@alanlester
British Empire Professor, University of Sussex. Co-editor, MUP Studies in Imperialism series. Views here own. Blogs on politics of colonial history here: https://alanlester.co.uk Editor https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-truth-about-empire/
UCU Commons newsletter #12 just landed! Election results, ARPS & Anticas conference reports, Women’s TUC, opposing the Iran war, Equality Research conference, @alanlester.bsky.social on defamatory attacks & Adam Tickell punching down on tuition fees #UCU #UKHE
ucucommons.org/ucu-commons-...
We hear a lot about India’s imperial railways. Latest MUP Studies in Imperialism monograph is novel both in its attention to Chinese imperial railways and its new-look cover!
@rafaelbehr.bsky.social spot on
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Not for the first time Trump’s policies seem to favour not only Netanyahu’s Israel but also Putin’s Russia over the USA.
Steve Rosenberg: Russia seeks diplomatic and economic gains from Iran war www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Nesrine Malik is one of the best-informed and perceptive commentators on the current crisis that you’ll find anywhere. www.theguardian.com/world/video/...
4. And the most frequent, scathing responses: "Where is my compensation for Norman/Viking etc slavery" or "We'll pay when the Arabs/Ottomans etc pay". Actually the Church of England's specific institutional responsibility is for trans-Atlantic slavery, not oppression in world history generally.
3. "The church's reparative scheme will mean less money for church repairs and parishioners". Actually the fund will be leveraged from the £11.1 billion invested funds managed by the Church Commissioners, which are separate from day to day operating budgets.
2. "Britain already paid reparations for slavery by compensating slave owners to end the practice". Reparation is about justice for the victims of atrocities, not rewards for the perpetrators.
1. "Reparative justice is all about the past and the present is difficult enough." Actually reparation is about repairing things in the present. An example: funding hurricane-resistant homes for Jamaican descendants of those trafficked and enslaved by the Church, who never inherited compensation.
1/5 I just came across this classic piece of anti-social justice propaganda from GB News. It's had 3,600 comments, nearly all derisory and based on objections that the right wing press has aired time and time again. So let's run through those most frequently repeated:
Future historians are going to need a lot of help from pyschoanalysts to understand Trump's awestruck paralysis whenever he comes into Putin's orbit. Either that or access to Russian intelligence files.
www.reuters.com/world/kremli...
2/2 … and among white people terrified or brutalised by national service. One friend, a gay conscientious objector, was imprisoned and regularly assaulted, while two teachers I befriended turned against me as I reacted with horror at their “trophy” photos of dead Angolan soldiers.
1/2 Great piece on the trauma that maintaining white supremacy brings, including to its ‘beneficiaries’. I witnessed that in apartheid South Africa in 1988, when I spent time in black communities plagued by detentions without trial and ‘disappearances’, …
www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...
Good analysis of ever greater divergence between Netanyahu’s & Trump’s will for destruction & chaos in Iran as economic turmoil sets in.
www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...
Both Reform's and the Conservatives' foreign policy now amounts to rendering Britain a toy that Trump can periodically throw out of his cot when piqued and demand back again, so he can repeat the same antic whenever he feels like it.
www.independent.co.uk/voices/edito...
Brilliant from @nesrinemalik.bsky.social: how Trump & Netanyahu have just jeopardised the entire Gulf State apparatus.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
White House X post showing Trump as Superman
If any novelist had their fictional US President post images of himself in Superman guise to the nation, they’d be derided, quite rightly, for mocking their readers’ credulity.
1/2 An opportunity to consider the UK’s reparative role in mobilising the Commonwealth as a global community acting on climate change:
Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism share.google/alAYdCFCEOjC...
Second “explainer” piece here www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
This FOl enquiry for the Guardian has taken up a great deal of my life for the past 2 years. (1/3)
2/2 A Carradice or Karimore canvas saddlebag attached to a Brooks leather saddle.
1/2 My vote for English cultural artefacts from my cycle touring youth …
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Yes, may have hit carried away there 😊
3/3 And meanwhile, a new superpower, one that enacts its own internal atrocities & oppressions, but never did colonise the wider world or carry out the Holocaust or trans-Atlantic slavery, sits and watches as the USA hastens the West’s decline by indulging Trump’s every narcissistic, ignorant urge.
2/3 A few billionaires, irrevocably invested in the climate crisis, hoard more wealth than many countries and use it to buy up media so they can persuade the people to direct their ire at the world’s poorest and most vulnerable- those who have left the one home they have for fear or poverty.
1/3 There is and End of Days feel about Western Hegemony right now. A half millennia in which the West hoarded much of the world’s wealth, plundering, colonising and burning through fossil fuels, is ending in a paroxysmal, Trumpian blunder.
www.thetimes.com/culture/book...
This is also worth a read on Paul Marshall’s right wing ecosytem which exists to back a populist right wing takeover of the UK, whether it’s in Conservative or Reform clothing app.thenewworld.co.uk/story/143582...
