People domesticated sugar around 8,000 BCE in New Guinea. The technique of chemically refining sugar first emerged in India about 2,500 years ago, and this knowledge spread towards China, Iran, and the early Islamic worlds.

"By the fourteenth century, Cyprus and Sicily had become important Mediterranean producers of sugar for the Europeans. This success encouraged Europeans to expand the sugar industry to the Atlantic Islands, South America, and the Americas. By the time of Elizabeth I’s and James I’s rule, increasing amounts of sugar was brought from sugar plantations (engenhos) in Brazil. These engenhos demanded the enforced labour of indigenous peoples, and, increasingly, enslaved Africans, who would work in appalling conditions to crush the sugarcane, extract the juice, and boil this juice at a hot temperature to produce sugar molasses, which would be shipped to Europe in large barrels called hogsheads."

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/sugar/

#sugar #history #Brazil #raceMaking #racialization

Plantations industrialised with capitalism.
Let's spin a sugary yarn 🧶

@economics @histodons @geography

#EstelleSays #sugar #tobacco #accumulation #racism #extractivism #landGrab #raceMaking #lineofColor #racialization #rapeCulture #systemicRacism #capitalism #whiteSupremacy #whiteFragility #Discovery #Encounter #Columbus #plantations #America #history #slavery #England #UnitedKingdom #GreatBritain #Bristol #Liverpool #London #decolonial #antiRacism #sweet #sweets #Caribbean #marketing #commOdon

"We should first examine how colonisation works to decivilise the coloniser, to literally dumb them down, to degrade them, to awaken them to buried instincts, to greed, to violence, to racial hatred, to ethical relativism."

Aimé Césaire in "Discours sur le colonialisme", 1950

#entanglement #othering #civilisation #lineOfColor #raceMaking #beliefs #squash #brutalization #complicity #epistemology #coloniality #genocide #racism #colonialism #Césaire #AiméCésaire #whiteness #quote #quotes #citation

"The Zionist produces and defines itself through the animalization of the Palestinian."

"Palestinian liberation is an impossibility in the current ordering of knowledge and being, similarly demanding through its realization the end of […] this world, and modernity."

This paper "posits that Palestinian freedom necessitates the creation of new worlds and [the getting rid of encumbering] constructs such as modernity and the Human."

https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/ by Scott Campbell @susurros

@philosophy 🧶

#pessimism #epistemology #grievability #othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #PalestinianLivesMatter #Zionism #intellectualHistory #colonialism #genocide #ongoingNakba #brutalization #philosophy #europe #europeIsrael #coloniality #proZionism #StandWithIsrael #SylviaWynter #praxis #raceMaking #entanglement

"Freedom can be granted, but it remains a “legal fiction”. […] Rights cannot be bestowed upon those constructed as Slaves, non-Humans, or property, especially when such a status is the contingent basis of the worldview through which rights are given their coherence."
by Scott Campbell @susurros

“Peace, within an antiblack world, is a fallacy (much like freedom). The metaphysical infrastructure that supports the fiction of the white human is sustained by antiblack violence.”
by Calvin Warren, in Ontological Terror

(continued) 🧶

#othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #antiBlackness #slavery #BlackMastodon #AfroPessimism #beliefs #institutionsDeceive #justice #judicialBias #legality #legitimacy #IHL #internationalLaw #law #OPT #WestBank #JewishSupremacy #liberation #israelPalestine #raceMaking

"In terms of racial identity, white Americans have had the choice of being something vague, something unraced and separate from race. A capitalized "White" challenges that freedom, by unmasking Whiteness as an American racial identity as historically important as "Blackness" — which it certainly is."

~ Nell Irvin Painter: https://www.wctrib.com/opinion/nell-irvin-painter-why-white-should-be-capitalized-too via @breton 🧶

#raceMaking #entitlement #bias #whiteSupremacy #coloniality #decolonial #racism #antiRacism #sociology #USA #USPol #quotes #militancy #Americans #Whiteness #American #identity #blackMastodon #NellIrvinPainter

“In her magisterial book The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan offers a sobering conclusion: The Partition of 1947 is also a loud reminder, should we care to listen, of the dangers of colonial interventions and the profound difficulties that dog regime change. It stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths. Partition is a lasting lesson of both the dangers of imperial hubris and the reactions of extreme nationalism. For better or worse, two nations continue to live alongside each other in South Asia and continue to live with these legacies.”
―Caroline Elkins, "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire"

#liberalism #raceMaking #hinduism #violence #brutalization #ethnic #religion #IndianSubcontinent #India #Pakistan #Bangladesh #colonialism #British #BritishEmpire #BritishRule #CarolineElkins #Elkins #book #quotes #regimeChange

“For nearly a thousand years, communities on the Indian subcontinent had coexisted in a cultural melting where religious identity was less salient than ethnic or linguistic identity. “A hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged,” according to the historian of India William Dalrymple. “In the nineteenth century, India was still a place where traditions, languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and where people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith.” Much as communities had negotiated means of coexistence in pre-Mandate Palestine only to see them unravel during British rule, the subcontinent’s communal arrangements corroded when the full weight of Britain’s colonial state bore down on them. The Raj’s divide and rule policies produced a chemical-like reaction, shattering long-standing traditions of coexistence and interacting with local personalities who had their own ambitions, passions, and allegiances. It was another liberal experiment in empire gone horribly wrong, and on a scale so epic that once history’s chain of contingent events combusted, no one could contain it.”

Excerpt from Caroline Elkins' #book, "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire"

@bookstodon hat-tip @markvonwahlde

#liberalism #castism #raceMaking #hindouism #beliefs #violence #brutalization #ethnic #religion #islamophobia #IndianSubcontinent #India #Pakistan #Bangladesh #colonialism #British #preBritish #BritishEmpire #BritishRule #bookStodon #CarolineElkins

'It is overwhelming for people to see and recognize the #genocide not only because it is reminiscent of the same forms of genocide we witnessed in Bosnia and Kosovo but also because the same tactics of dehumanization and mass murder are deployed in the ostensibly “defense” of “civilization” from “terrorism.” The destruction of people, lives, land, and cultural and religious sites are working out in the same way they did in the 1990s and their justifications are anchored in Islamophobic, racist, and colonial articulations of mass murder in the name of Western liberalism.'

https://lefteast.org/yesterday-srebrenica-today-gaza/ via @Clapotis 🧶

#trauma #PTSD #israel #Gaza #supremacy #raceMaking #believe #beliefs #dehumanization #GazaWar #warOnGaza #OngoingNakba #revenge #retribution #war #warOnGaza #israelGaza #israelGazaWar #ethnicCleansing #warCrimes #GazaGenocide #Srebrenica #Bosnia #Yugoslavia #UN #history #UNHistory #liberals