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The Invention of the Indigène

Mahmood Mamdani: Congo Explained, 20 January 2011

... movement of soldiers and refugees has exacerbated domestic tensions. Ituri lies in the north-east of Congo, bordering Uganda. It was the site of lucrative gold deposits, to which the Belgians were drawn as early as 1903. In time, other natural resources, from diamonds to coltan and tropical timber, brought a flood of fortune-seekers to ...

Ahead of the Game

Daniel Finn: The Official IRA, 7 October 2010

The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party 
by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar.
Penguin, 658 pp., £9.99, April 2010, 978 0 14 102845 3
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... republic in place of the capitalist one that had entrenched itself after the War of Independence. North of the border, it was harder to articulate a leftist-republican project. Connolly had concluded Labour in Irish History with the hope that ‘the pressure of a common exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class; earnest ...

First Movie in the White House

J. Hoberman: ‘Birth of a Nation’, 12 February 2009

D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’: A History of ‘The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time’ 
by Melvyn Stokes.
Oxford, 414 pp., £13.99, January 2008, 978 0 19 533679 5
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... politician and Baptist minister born into a slave-holding family in the Confederate state of North Carolina three years into the Civil War, was enraged by the success of a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His response was to write a quasi-autobiographical novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902), which was both a ...

The Triumph of Plunder

James Morone: Gore Vidal on the venal history of America, 23 September 2004

Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson 
by Gore Vidal.
Yale, 198 pp., £8.99, September 2004, 0 300 10592 4
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... mainly about money. After the Revolution, he considers escaping his expensive fame by heading north, perhaps as far as Canada. When his mother asks for 15 guineas, he blows up: ‘It is really hard upon me when you have taken everything you wanted from the plantation.’ And worse: ‘I have paid . . . by my own account fifty odd pounds out of my own ...

Behind the Waterfall

Lorna Scott Fox, 16 November 1995

The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado 
by Charles Nicholl.
Cape, 396 pp., £18.99, May 1995, 0 224 03333 6
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... the cloak-and-pipe fellow who was dropped for the Earl of Essex. His other colonial fiasco (the North Carolina settlement which vanished without trace in 1586) is only slightly more remembered. Britain was never seriously to colonise South America, and there never was an El Dorado in the form Ralegh sought. But his reckless, unpopular, foreigner’s sort of ...

Scram from Africa

John Reader, 16 March 2000

The Politics of the Independence of Kenya 
by Keith Kyle.
Macmillan, 258 pp., £18.99, April 1999, 0 333 76098 0
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... social and economic cohesion, threatened with internal tribal strife and external attack from the north, but lacking in funds and forces to maintain adequate security services, an independent Kenya presents the least hopeful prospect of all the Colonial territories to which we have given or contemplate giving independence. Yet as Kyle astutely points ...

Cool It

Jenny Diski, 18 July 1996

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 356 pp., £15.99, June 1996, 9780571144877
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... have seemed to “hold the Moon and Stars in fee” ’. The Romantic imagination took up the Far North and South, its impossibilities, its auroras, its uncanny stillness, its palatial icebergs, and turned them into dreamstuff. When Ishmael, in a kind of homage to The Ancient Mariner, looks into the ‘inexpressible, strange’ eyes of an albatross caught on ...

On the Beaches

Richard White: In Indian Country, 21 March 2002

Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America 
by Daniel Richter.
Harvard, 317 pp., £17.95, January 2002, 0 674 00638 0
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... with the premise that governs his book: that there were views from Indian Country of eastern North America which can be recovered by modern historians. Historians can, of course, construct a history of Indian/European colonial encounters, but the sources are overwhelmingly one-sided. There are European sources galore, and increasingly sophisticated ...

Short Cuts

Harry Stopes: Life on Licence, 19 December 2019

... John​ is one of more than 250,000 people in Britain living under the supervision of the probation service. He got out of prison in April 2018, when his sentence still had some years to run. I met him while I was reporting on the shortcomings of the law on joint enterprise. In 2005 he had been convicted for murder after a man died as a result of injuries received during a burglary John was involved in – injuries John did not inflict ...

Global Morality Play

Helen Pfeifer: Selimgate, 1 July 2021

God’s Shadow: The Ottoman Sultan Who Shaped the Modern World 
by Alan Mikhail.
Faber, 479 pp., £10.99, June, 978 0 571 33194 9
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... But the victory was just as important for the gateways it opened to other parts of the world: North Africa and the western Mediterranean, where the Spanish were expanding their influence; the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, where the Portuguese were elbowing in on local trade; and Iran and Iraq, where the Shiite Safavid dynasty was establishing its ...

What Condoleezza Said

Tony Wood: Why Did Saakashvili Do It?, 11 September 2008

... of Ossetians – Indo-Iranian in ethnic origin – live in Russia, in the autonomous republic of North Ossetia; according to the 1989 Soviet census, Ossetians formed 66 per cent of South Ossetia’s population, with Georgians accounting for 29 per cent. The two communities have lived alongside each other, and intermarried, for centuries. As the nationalist ...

Diary

Tom Vanderbilt: The View from Above, 31 March 2005

... of us don’t know what to look for, however, and the aerial view is alien to our sense of scale. John Wise, the pioneering American aeronaut, thought he was looking at a waterfall in a pleasure-garden when he saw Niagara Falls from space. ‘I was disappointed, for my mind had been bent on a soliloquy on Niagara’s raging grandeur … The little frothy ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... design for the Canadian Estate at Bulford. Two birds with one stone: the A303 should be diverted north just west of Parkhouse crossroads (the site of the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when police from Wiltshire and five adjacent sties plus troops in porcine disguise ambushed and assaulted New Age travellers en route to Stonehenge: there is no ...

Purchase and/or Conquest

Eric Foner: Were the Indians robbed?, 9 February 2006

How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier 
by Stuart Banner.
Harvard, 344 pp., £18.95, November 2005, 0 674 01871 0
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... diminished. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), a pivotal Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indians had a ‘right of occupancy’, but were not full owners of their land as whites understood it. Nonetheless, to the end of the 19th century, even as the federal government forcibly expelled Indians from the eastern half of the ...

Dykes, Drongs, Sarns, Snickets

David Craig: Walking England, 20 December 2012

The English Lakes: A History 
by Ian Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £16.99, March 2012, 978 1 4088 0958 7
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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot 
by Robert Macfarlane.
Hamish Hamilton, 432 pp., £20, June 2012, 978 0 241 14381 0
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... is based on a walk through the Lairig Ghru, the finest of British mountain passes, from Deeside north to Speyside. You might have thought that the terrain would be allowed to come into its own here: the huge massifs of Braeriach and Ben Macdhui louring above the path, with the promised land of river meadows and white houses glowing in the vee of the col ...

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