimination-against-women

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Reservations to CEDAW, all countries and what reservations they withdrew from (change is slow...but can AND DOES happen!)

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Reservations to CEDAW, all countries and what reservations they withdrew from (change is slow...but can AND DOES happen!)

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https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-8&chapter=4&clang=_en#top

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Map: How does armed conflict and the arms industry drive hunger?

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Map: How does armed conflict and the arms industry drive hunger?

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https://developmenteducation.ie/feature/map-how-does-armed-conflict-and-the-arms-industry-drive-hunger/

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Conflict threatens innocent lives in more ways than one. While millions of people who've been displaced by conflict experience extreme food shortages, hunger is also being used as a deliberate tactic in conflict zones.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that 80% of children suffering severe acute malnutrition live in countries affected by conflict.

Food security - and food insecurity - are big business.

How can healthy nutritious food ever be achieved when the buying and selling of arms and weapons flourishes? In 2021, for example, 32 armed conflicts were reported in the Alert 2022! yearbook.

"Conflict is a major threat to food security and nutrition and the leading cause of global food crises. Marked increases in the number and complexity of conflicts in the last ten years have eroded gains in food security and nutrition, leading several countries to the brink of famine. Internal conflicts have surpassed the number of interstate conflicts, but with a significant rise in internationalized internal conflicts

Who are the main actors selling and buying arms? How does this impact on access to and availability of food?

Those tracking world hunger issues such as researchers involved in updating the Global Hunger Index have had to address multiple 'drivers' that are taking place at the same time. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool designed to measure and track hunger at global, regional, and national levels. The 2022 GHI notes:

"This year's GHI brings us face-to-face with a grim reality."

A toxic cocktail of conflict, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic has already left millions exposed to food price shocks and vulnerable to further crises. Now the conflict in Ukraine - with its ripple effects on global supplies of and prices for food, fertiliser, and fuel - is turning a crisis into a catastrophe.

As we face the third global food price crisis in 15 years, it is clearer than ever that our food systems in their current form are inadequate to the task of sustainably ending poverty and hunger. This is especially true in countries that face the highest rates of undernourishment, child wasting, stunting, and child mortality due to malnutrition."

This 'slider map' invites readers to explore conflict and food security in the world - who are the buyers and sellers of arms and weapons, by country? Where does armed conflict take place and how might this link to food security issues?

Explore the data used in these maps:

Suggested learning tasks

A number of learning tasks are suggested with ideas for integration as part of English, Art, Geography, Mathematics, Home Economics:

Explore the visuals presented by scrolling between the two maps and the information they present. What do you think of the two stories that the data presents?

Why are there different colours on the map?

Look at the data sources and find something interesting. Draw a graph, table or pie chart of what you've found and prepare 1 sentence on why this is interesting to you.

What are the differences between the maps? Prepare a short response to the two maps and what it tells us about geography and who is responsible.

In small groups prepare a short visual presentation (using websites, statistics, images etc.) on the topic of food security - what does food security and food insecurity mean? Compare this to the food security and top 20 food companies map. How might it impact on people and places in this slider map in terms of accessing healthy nutritious food?

Explore the other two interactive maps in the series on key drivers of global hunger.

For more:

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Map: How does armed conflict and the arms industry drive hunger? - DevelopmentEducation.ie

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Conflict threatens innocent lives in more ways than one. While millions of people who've been displaced by conflict experience extreme food shortages, hunger is also being used as a deliberate tactic in conflict zones. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that 80% of children suffering severe acute malnutrition live in countries affected by conflict.

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The 2021/22 Human Development Report (online edition) with a focus on Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World

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The 2021/22 Human Development Report (online edition) with a focus on Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World

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https://report.hdr.undp.org/ Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World

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Human Development Report 2021/22 | UNDP HDR

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Philip Alston's furious report in 2020 on the international poverty line, as UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human right. Calling it "misplaced triumphalism"

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Philip Alston's furious report in 2020 on the international poverty line, as UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human right. Calling it "misplaced triumphalism"

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A Pan-African organization dedicated to highlighting, magnifying and celebrating Pan-African ideals of community, empowerment and prosperity and calling out the toxic machinations of white saviorism.

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Here is the digital copy - I'd suggest purchasing it via your local bookshop too folks!

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“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

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“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” https://t.co/1rkKhfH6jH

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“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” pic.twitter.com/1rkKhfH6jH
— 21st Century City (@urbanthoughts11) October 23, 2022

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“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” https://t.co/1rkKhfH6jH

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“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” https://t.co/1rkKhfH6jH

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“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

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Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, and his wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, ride in the state carriage towards the Viceregal lodge in New Delhi, on March 22, 1947 [File: AP]

There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India - as horrible as it may have been - was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long - the story goes - was a gesture of Britain's benevolence.

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik - just published by Columbia University Press - deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly from India during the period 1765 to 1938.

Keep reading

It's a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.

How did this come about?

It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way - mostly with silver - as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.

Here's how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, "buying" from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

It was a scam - theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.

Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain's industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.

On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they "bought" them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.

After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company's monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.

How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills - a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were "paid" in rupees out of tax revenues - money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded.

Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.

This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world - a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century - it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India's exports wasappropriatedin its entirety by Britain.

Some point to this fictional "deficit" as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the "deficit" meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.

Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence - funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars. As Patnaik points out, "the cost of all Britain's wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues."

And that's not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.

Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.

These are eye-watering sums. But the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development - as Japan did - there's no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.

All of this is a sobering antidote to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped "develop" India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that British rule was a to India.

This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll , 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.

Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century - the heyday of British intervention - income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.

Britain didn't develop India. Quite the contrary - as Patnaik's work makes clear - India developed Britain.

What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely. Reparations? Perhaps - although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain's industrial rise didn't emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.
Editor's note: A previous version of this article erroneously had the beginning of the British Raj as 1847. The correct year is 1858. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

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How Britain stole $45 trillion from India

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Does $1.90 a day keep global poverty away?