Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow @MWPalen

From Putin’s history lessons to the perils of forgetting the Ottoman past, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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Putin’s History Lessons

Nina L. Khrushcheva
Project Syndicate

 A revanchist agenda, driven by the desire to rectify perceived historical wrongs, lies at the heart of Russia’s foreign policy and provides the rationale for its war in Ukraine. But what Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have forgotten is that rewriting history to serve the interests of those in power tends to invite dissent and often backfires.

Russia’s new history textbooks for tenth and eleventh graders are prime examples. Authored by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky and Anatoly Torkunov, rector of the once-renowned Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the textbooks reflect Russia’s “new approach” to history, emphasizing the need to reclaim the country’s lost “historical territories” and praising the “special military operation” in Ukraine. But Russia’s turn toward revanchism predates February 2022. State propaganda has long portrayed Russia not as a colonial power but rather as a “unique civilization” that must maintain its singular essence and whose demise could trigger global chaos. [continue reading]

Oil and gas approvals spell ecocide

Lori Lee Oates
National Observer

It has recently come to light in the United States that right-wing groups have penned Project 25 — a plan to dismantle American climate policy if Republicans win future elections. On the first anniversary of the game-changing Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration continues to approve new oil and gas projects. United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Tory government have recently issued licences for hundreds of new oil and gas projects in the North Sea. It is time to start viewing this behaviour as a manifestation of ecocide.

Ecocide is the deliberate or neglectful destruction of the natural environment, often with irreversible impacts. A panel of legal experts is trying to have ecocide recognized as “the fifth crime” at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The Rome Statute, which established the ICJ, recognizes four crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression. Scholars of genocide increasingly recognize the links between ecocide and genocide as the global ecological crisis deepens. [continue reading]

Western Australia Scraps Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Laws Designed to Stop ‘Another Juukan Gorge’

Elizabeth Pearson
Institute of Art & Law

The State of Western Australia is repealing laws it introduced “to prevent another Juukan Gorge”, after its reforms were labelled too prescriptive, complicated and confusing. The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA) (2021 Act) was enacted after 46,000-year-old sacred Aboriginal rock shelters were controversially destroyed by Rio Tinto during a mine expansion project in 2020. The destruction had been authorised under section 18 of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA).  At the time, section 17 of that Act made it an offence for a person to excavate, destroy, damage, conceal or in any way alter any Aboriginal site, unless that person was acting with the Minister’s consent under section 18 to sign off on mining projects.

Consent had been granted in 2013, before more than 7,000 Indigenous artefacts and sacred objects were subsequently discovered in the area, including a 4,000-year-old plait of human hair, woven together from the strands of the Traditional Owners’ direct ancestors. The destruction of the Juukan Gorge triggered public protests, a Federal Parliamentary Inquiry and calls for urgent reform of Indigenous cultural heritage laws. [continue reading]

Walter Rodney: Illuminating the road from mental slavery

Foluke Ifejola Adebisi
African Skies

The first time I saw a copy of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, I was in my first year at university. The book had a yellowing yellow cover and was nestled in the armpits of one of those people we not-so fondly called, ”Aluta boys.’ The first thought on my mind was, ‘what fresh hell is this?!!!‘

I being the very quiet, shy and retiring person that I am (not), asked the Aluta fellow, how he was finding the book. He then went off on such a pseudo-Marxist/OPC tirade that I determined, there and then, never to come within seeing distance of the book, these being the effects it seemingly produced. I have since then read the book for myself, and so I very, very strongly suspect that Mr Aluta never actually read the book himself, but extrapolated from the title what the book may possibly be about, and so decided to carry said book on his person always, to lend his Aluta-ness extra gravitas. Anyways, after that encounter with the Lord of Aluta, I was not to come across references to How Europe for a while. As those who know know, if you study for a law degree in Nigeria (or indeed any common law jurisdiction), you must spend all your waking seconds reading your law textbooks and law notes and law cases. Seconds taken out to read the text on street signs and massive noticeboards are massive distractions from that singular goal and not frequently indulged in. Reading a whole book not dedicated to legal study was therefore, completely out of the question. [continue reading]

Forgetting the Ottoman past has done the Arabs no good

Mostafa Minawi
Al Jazeera

Imperialism is a difficult subject to tackle in the Arab world. The word conjures up associations with the days of French and British colonialism and the present-day settler colony of Israel. Yet the more indigenous and long-lasting form of imperial rule, Ottoman imperialism, is often left out of contemporary historical debates. Some of the states that succeeded the Ottoman Empire have chosen to sum up Ottoman rule in local curricula as simply Ottoman or Turkish “occupation”, while others repeat well-rehearsed tropes of “Ottoman atrocities” that continue to have popular purchase on a local level.

In places like Syria and Lebanon, probably the best-known Ottoman official is military commander Ahmed Cemal (Jamal) Pasha, infamously nicknamed “al-Saffah” (the Butcher). His wartime governorship of the provinces of Syria and Beirut was marked by political violence and executions of Arab-Ottoman politicians and intellectuals and remains in public memory as the symbol of Ottoman rule. But as historian Salim Tamari has pointed out, it is wrong to reduce “four centuries of relative peace and dynamic activity [during] the Ottoman era” to “four miserable years of tyranny symbolized by the military dictatorship of Ahmad Cemal Pasha in Syria”. [continue reading]