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

From when the US helped kill democracy in Chile to who decided that French food was best, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

---

When the US helped kill democracy in Chile

Jime Lobe and Connor Echols
Responsible Statecraft

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende and ushered in a particularly brutal and bloody dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, which lasted until 1990. The role of the CIA in preparing the conditions for the coup, as well as subsequent U.S. support for the dictatorship, contributed heavily to the perception in Latin America and beyond that Washington, despite its claims to champion democracy, preferred “friendly” authoritarian regimes over the possibility that non-aligned or democratically elected left-leaning governments could take power in regions that it considered to be within its sphere of influence.

Investigations in the mid-1970s into the U.S. role in Chile also led to unprecedented legislation — sometimes enforced, sometimes not – designed to ensure greater Congressional oversight of U.S. covert operations and to curb U.S. military and other assistance to governments and armies that abuse fundamental human rights. [continue reading]

Asking Australia for an Indigenous voice isn’t new – it’s been a long and difficult struggle

Mark McKenna and Peter Yu
Guardian

What can history show us about the significance of the referendum on 14 October? If “history is calling”, whose voices from the past can we hear? In April, the Australian National University became one of the nation’s first universities to “unreservedly” declare its support for “enshrining an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice in the constitution”. Keen to offer further support, historians and other prominent Australians have provided informed, trustworthy and easily accessible historical information online that would help Australians to understand the long journey to the 2023 referendum.

The events we’ve highlighted aren’t the only examples of Indigenous Australians petitioning for their rights – there were also many statements, petitions, ceremonies and peace negotiations before 1901 – but they are certainly among the most pivotal since federation. Without knowledge of this history we believe it’s impossible for voters to understand where the campaign for Indigenous recognition and the voice has come from. [continue reading]

As wildfires burn across the world, what is the role of Australia’s eucalyptus tree?

Emily Clark
ABC

Portugal, Greece, Spain, Chile, California and now Hawaii have all battled wildfires this year as high temperatures and strong winds have whipped small sparks into violent infernos.  But fire needs fuel, and what these places also have in common is an invasive species — Australia’s eucalyptus tree. It comes from the oldest continent in the world and it can grow in even the driest of places.  

For more than 200 years, seeds of the eucalyptus tree have been planted beyond the bounds of Australia’s coastline. It has been cultivated around the world, making a new home in southern Europe, South America, parts of Africa, the west coast of the United States, and even parts of South-East Asia. But there is now a debate over whether this tree has been worth the industry and habitat it provides. Eucalyptus trees mature fast. And in Portugal, as they grew, so too did a lucrative paper industry. [continue reading]

Deprovincializing Black Studies and Translating Blackness Beyond Borders

Robin D. G. Kelley
Black Perspectives

Lorgia García Peña’s Translating Blackness is a monumental achievement. By decentering the U.S., it deprovincializes Black Studies and offers a genuinely transnational framework for understanding race and Black-Latinidad from the Caribbean to Europe. And it deploys “translation” as a way of seeing how Blackness is used in the structures of gendered racial capitalism (i.e., colonialism, migration, globalization, etc,) to reproduce “minoritized subjectivity,” creating the conditions for exclusion and marginalization, for new expressions of political inclusion and solidarity across borders, and sometimes both simultaneously.

For example, in her extraordinary first chapter on the tensions between Gregorio Luperón and Frederick Douglass, she shows how the struggle to fulfill the promise of Black freedom during and after Reconstruction fueled U.S. imperial expansion. García Peña reminds us that 1898 was not the beginning of U.S. imperial expansion but rather the culmination of at least a century of imperialism. She traces various U.S. attempts to annex the island of Santo Domingo back to Reconstruction under the “liberal” Republican regime of Ulysses S. Grant. She is not arguing that this is the first instance of U.S. imperial designs on the Caribbean. During the antebellum period, annexing some Caribbean island or Latin American nation had been the dream of slave holders looking to extend their power and longevity. And it had been the dream of 19th century “racial liberals” like Abraham Lincoln, who did not believe Black people were safe in a white man’s country, to save Black folks by deporting and resettling the entire population in some far away land. One cannot help but recognize how this ostensibly benevolent form of population transfer, dating back to the American Colonization Society, mirrored the slaveholders’ logic that enslavement was an act of Christian benevolence because it saved Africans from heathen rulers who sold us in the first place. [continue reading]

Who decided French food was best?

Annie Gray
Delicious Magazine

There’s a long history of tension between what the British have dismissed as overly fussy French food versus plain English fare. We’ve had a love-hate relationship with our nearest neighbour for over a thousand years. And during that time, French food conquered not just Britain but quite a lot of the world. But who decided French food was best? Essentially, the French did, then persuaded everyone else to agree.

The French takeover began for Britain in 1066 when the Normans invaded, bringing with them the culinary words we still use for cow (boeuf/beef), sheep (mouton/mutton) and pig (porc/pork). They even ferried over Cistercian monks to fix the cheese culture. The idea of French culinary supremacy was thus embedded in English gastronomy from the start. French became the court language and for a long time large parts of France were ruled from London. For the upper classes a pan-European cuisine developed, with French and Italian influences to the fore. For about 500 years the type of cuisine you ate was defined more by class than country. [continue reading]