#pre-british india

[khushireadsandrambles]

Mash'al-E-Mahtaab

Ilaahi kaisi kaisi sooratein tune banai hai, ki har soorat kaleje se laga lene ke qaabil hai..

Nargis Jaan "Nawabjaan"

The Queen of Shahi Baugh ✨

Gauhar Jaan "Nagma"

The poetess of Noor Mahal ✨

Mahnoor Jaan "Hoor"

The ambitious Half-Blood ✨

Firdaus Jaan "Bahaar"

The Paradise of Noor Mahal ✨

@harinishivaa @nspwriteups @vijayasena @let-it-ripperoni @kaal-naagin @hinsaa-paramo-dharma @janaknandini-singh999 @yehsahihai @whippersnappersbookworm @willkatfanfromasia @thecrazyinktrovert @celestesinsight @sowlspace @chemicalmindedlotus @arjuna-vallabha @thirst4light @jukti-torko-golpo @ramayantika @thegleamingmoon @deadloverscity @dr-scribbler

[robobee]

I just know* some of my ancestors were wronged hardcore by the British because whenever I see a rich British person with their Mayfair accent I get possessed by the same rage I imagine the French felt storming Versailles

[allherfaeriesmeetinjuly]

obsessed with russian “doomed” music and german expressionism art rn

[anky123]

This post gives a message on why you must consider doing a pre-masters course in the UK. This post gives information on becoming familiar with UK culture, understanding the British teaching style, and many more. To know more, read this post and contact our UK study abroad consultants in India today.

[metamatar]

This is maybe a stupid question but do you think there's any ties between like orientalist trends in western countries that glorify dharmic religions and Hindutva? Like I've heard 'Hinduism is the oldest religion on Earth' and 'Hinduism/Buddhism are just so much more enlightened than savage Abrahamic religions' and 'how could there be war and oppression in India? Hindus don't believe in violence' from white liberals and it certainly seems *convenient* for Hindutva propaganda, at least.

Not stupid at all! Historically, orientalism precedes modern Hindutva. The notion of a unified Hinduism is actually constructed in the echo of oriental constructions of India, with Savarkar clearly modelling One Nation, One Race, One Language on westphalian nationhood. He will often draw on Max Mueller type of indology orientalists in his writing in constructing the Hindu claim to a golden past and thus an ethnostate.

In terms of modern connections you can see the use and abuse of orientalism in South Asian postcolonial studies depts in the west that end up peddling Hindutva ideology –

The geographer Sanjoy Chakravorty recently promised that, in his new book, he would “show how the social categories of religion and caste as they are perceived in modern-day India were developed during the British colonial rule…” The air of originality amused me. This notion has been in vogue in South Asian postcolonial studies for at least two decades. The highest expression of the genre, Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind, was published in 2001. I take no issue with claiming originality for warmed-over ideas: following the neoliberal mantra of “publish or perish,” we academics do it all the time. But reading Chakravorty’s essay, I was shocked at the longevity of this particular idea, that caste as we know it is an artefact of British colonialism. For any historian of pre-colonial India, the idea is absurd. Therefore, its persistence has less to do with empirical merit, than with the peculiar dynamics of the global South Asian academy.

[...] No wonder that Hindutvadis in both countries are now quoting their works to claim that caste was never a Hindu phenomenon. As Dalits are lynched across India and upper-caste South Asian-Americans lobby to erase the history of their lower-caste compatriots from US textbooks, to traffic in this self-serving theory is unconscionable.

You can see writer sociologists beloved of western academia like Ashish Nandy argue for the "inherent difference of indian civilization makes secularism impossible" and posit that the caste ridden gandhian hinduism is the answer as though the congress wasn't full of hindutva-lites and that the capture of dalit radicalism by electoralism and grift is actually a form of redistribution. Sorry if thats not necessarily relevant I like to hate on him.

Then most importantly is the deployment of "Islamic Colonization" that Hindu India must be rescued from, which is merely cover for the rebrahmanization of the country. This periodization and perspective of Indian history is obviously riven up in British colonial orientalism, see Romila Thapar's work on precolonial India. Good piece on what the former means if you've not engaged with it, fundamentally it posits an eternal Hindu innocence.

[fatehbaz]

Endangered Indian sandalwood. British war to control the forests. Tallying every single tree in the kingdom. European companies claim the ecosystem. Spices and fragrances. Failure of the plantation. Until the twentieth century, the Empire couldn't figure out how to cultivate sandalwood because they didn't understand that the plant is actually a partial root parasite. French perfumes and the creation of "the Sandalwood City".

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Selling at about $147,000 per metric ton, the aromatic heartwood of Indian sandalwood (S. album) is arguably [among] the most expensive wood in the world. Globally, 90 per cent of the world’s S. album comes from India [...]. And within India, around 70 per cent of S. album comes from the state of Karnataka [...] [and] the erstwhile Kingdom of Mysore. [...] [T]he species came to the brink of extinction. [...] [O]verexploitation led to the sandal tree's critical endangerment in 1974. [...]

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Francis Buchanan’s 1807 A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar is one of the few European sources to offer insight into pre-colonial forest utilisation in the region. [...] Buchanan records [...] [the] tradition of only harvesting sandalwood once every dozen years may have been an effective local pre-colonial conservation measure. [...] Starting in 1786, Tipu Sultan [ruler of Mysore] stopped trading pepper, sandalwood and cardamom with the British. As a result, trade prospects for the company [East India Company] were looking so bleak that by November 1788, Lord Cornwallis suggested abandoning Tellicherry on the Malabar Coast and reducing Bombay’s status from a presidency to a factory. [...] One way to understand these wars is [...] [that] [t]hey were about economic conquest as much as any other kind of expansion, and sandalwood was one of Mysore’s most prized commodities. In 1799, at the Battle of Srirangapatna, Tipu Sultan was defeated. The kingdom of Mysore became a princely state within British India [...]. [T]he East India Company also immediately started paying the [new rulers] for the right to trade sandalwood.

British control over South Asia’s natural resources was reaching its peak and a sophisticated new imperial forest administration was being developed that sought to solidify state control of the sandalwood trade. In 1864, the extraction and disposal of sandalwood came under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. [...] Colonial anxiety to maximise profits from sandalwood meant that a government agency was established specifically to oversee the sandalwood trade [...] and so began the government sandalwood depot or koti system. [...]

From the 1860s the [British] government briefly experimented with a survey tallying every sandal tree standing in Mysore [...].

Instead, an intricate system of classification was developed in an effort to maximise profits. By 1898, an 18-tiered sandalwood classification system was instituted, up from a 10-tier system a decade earlier; it seems this led to much confusion and was eventually reduced back to 12 tiers [...].

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Meanwhile, private European companies also made significant inroads into Mysore territory at this time. By convincing the government to classify forests as ‘wastelands’, and arguing that Europeans would improves these tracts from their ‘semi-savage state’, starting in the 1860s vast areas were taken from local inhabitants and converted into private plantations for the ‘production of cardamom, pepper, coffee and sandalwood’.

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Yet attempts to cultivate sandalwood on both forest department and privately owned plantations proved to be a dismal failure. There were [...] major problems facing sandalwood supply in the period before the twentieth century besides overexploitation and European monopoly. [...] Before the first quarter of the twentieth century European foresters simply could not figure out how to grow sandalwood trees effectively.

The main reason for this is that sandal is what is now known as a semi-parasite or root parasite; besides a main taproot that absorbs nutrients from the earth, the sandal tree grows parasitical roots (or haustoria) that derive sustenance from neighbouring brush and trees. [...] Dietrich Brandis, the man often regaled as the father of Indian forestry, reported being unaware of the [sole significant English-language scientific paper on sandalwood root parasitism] when he worked at Kew Gardens in London on South Asian ‘forest flora’ in 1872–73. Thus it was not until 1902 that the issue started to receive attention in the scientific community, when C.A. Barber, a government botanist in Madras [...] himself pointed out, 'no one seems to be at all sure whether the sandalwood is or is not a true parasite'.

Well into the early decades of twentieth century, silviculture of sandal proved a complete failure. The problem was the typical monoculture approach of tree farming in which all other species were removed and so the tree could not survive. [...]

The long wait time until maturity of the tree must also be considered. Only sandal heartwood and roots develop fragrance, and trees only begin developing fragrance in significant quantities after about thirty years. Not only did traders, who were typically just sailing through, not have the botanical know-how to replant the tree, but they almost certainly would not be there to see a return on their investments if they did. [...]

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The main problem facing the sustainable harvest and continued survival of sandalwood in India [...] came from the advent of the sandalwood oil industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. During World War I, vast amounts of sandal were stockpiled in Mysore because perfumeries in France had stopped production and it had become illegal to export to German perfumeries. In 1915, a Government Sandalwood Oil Factory was built in Mysore. In 1917, it began distilling. [...] [S]andalwood production now ramped up immensely. It was at this time that Mysore came to be known as ‘the Sandalwood City’.

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Text above by: Ezra Rashkow. "Perfumed the axe that laid it low: The endangerment of sandalwood in southern India." Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, no. 1, pages 41-70. March 2014. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[bantarleton]

Who Were the "Hessians"?

A good article from Facebook by Dr Alex Burns;

Myth 1): German troops were all Hessians.

Although most came from the mid-sized German state of Hessen-Kassel, troops from six different principalities (Hessen-Kassel, Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Hessen-Hanau, Ansbach-Bayreuth, Waldeck, and Anhalt-Zerbst.) Indeed, the current leading progressive reenactment group portraying these soldiers represents Regiment Prinz Friedrich, essentially a garrison unit from Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel.

If you include the larger, global war outside America, fought in places like Gibraltar and India, troops from the state of Hanover (Braunschweig-Lüneburg) also fought for the British outside of the Holy Roman Empire (the pre-German territorial entity.) So, while over 60% of these troops came from Hessen, they really hailed from all over the western and central Holy Roman Empire. As a result, it might be better to call them something other than Hessians. "Germanic" has been put forward, but that usually conjures up images of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Myth 2): They were mercenaries.

Imagine you are a soldier in the United States Army, serving in West Germany during the Cold War. You are stationed there because of longstanding agreements and alliances, which stretch back decades. The United States Government and the West German government have a financial understanding that helps maintain your presence in the region. Are you a mercenary? The situation was very similar for the German-speaking soldiers who fought in the American War of Independence, They had a longstanding relationship with Great Britain, stretching back decades. They had fought with alongside the British since the 1690s, both in continental Europe and in the British isles. As a result of the Hanoverian succession in 1714 (the British Royal family was drawn from Hanover) they had longstanding marriage connections with Great Britain. Horace Walpole, a British politician from the 1730s, referred to the Hessians as the Triarii of Great Britain.

These soldiers did not personally or corporately take on contracts from the British. they were members of state militaries: their governments were paid a subsidy by the British in order to fight in their wars. Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia, received subsidies from the British during the Seven Years War. As a result, the modern German term for these troops is *Subsidientruppen, *or subsidy troops. **Thus, it might be better to speak of the German-speaking subsidy troops, as opposed to calling them Hessians, or mercenaries. **Historians have argued that it might be fitting to call their countries "mercenary states". This is different from saying they were mercenaries.

Myth 3): They were sold to America because their princes were greedy and wanted to build palaces and pay for their illegitimate children.

The princes of the Western Holy Roman Empire lived in an incredibly dangerous world during the eighteenth century. Their territories were small, rural, principalities, trapped between the military giants of France, Austria, and Prussia. As a result, from the 1670s, these princes attempted to use subsidy contracts to build themselves larger armies, in order to preserve their independence. These subsidy contracts were a standard feature of European politics, diplomacy, and conflict resolution. They allowed the princes to better protect their small domains. None of the princes who formed subsidy contracts with Britain during the American War of Independence were doing something radically new or greedy. Instead, they were following on decades of practice which had allowed them to maintain their own independence. The Hessian (Hessen-Kassel) Landgraf Friedrich II actually used the funds from the contract, in part, to promote economic development and the textile industry in his territories. **Some of them had illegitimate children. Some had palaces. Portraying them as sex-crazed misers limits our understanding of the economic and security necessities which actually underpinned their subsidy policies. **Following the long-standing practices of their governments, princes in the Western Holy Roman Empire entered subsidy agreements to maintain the costs of their states.

Myth 4): They committed many brutal war-crimes in America.

The subsidy troops had been used in messy civil conflicts before. Hessian troops were used against the Jacobites in 1745-6, where they remarkably refused to take part in the repression against the Scottish Jacobites. Their troops were remembered in Perthshire, Scotland, as "a gentle race," and their commanding Prince (Friedrich II) declared, "My Hessians and I have been called to fight the enemies of the British crown, but never will we consent to hang or torture in its name." (Duffy, *Best of Enemies, *p. 133). English officers in the Seven Years War, noted that their troops were reprimanded for plundering more than Hessian forces. (Atwood, *The Hessians, *p. 173). In North America during the War of Independence, the Hessians once again behaved better than their British counterparts. Although there was a surge of fear about Hessian brutality early in the war, after the first few years of the war, Americans believed that the Hessians treated them better than British soldiers. Aaron Burr wrote of Hessian atrocities: "Various have been the reports concerning the barbarities committed by the Hessians, most of them [are] incredible and false." (Matthew Davis, *Memoirs of Aaron Burr, *Vol 1. p. 107). Comparing the brutality of the Napoleonic Wars with the American War of Independence, a Hessian veteran who served in both wars commented: "Everything which the author has subsequently seen in this regard greatly exceeds what one should term cruelty in America, which in comparison with more recent times, can be regarded as nothing more than a harmless puppet show." (Adam Ludwig von Ochs, *Betrachtungen Ueber die Kriegkunst, *60-61.) Hessian troops committed crimes in America, there is no doubt. What is clear is that these crimes were not excessive for an eighteenth-century conflict.

Myth 5): Many of them deserted to America, where life was better.

Many Americans claim Hessian ancestry. As a result, it is common to encounter the sentiment that these "mercenary" troops were simply waiting to switch sides. In reality, most of these troops returned to their homelands in the Holy Roman Empire. A very small number switched sides before the end of the war, a larger (but still small) percentage elected to remain in America after the war ended in 1783. Far from being an act of rebellion, the princes encouraged their subsidy troops to remain in America if they desire: this would cut costs, and make the process of slashing the military budget easier in peacetime. Most returned to celebrations, public parades, and being welcomed by loved ones. For more on exact data of desertions, as well as the subsidy-troops' return home, see Daniel Krebs' book, *A Generous and Merciful Enemy. *The majority of these troops remained loyal to their princes, and returned home to their own native lands.

Who Were the Hessians?

The experience of 37,000 soldiers mainly drawn from six small counties is not all one thing. There are elements of truth to each of the myths about the Hessians, but their story is more complex than the myths that are told about them in English-speaking circles in North America. They were drawn from a fascinating world in Central Europe with its own customs, practices, and traditions. They entered the American story, and as a result, it is worth taking the time to understand and remember their path in it in a complex way.

A "Hessian" Reading List:

Rodney Atwood: "The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel in the American Revolution"

Friedrike Baer: "Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War"

Stephan Huck: "Soldaten gegen Nordamerika Lebenswelten Braunschweiger Subsidientruppen im amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg"

Charles Ingrao: "The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785"

Daniel Krebs: "A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution"

[yourtongzhihazel]

Is the main distinction between "slave societies" (Egypt, Rome, pre-Columbian American states, etc.) and slavery that emerged during the growth of capitalism in the dominance of commodity production? Like, slaves in Rome weren't so heavily growing cash crops like they did in the Americas, because the productive forces were very weak at the time. Are there more qualitative differences?

Generally speaking, yes that's absolutely correct. We can expand on this further.

Recall from Capital the process of primitive accumulation. In short, this is the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism. Marx identifies how that phenomenon specifically looked like in england through the closing of the commons and associated state violence. Long story short, the peasants became proletarians, industry grew, you got proto-capitalist firms like the dutch east indies or british east india companies, and in these nascent industrial, early transition from feudalist to capitalist societies, one of the prime concerns was the gathering of materials to fund these industries. From this, we got mercantilist policies and colonization. Marx points out that inthe colonies, primitive accumulation, as it occurred in the home countries, could not happen; there didn't exist the same restrictive material conditions and superstructure which was conductive for that process. The indigenous populations were largely genocided and their land stolen and what indentured labor was imported were limited in scope. The solution, thus, was chattel slavery. This created a whole class of people whose sole purpose was the production of raw material for industrial consumption.

In the slave societies of the past, the slaves themslves largely made up the means of production. While this didn't exactly change under chattel slavery, an important difference is that the slaves themselves also became commodities in their entire being. This placed them on a strata even lower than the proleteriat who also had to commodify their bodies in the form of purchasable labor power, but had the freedom of entering the market on "free-er" terms.

For a more in-depth analysis, Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery is an excellent resource which not only explores the origins of capitalist chattel slavery, but also its details, extent, and integration into early capitalism and why it eventually fell out of favor.

[ballads-for-kuni]

Genshin Timeline Confirmation

WARNING: REFERENCING OF GENSHIN FONTAINE 4.2 ARCHON QUEST ENDING. PLEASE TURN BACK NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED THE AQ, OR BE AT RISK OF SPOILERS.

GUYS

FONTAINE ESSENTIALLY EXECUTED FOCALORS, THE HYDRO ARCHON, VIA "GUILLOTINE" (OF SORTS).

AND FONTAINE IS CONFIRMED TO BE BASED OFF FRANCE.

WHICH MEANS THAT FOCALORS' EXECUTION IS EQUIVALENT TO THE EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, THE LAST QUEEN OF FRANCE BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

MARIE ANTOINETTE WAS EXECUTED ON OCTOBER 16, 1793.

SO THAT MEANS WE NOW HAVE A TIMELINE FOR GENSHIN'S HISTORY IN CONJUNCTION TO IRL HISTORY.

IT'S BREAKDOWN TIME!

WHAT HAPPENED IN COUNTRIES IN 1793

MONDSTADT = GERMANY = Holy Roman Empire (962-1806) LIYUE = IMPERIAL CHINA = Qing Dynasty (1636-1912) INAZUMA = SHOGUNATE JAPAN = Edo Period (1603-1868) SUMERU (RAINFOREST) = SOUTH ASIA + MIDDLE EAST = too many areas to cover, completely unsure (India: Early-Modern period, British occupation of majority of India, mass-industrialisation) SUMERU (DESERT) = EGYPT = Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) FONTAINE = FRANCE = End of the French Monarchy NATLAN = PRE-COLUMBIAN LATIN AMERICA + WEST AFRICA = unsure SNEZHNAYA = RUSSIA = Russian Empire (1721-1917) under Catherine II (overthrew her husband, Peter III; she ruled 1762-1796)

Let me know if you guys like and want more stuff like this, I'll go deep-dive for more research if you guys like it! ♥

[slyandthefamilybook]

aren't israelis colonizers? is israel any different from india with respect to kashmir?

I don't know enough about India and Kashmir to answer that part, so I won't

But in short, no, Israelis are not colonizers.

As a longer answer, I think first it's important to draw a distinction between colonization and colonialism. Colonization has a pretty broad application. In its simplest sense it means "people moving from one place to another place and establishing some sort of autonomy there". It usually involves the suppression of indigenous peoples, but not always. We talk about, for example, "colonizing Mars", even though there's no one up there as far as we can tell

In that sense, sure, you can call Israelis colonizers. You'd be ignoring the millions of Jews who are descended from the Old Yishuv (the Jews who lived in British Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel), unless you think that pre-Israel Jews were also colonizers, in which case I don't think there's a discussion to be had. You'd also have to ignore the millions of non-Jewish Israeli citizens, such as Bedouin Arabs, Druze, Samaritans, Chinese, Arameans, etc.

You'd also have to ignore the roughly 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab-dominant countries and fled to Israel as refugees, not as settlers. "Israeli" is a pretty broad term, it turns out

In terms of colonialism it's pretty much impossible to fit any definition to Israel. Colonialism is the process of exporting a dominant culture from a centralized point at the expense of indigenous cultures. For example, when the British established colonies on Turtle Island, the colonizers brought their British culture with them. They spoke English, worshiped God and The King in that order, used British pounds, established settlements with names like "James' Town" and "George Town", followed English law, and generally made a mess of the place. In contrast, when the First Aliyah came to British Palestine, they shed their European names in favor of their Jewish ones. They abandoned English, German, Yiddish and Ladino in favor of Hebrew, the last surviving Canaanite language. They built cities named things like Tel Aviv, and Shmuel HaNavi. For the first time in centuries, they visited the tombs of our ancestors–Avraham, Yitzchak, and Ya'akov. They made pilgrimages to the very cities spoken about in the Torah, our founding document and the source of our ethnogenesis. They found Jewish artifacts thousands of years old. Some people call this "artificial self-indigenization", but they're wrong. It's not even re-indigenization, because indigenous identity has no expiration date. Jews may have assimilated into various cultures around the world to some extent or another, but our identity as Jews has always been tied to the Levant. No colonial project in history has viewed itself as a return to a place from which they originated.

This isn't to say that Israelis haven't committed atrocities against Palestinians, or that they don't continue to do so. Theft of Palestinian homes, the Nakba, the suppression of the rights and culture of Palestinians, all of that history is reprehensible and needs to be answered for. But violence does not a colony make.

here's a piece from the left-wing Israeli news outlet Ha'aretz talking more about it

[kuhuchan]

one weird-ish thing in these old-ish stories is how much the british people in general treated india as some fantasy land far away with magic and everything exotic.

naming animals and objects indian names for the exotic touch, weird fascination to snakecharming, and tantric rituals and yoga, and spicy food etc etc

cant give specific examples rn but this is kinda the vibes i often get while reading stuff from that era

and its kinda weird reading from this perspective....... like no yall are supposed to be the weird looking ones with weird looking food and weird looking cloths lmao

not claiming racism or anything, ig this is what happens when two very different populations interact

An excerpt from Prostitution under the Raj which traces the evolution of prostitution in Bengal from pre- to post-colonial era. Seemed fitting.

[aboardthescheherazade]

Inspired by @professorcalculusstanaccount's timeline posts, it's Roberto Rastapopoulos through the years! No little Greek boy don't grow up to be a massive shithead--

Rasta is a very difficult character to understand in canon, because so much of his lore is left unknown to the viewer. However, there were little bits and pieces, some in Herge's tertiary studio notes; over time I've wrung some water from that stone, and put together this timeline in my head. I went with a more condensed range than ProfCal (i.e. pre-canon up to canon, rather than into post-canon), since Rob does technically "die"/disappear by the end of the (finished) comics.

Headcanons and details under the cut:

According to speculative official notes, he was born in the 1890s in Leros. It's a beautiful island but also one with a turbulent history, as when little Roberto was born, that part of Greece was under control by the Ottoman Empire. His father was a sponge diver, which was a very viable career at the time. (Decades later, the industry would be ruined when the area's sea sponges were over-harvested by bigger diving operations.) His mother is basically unknown...many official outlets say Rastapopoulos is part American, so I imagine his mother was of Greek-American heritage who either met his father abroad or in America.

There were two real-world figures who influenced my timeline: Aristote Onassis and Aleister Crowley. Onassis was one of Herge's later inspirations when writing Rastapopoulos, and for good reason; much like Rastapopoulos's own immoral dealings, Onassis indiscriminately sold warships during WWII and can easily be considered an arms dealer who profited off of human atrocities. On the other hand, Aleister Crowley was my own connection. All the pseudo-Egyptian mysticism in Cigars of the Pharaoh and the Kih-Oskh Brotherhood seems to be a reference to the very real trend in the early 20th Century where the upper crust of western society became fascinated with esoteric beliefs. (Seances and the Ouija Board were also created during this era.) Crowley rose in infamy during this time, too, as a spoiled debutante who spent his inheritance on journeys through the MENA region to perform rituals and "adapt" Eastern religions for his own belief system. With Rastapopoulos making up an entire pharaoh and emblem for his secret trafficking club, it reminded me very much of Crowley's own endeavours, and the commodification of MENA cultures and iconography during this era.

Child (1897) - Canonically, he has three brothers and two sisters, so l envisioned him as the middle child amidst all that. Little Roberto was spoiled when he was little, but when his youngest brother was born, it left Roberto feeling like the attention had been stolen from him.

15 (1906)- The other siblings hoped Roberto would be just as enthusiastic as they were about the family diving business, but alas, he'd always been more interested in reading prose and classical plays. His favourite play is Gounod's Faust. Some days, he daydreams about what a deal with the devil could get him, thinking he'd be able to outsmart the devil and win his riches for free. Roberto was at a rebellious point in his life, and sadly, he'd come to be ashamed of his background, deciding sponge diving was "peasant work" and that he'd rather tell others he was British or American. Eventually, it became easier for the whole family to just send him to a boarding school. Deep down, Roberto's parents hoped he might become an actor, a writer, or some sort of scholar...but the night before he left, Roberto secretly took down his whole family's banking information.

20s (1910s) - Roberto is now in his "Aleister Crowley's world tour" phase. He throws around mysteriously large quantities of money, often putting it into investments, and taking many journeys through Egypt and India. (I also like to imagine he met the Fakir and Colonel Fuad around this time; maybe Zloty too). Rastapopoulos is an insufferable, preening dandy at this time, trying to carve out his own place among the societal elite. His Greek identity is only flaunted as a way to make him seem more "exotic" to strangers. He tries not to think about the bank accounts he's leeching from.

30s (1920s) - Several of his investments actually flourished. His shares in Arab-Air and Flor Fina yield enough profit to let him buy out the companies, and his decadence only increases as he reaps even more profits. With extra money going around, Rastapopoulos finally decides to foray into the movie industry...as a movie producer. His passion for theatre never died, and if he can't become an actor himself, then why not produce the kinds of stories he wanted to be in? By the time the Great Depression hits, Rastapopoulos has amassed more than enough wealth to stay afloat...and the drug ring he's started with a few good friends sure helps, too. He's more concerned with holding onto every millimetre of his receding hairline.

40s (canon) - By all means, Rastapopoulos could have disbanded the cartel and retired comfortably. Maybe he could have invested more in his own movies, and focused more on Cosmos Pictures's internal operations. And yet, he didn't. Bigger numbers are better, so Rastapopoulos kept amassing his dirty money, thinking he was too big to fall. He got messy and left behind some viable clues, which some Belgian kid happened to stumble across...

50s (1940s-early 50s)- "Roberto Rastapopoulos" may be out on bail and facing decades in prison, but "Marquis Dante di Gorgonzola" is just some mysterious financier with an offshore bank account. Some of the other societal elites recognize him, but they find the alter ego funny and play along; "Oh, here comes "the marquis"...! He's due back in Hong Kong!" He can't make money through drug trafficking anymore, he can't show his face in Hollywood, and he certainly can't go back to Greece. Unfortunately, some of his associates introduce him to a different kind of trafficking, one even more immoral, but just as lucrative... It's the climax of the Rastapopoulos family tragedy: the son of hard-working commoners has ground his family's name into dust thanks to his pursuit of power and decadence; he has now resorted to deceiving those same sorts of commoners, dooming them to unknown fates just so he can buy a boat. Later, he begins resorting to harebrained schemes and petty crime just to maintain that lifestyle. His Greek identity has long been buried in favour of a vague, exotic cultural identity meant to explain away his quirks and twitchiness.

I've long been torn on whether or not Endaddine Akass is Rastapopoulos's final form. Herge's notes do consider him surviving Flight 714 to Sydney by waking up in the tropics with some degree of amnesia...perhaps this is near Jamaica, where he'll meet Ramo Nash under a new identity. It also feels the most theatrical - Rastapopoulos is playing yet another role, and he has a grand finale planned for Tintin's murder. Additionally, the mysticism Akass totes in Alph-Art is inspired by the alternative religion fads of the 1960s-70s; Akass is evocative of some of those many cult leaders, like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh or Father Yod.

And yet, I almost find it more fitting for Rastapopoulos to survive Flight 714 to Sydney with full amnesia. He only knows himself as some middle-aged vagrant, and he decides he just has to pick himself up, and find some odd jobs to make a living. He gives himself a new name; his family history has been wiped clean. He struggles to make ends meet, much like the family he bankrupted, though he'll never know just how ironic his life has become. The rest of the world knows Rastapopoulos as a bombastic, flashy debutante who died a pitiful death during a police standoff. Tintin feels like he saw him one last time, but it feels like a bad dream he had during a flight layover. The man who always wanted to be the biggest and best died quietly in the sea, his true fate unknown, his body forever missing.

I think that's why I find Rastapopoulos so fascinating as a character! You can either make him into Tintin's greatest scourge who fights to the death to maintain his status, or you can rip all that away and doom him to a humble existence.

[lunar-serpentinite]

Nandhini's Legacy AU : Family Masterlist

A directory for all the Magical families that have a role in my Tamil!Potters AU titled Nandhini's Legacy

Nandhini's Descendants

Status: Extant

House Words: The Forests Answer to Us

Residence: House of Serpents (Western Ghats, Tamil Nadu, India); Nagaraja Hall (Gloucestershire, England)

Insignia: Cobra (Lotus Eater), cow, elephant

Colour/s: Green and gold

Head/s: Nithila, daughter of Aathirai (Main); Lily Potter (British branch); ████████ (Italian branch)

A South Asian Magical family from Tamil Nadu, with known branches in the United Kingdom and Italy. The main branch in Tamil Nadu do not carry surnames but as a collective they refer to themselves as Nandhini's descendants or Aditya's descendants. The United Kingdom branch carries the surname Potter. There is little information on the Italian branch. Should the main branch members find themselves in need of a surname for whatever reason, they have their pick of either Nandhini, Aditya, or Potter.

They are known for their unique variant of Parseltongue, commonly known as Potter's Parseltongue in the western world, and their unique connection with snakes. Their estates are known to house an extremely rare type of Magical snake called the Lotus Eater cobra, which appears in their heraldry.

The British branch is also known for their contributions to the country's Potions field and their work in the Magical ceramics industry.

The title of the Head and Heir of the family is primarily passed down the female line but only in secret. In the eyes of the public and the law, they practice patrilineal primogeniture like most other families. This specifically stems from old survival tactics of their ancestors but in the present day, the practice is continued out of respect and fondness of tradition.

They are known to rarely marry outside their South Asian circles, if at all. Regulus Potter ne Black is the first person who is not of South Asian descent to have successfully married into the family.

Through marriage, they are connected to the House of Black.

Notable members: Harry Potter, James Potter, Lily Potter (nee Evans), Regulus Potter (ne Black), Nithila, Lathishri, Kadhir, Iniyan

More information on the family

More information on members (Harry Potter, Lily Evans Potter, others TBP)

The House of Black

Status: Extant

House Words: Toujours pur (Always pure); Birthed by Shadows, Thrive in Darkness

Residence: 12 Grimmauld Place (Borough of Islington, London)

Insignia: Hawk, three crows

Colour/s: Black and maroon

Head/s: ████████ (Main); Sirius Black (British branch)

An ancient and powerful family whose earliest ancestor has been said to have lived as early as pre-Islamic Arabia. According to their own members, the family donned the surname of Black because their ancestors survived and thrived in the shadows of great kingdoms and empires.

In the present time, it said that the House of Black is so massive that their influential reach spans from North Africa all the way to West Asia. Smaller branches have left Asia and Africa and have settled somewhere else in the globe. One of the most notable branches would be their British branch which consists of at least three sub-branches. They are primarily known for their natural talent and extensive knowledge and use of Mind Magic, as well as their open usage and mastery of the Dark Arts.

Despite their fame and influence, little is actually known about the House of Black as a whole. Individual branch seats, heads and members are known, but the House's main seat and head remain a mystery even to the most prolific information hunters in the underground market.

The family's British branch is considered to be one of the country's Sacred Twenty-Eight. The British branch as at least three known sub-branches. The head British branch is historically Egyptian while the other two known sub-branches are historically Levantine (Palestinian) and Persian. The British branch is also notable for their tradition of naming their members after various objects in the night sky, from constellations to stars to natural satellites.

Famously, they rejected Dark Lord Voldemort's offer of allegiance in his first campaign. Orion Black, the Head at the time, has been reported to have told him that their family has "seen more formidable and competent Dark Lords back in the day". However, the family also did not make any moves to stop the Dark Lord's campaign either.

Like the other pureblood families, they generally refused to marry non-purebloods.

Through marriage, they are connected to the Potter family, the Lestrange family, and the Malfoy family, among other families.

Notable members: Sirius Black, Regulus Potter (ne Black), Andromeda Tonks (nee Black; estranged), Bellatrix Lestrange (nee Black), Narcissa Malfoy (nee Black)

More information on the family (TBP)

More information on members (TBP)

Maison Malfoyenne

Status: Extant

House Words: Sanctimonia Vincet Semper (Purity Will Always Conquer); Mountains Bow to River Rapids

Residence: Château de Port du Rhin (Port du Rhin, Strasbourg, France); Nadder Court (Wilton, Wiltshire, England)

Insignia: Mute swan, serpent

Colour/s: Blue and green

Head/s: Cassian Malfoy (Main); Lucius Malfoy (British branch)

A French magical family who trace their origins back to Strasbourg, France and Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Historically and traditionally, they are a family of lawmakers, judges, and politicians. Their main branch in Strasbourg is noted to have a hand at shaping the French Magical Parliament to what it is today and members of the family continue to hold significant power in the Magical Parliament themselves.

This tradition continues with the British branch of the family. Armand Malfoy established himself as a pillar of the early Magical British community shortly after arriving in the country and receiving land and a title from King William I. His descendants would go on to become notable members of the governing bodies of the time. The family has produced a certain number of Chief Warlocks and a couple of Supreme Mugwump candidates.

The family has a fondness for establishing their family estates nearby rivers. The main family seat of Château de Port du Rhin is located near the River Rhine, while the British seat of Nadder Court is located near the River Nadder. They are also known for their mastery of water magic.

In the Dark Lord Voldemort's first campaign, Lucius Malfoy had joined the ranks of his Death Eaters but soon defected once his then-fiancee and current wife Narcissa Malfoy nee Black made him choose between her or the Dark Lord.

The Malfoy branch of the family was listed as part of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. Like the other pureblood families, they generally refused to marry non-purebloods.

Through marriage, they are connected to the House of Black, the Lestrange family, and the Lovegood family, among other families.

Notable members: Lucius Malfoy, Narcissa Malfoy (nee Black), Draco Malfoy, Pandora Lovegood (nee Malfoy), Xenophilius Lovegood, Luna Lovegood

More information on the family (TBP)

More information on members (TBP)

Clan Weasley

Status: Extant

House Words: Roots Run Deep

Residence: The Burrow (Ottery St Catchpole, Devon, West Country, England)

Insignia: Rowan, oak

Colour/s: Orange and green

Head/s: Arthur Weasley

Historically a Scottish Highlands Pureblood clan, the Weasleys used to be protectors of a Magical part of the Caledonian Forest before they were driven out of their ancestral home around the time when the local Pureblood clan leaders were forced to hand over their authority to the growing power of the British Ministry of Magic. The Weasleys' portion of the Caledonian Forest was handed over to wandmakers under the Ministry and the Weasleys themselves were forced to relocate further and further away from their ancestral home until they settled in Devon.

The Weasleys' current residence is in Ottery St Catchpole where many of their relatives have also settled. Though they don't have the same power and strength they used to have, they were able to smuggle some saplings from their ancestral home and they have been caring for the trees that grew from those saplings in the years since.

Their Magic is closely tied to the earth and the trees they take care of. Many of them eventually end up in careers where they work closely with wood (carpenters, carvers, broom makers, Quidditch players) or the earth and the creatures that dwell in and on the earth (agriculturists, all sorts of animal caretakers, etc.)

They are also known to have fairly large family units, with their main branch currently having seven children in the youngest generation.

Notable members: Arthur Weasley, Molly Weasley (nee Prewett), William Weasley, Charles Weasley, Percy Weasley, Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Ronald Weasley, Ginevra Weasley

More information on the family (TBP)

More information on members (TBP)

The Park Clan

Status: Extant

House Words: Beware the Spider

Residence: Sangju Park Clan Ancestral Home (Hamchang-eup, Sangju, North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea); Sangjeon Pavilion (Staffordshire Moorlands, Staffordshire, England)

Insignia: Fox, star, spider

Colour/s: White and blue

Head/s: Park Ho-Jung (Main); Aloysius Parkinson (British branch)

[WIP]

Notable members: Aloysius Parkinson, Primrose Parkinson, Pansy Parkinson

More information on the family (TBP)

More information on members (TBP)

[kaladinkholins]

i love being southeast asian.

despite whatever unhappy history, despite the rise of ethnonationalism and racism in our countries; despite the fact that most of us remain in the global south under the invisible thumb of western empires and conglomerates, exploited by rich expats and beg-packers; despite the conservatism, the bigotry, the pain and prejudice and the corruption.

despite all that, i love where i am from. this is my home.

my hands tenderly trace the lines of our history and find within it a colourful collection of influences that continue to shape us until today:

the native malays, javanese, sundanese, minangkabau, bugis, visayan, tagalog, and other dominant peoples.

alongside indigenous tribes like the iban, kadazan, sama-bajau, temuan, penan, jakun, and hundreds upon hundreds more ethnic groups.

all of us holding onto our ancestors' mysticism and spirituality and animism, the watchful gaze of legacy fixed on us as we move through an ever-changing and modernising world (and what is modernity anyway? isn't civilisation overrated?).

and then the chinese peoples. the hainanese, hokkien and cantonese and more, many of whom came here due to trade in the pre-colonial era, but then most arrived as the imported labour for the colonial powers.

but this is their home too. we live here together, and through them we all celebrate lunar new year and the mid-autumn festival. all of us give red envelopes during our many festivals. we give oranges that symbolise prosperity and ring in the year of the rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat. we hold lion dance performances in our malls and marks. we eat and exchange mooncakes.

and then the indian peoples, though mostly tamil indians from south india, but also sikhs, malayalis, and punjabis, who arrived and assimilated and spread their culture and beliefs much earlier before the pre-colonial era, causing the indianisation of southeast asia. then more indian peoples came during the colonial era, again, as imported labour, working our fields or donning the uniform of our common oppressors, kept walled away from us despite how alike we look and sound.

because truly we do sound the same. sanskrit remains an abundant source for a large chunk of our languages. i hear the vedic mantras and can pick apart words that sound familiar. hinduism and buddhism still leaves its traces in our cultures even for those of us who've shifted to islam.

and yes, islam. we're not what the west thinks of when they talk about the muslim world, but southeast asia has some of the largest muslim populations in the world. because through trade, since the medieval times, islam came here and with it brought so many arabic influences that has come to shape our languages and customs, with plenty of our cultures having since been morphed around islamic beliefs and ideas. in malaysia and indonesia and brunei (and perhaps even certain parts of the philippines) you'll find a mosque or a prayer room everywhere you go. and every ramadan millions of us fast, every eid all of us dress up and visit each other's houses for feasts and festivities.

then of course came european colonisation at the hands of the portugese, dutch, british (in malaysia and indonesia's case we got all three), spanish, and french their reigns lasting over 400 years. and from them we came european culture and more new languages, english quickly becoming a second language (or even a first language) for so many of us, missionaries building churches and spreading the word of jesus christ as the son of god; with their fair features they draw a line between us and them, between the civilised and the barbarians, between the light-haired light-eyed and the unruly dark-haired dark-eyed.

and then comes world war 2 and the japanese invasion, and for most it was so brutal and violent, and for the rest it was miserable, with famine and inflation but we were forced to sing songs in japanese anyway, to watch their planes fly in the sky towards their enemies, to swallow their ideas in our parched throats.

and then the war ended and wounds began to heal, and then came the 1980s until now with all its shiny technology: nintendo, panasonic, television and anime, and now we have leagues of people learning japanese language and culture anyway, except now it is done wholeheartedly, and as it turns out japanese isn't even that different from our own cultures anyway. houses on stilts made of wood with thatch roofs, making our living from the sea and coast, eating rice for every meal, our phonetics and theirs so alike.

and today we have waves of their expats migrating here because of course they do, we're the Global South™ and for them it's cheap and affordable, so we have little japans sprouting here and there and sometimes i go to a random street and find signs written in japanese and read bits of broken hiragana.

and it's beautiful, being able to move through this world and find the handprints we've all left upon it. it's a wonderful amalgam of so many traditions and colours and beliefs and language all mixing around in this huge bubbling melting pot.

and i'm not chinese or indian or arab or british but when i see them on tv, i'm also seeing a part of me, i hear the words in their tongue and i recognise them as mine, i eat their food and know them as intimately as my own.

but of course our politicians, our kings and our prime ministers (and the divide-and-conquer rule of colonisers now gone) continue to divide us and make us hate each other, fanning flames of distrust and fear of that-which-is-different.

it's such a shame too, because it's so special. it's what makes us us, our dozens of creoles, the way we can speak a sentence comprising vernacular from at least four languages and we all understand each other anyway.

we have a word in malay, "rojak", which is also the name of a dish that mixes a bunch of different ingredients, and is found in malaysian, indonesian and singaporean cuisine. but where i'm from, we also say "rojak" to mean anything that's an eclectic mixture of things, things that seemingly don't go together and aren't necessarily pleasing to the eye but still, somehow, it works, in fact it tastes good, spicy and flavourful and hearty.

and that's us: southeast asia, all of it, a beautiful rojak culture. and it's ours.

[fatehbaz]

Whither the man-eater? This entity was once the prime interest of an entire league of famous sportsmen in colonial India, the engrossing content of many books [...]. [T]he man-eater was first constructed, and then dismantled [...]. This erratic rise and fall of the man-eater is descriptive of changing power relations, the ephemeral yet pervasive axis between the colonial and the post-colonial [...].

---

Jim Corbett was a case in point. [Around the time of independence, Corbett authored popular stories of his adventures in colonial India in the preceding decades, including Man-Eaters of Kumaon and The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag]. [...]

The man-eater was destined [...] to shine in all its ferocity at a certain moment in time and not any other.

Thus, [there is special] context within which specific 'meanings' get associated with animals, at certain times, and at the the hands of select actors [...].

[T]he engulfing realm of the printed word, especially the English book, gave astounding shape and clarity to the idea of a man-eater. [...] The man-eater was never thought of as a sub-species of Panthera tigris in the tables of natural history; rather the man-eater [...] was ‘out of nature’, and thus some kind of an addendum to naturalist understandings. [...] The making of the man-eater into a coherent animal category follows an arduous path. [...] [M]otor cars and other gadgets such as hunting lights had arrived on the scene. [...] [A British officer] who had served in the Central Provinces for quite a while after [1909] [...], commented [..] ‘With modern inventions it would be quite easy to be playing cards in the tent [,] and when the tiger turns up, kill him by pressing a button on a tent wall.’ [His] exasperation was evident [among] [...] [s]portsmen in the 1920s and 1930s [...]. [A] single species splits into undefeatable man-eaters and gentlemanly tigers worthy of observation alone. [...] Amid such lesser sportsmen the man-eater thus became a tactic of power which elevated its [colonial] victor over both the hunters of the past and contemporaries of the present. [...] But it is truly a question if this muzzle-loading gun in the hands of the native [...]. The implication was that sportsmen had a fairer sense of restrictions than the non-sporting classes. With the latter classes gaining political mobility, fears of an 1857-like massacre were also in the air. [...] [B]y the 1930s [...] a host of sportsmen [...] might have preferred to see natives handling a rickety muzzle-loader than an elegant express rifle; the man-eater was intended to remain at large for those ["superior" colonial sportsmen] in possession of the latter. [...]

---

This development of a sportsman into an author can be located within a history of the book. [...] The English novel as a genre [...] began to acquire greater circulation after [...] 1870. [...] [A] book on which the sportsman laboured was like a trophy [...]. For all such ongoing fuss about size [records], a man-eater was more about qualities: cunning, finesse, stealth [...]. If the difficulty of hunting a man-eater was what gave the sportsman a chance to prove the superiority of his skill [...], then this difficulty was the stuff of a story, not a [size] measurement or a mounted trophy. And [...] an aspect of photography. [...] It authenticated the effort of a sportsman and could not be bought of the market [taxidermy trophies available to simply purchase at local shops] except through a book that bore the author’s name. [...]

---

There were dimensions of imagination and power that accompanied this. The idea of a man-eater was such that it helped advance the long held belief that the natives were a hapless lot. [...] Pandian [...] shares how the man-eaters of the colonial period were equated with the ‘arbitrary monarchs’ of a pre-colonial era, which also the British sportsman as a symbol of ‘sovereign might’, would meet on its own grounds. [...] [Consider also] the manner in which the simultaneous depiction of the remaining tigers as ‘large hearted gentlem[e]n’ of the forests (a thing Corbett professed) went to convey the contrary image of a docile, tame and innocent nature that could come to be harmed by natives at the slightest instance.

Protecting the people gave the colonisers power over animals, and protecting animals gave it a power over people.

Notions of animality and criminality intersected at the site of the man-eater.

The entire continuum of man-animal relations was thus canvassed through this tactic, which also the medium of the book in the later colonial periods broadcasted to distant corners of the colony. [...] What perhaps distinguished the man-eater from any ordinary form of game hunting was that it was additionally a form of ‘language-game’. [...] [T]he man-eater was an account in which the ephemeral idea of an ‘India’ glimmered constantly in the background. But it did so largely in English. The man-eater was an English diatribe [...]. The side by side portrayal of the victims of the man-eater as ‘superstitious’, ‘rural’ and ‘ignorant’, only went to establish before the (civilised) readers the proof of an (uncivilised) mass waiting to be salvaged, assimilated or disciplined. [...] [A] mild perusal of Corbett’s My India, published about five years after India’s gaining of Independence, provides ample evidence of the above dynamic. The eventual autonomy of the British administration besides a celebration of the decision making capacities of rural masses (described as ‘real’ Indians) is legend in the pages of this book. The political reality of colonial rule is conflated with a nationalistic pride, which also the sportsman allocates to himself in the describing of his (my?) India. One is left to understand that the man-eater thrived at its best in a colonised India as much as an Indianised colony. As the tension between an emerging nation and an erstwhile colony acquired sharpness in the later colonial periods and a decade thereafter, the narrative of the man-eater came into its own.

The man-eater is thus a veritable creature of timing that shone at its brightest in the 1940s, even if it had been shot down 30 years ago by the likes of Corbett. [...] [Later in the twentieth century, there was a] transformation of the landscape from a designated ‘wasteland’ under colonial administration to a ‘World Heritage Site’ in Independent India. At the peak of such transitions in the 1970s [...], the tiger itself was assuming cosmopolitan proportions and being regarded as a ‘citizen’ by the state. [...] [This was an] emergence of [...] a 'cosmopolitan tiger' [...].

---

All text above by: Varun Sharma. "Rise and Fall of the 'Man-eater': The Changing Science and Technology of a Species (1860-present)". History and Sociology of South Asia Volume 10, Issue 1. First published online 8 December 2015. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text in the first paragraph of this post is from the article's abstract. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[secular-jew]

The massacre of October 7 brought us back to the fundamental questions dealing with who controls this piece of land. Veteran historian Prof. Yoav Gelber lists a series of profound differences between Zionism and European colonialism, and explains why the "two-state solution" is an illusion, stressing that Israeli society needs to return to the "we" ethos.

Prof. Yoav Gelber

By  Matan Hasidim, Makor Rishon; Published on  02-21-2024 18:20

Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Al-Jazeera released a short video that spread like wildfire online about the "colonial roots of the Zionist movement." In fluent English, viewers were explained what 19th and 20th century European Jews were like, the British imperialism, and the present-day Israeli "apartheid state."

The video included interview segments with Israelis who participated in the War of Independence, reinforcing the narrative that the country's Arab residents were murdered or expelled from their homeland by a trained, equipped, and cruel Jewish-European army. The message was clear: Zionism's success was made possible by the firepower of European colonialism, and the state of Israel was born in an original sin. 

"This is not a new argument," historian Prof. Yoav Gelber says. "It already came up at the First Palestinian Congress, which convened in Jerusalem in January 1919. It should be prefaced that Islam in general does not see Jews as a people. Judaism is a religion only, and religious people do not need a nation-state and territory of their own, certainly not at the expense of others, especially not at the expense of Arab Muslims. All this was not yet on the agenda in 1919, but the participant asked 'If the Jews arriving in the country is not a 'people,' what are they? The answer given was that they were colonialists. To this day, this is the overarching narrative in the Arab world, certainly among the Palestinians."

Gelber, 80, is an emeritus professor and historian of pre-state Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict. He has dealt extensively with the relationship between colonialism and Zionism. Two of his books – "History, Memory and Propaganda: The Historical Discipline in the World and in Eretz Yisrael" (Am Oved, 2007), in which he also argues with some of the "new historians" and post-Zionists; And "Independence and Nakba" (Dvir, 2004), on the War of Independence from Israeli and Arab perspectives – extensively address this issue as well.

"Until the mid-twentieth century and the era of decolonization," he explains, "this argument did not carry much sway because 'colonialism' was not yet a dirty word. Apart from the resistance movements that began to emerge in India and – to a limited extent – in the Arab world (in Egypt and Iraq), half of the world was still under colonial rule. After the post-colonial era began – a trend that began after World War II – colonialism increasingly became synonymous with everything bad in the West, and Palestinian arguments began to get a receptive audience."

Q: Is there a resemblance between Zionism and colonial movements around the world?

"The common definition among today's opponents of Zionism is that this is a movement belonging to 'settlement colonialism,' as opposed to colonialism for economic purposes, where colonies were established to serve empires' economic needs. Zionism is indeed a movement of immigration and settlement, like other colonial movements in history, but that's where the resemblance between Zionism and colonialism begins and ends, Gelber says.

"The Zionist immigrants did not come here armed to their teeth like the American pilgrims or the conquistadors that came to South America. Unlike other colonial movements that suppressed the native population while seizing their land, until the establishment of the state, the Jews bought land with hard cash from the Arabs and settled on it. No other colonial movement has operated in this way."

Gelber says this point could also embarrass Palestinians today. "They argue that the lands were sold by landowners living outside Eretz Yisrael, in Beirut or Damascus. This argument is only partially true. No family from the Palestinian elite, including the Husseini family, is missing from the list of land sellers to Jews before the establishment of the state," Gelber says.

"Here lies one of the great early Palestinian failures in this conflict. Initially, no Arab tried to prevent the sale of land to Jews. Only later, as the national character of the conflict became more dominant, did things change – Arab efforts were made to prevent the sale of land to Jews through the use of violence and boycotts against sellers, and even a fund was set up to purchase land from people in financial straits who to sell land [so that they won't sell to Jews]."

Between Algeria and Degania

"Another significant difference between colonialism and Zionism," Gelber continues, "lies in the very Zionist choice to immigrate to Eretz Yisrael [Land of Israel]. Immigration usually occurred from crowded or poor countries towards areas like the early United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, and Australia – which were rich in resources but lacking in manpower or knowledge to exploit these resources. The immigration of the Jews was to a country with scarce resources that ejected people because it was unable to sustain them. Even as Jews carried out the waves of immigration known as the First and Second Aliyah there was a parallel trend of people leaving the land towards the classic immigration countries like the United States, Australia, or South America. This emigration included not only Jews but also Arabs, mainly Christians but also Muslims."

Another difference they point out is that the Zionist settlement was not intended to serve any "mother country" like in the colonies of European colonialism.

"Look, there was a fundamental difference between the Europeans who went to a Muslim country like Algeria and the Zionist settlers who arrived in Degania. Any European who arrived in Algeria under French auspices, or an Englishman who migrated to India, did not claim to be renewing an ancient national tradition that had been tied to the country he migrated to. Colonial movements in general were looking for a future, sometimes an economic future, or acted on behalf of Christian missionary-ideological goals. In contrast, the Jews were looking for their past. Every Jew everywhere in the world, throughout the exile, saw themselves in exile and remained faithful and prayed to Eretz Yisrael. This is the basis for the right of Jews to return to the country, and in that sense, we are not that foreign to the region."

The theory of stages

I present Gelber with a common argument on the Israeli Left that even if one is convinced that Zionism itself is not colonialist, the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria is indeed an expression of Israeli colonialism. "One of the hallmarks of postmodernist thinking is that everyone invents a thesis and defines definitions as they wish, and then builds an entire theory on that thesis," Gelber replies. "This argument is not related to how things actually happened in reality. In Palestinian eyes, the Jewish 'colonialism' in the country begbeganth 1917, if not earlier –  in 1881. As mentioned, post-colonial theories began to gain popularity in the West in the sixties. It's not that important whether it's before '67 or after '67, because the colonialist claim of the Palestinians towards us does not refer to the 'occupation' of the Six-Day War.

"This is indeed one of the most common mistakes in the narrative of the Israeli Left, that 'all the troubles began with the occupation.' Palestinian claims existed long before the 'occupation.' Settlements in Judea and Samaria are a continuation of the Jewish presence in the land. There was a war in '67, and it had consequences. Whether or not one should settle there is an internal Israeli debate. Why should a Jew have the right to live in Tel Aviv but not in Kiryat Arba? From the standpoint of historical rights, it is the same right. The debate is only about whether it should be realized."

Q: The two-state solution is now back in vogue in international discourse, including in light of statements by the Biden administration. In your view, does it have a chance?

"I've been writing for about thirty years, maybe more, that the Palestinians' goal has never been just to get a state. 'State' is perhaps an interim goal for them, certainly not a final one. When Mahmoud Abbas talks about a state, for him it's stage one. The ultimate goal is to return Eretz Yisrael to its Arab character, in which there may be a Jewish 'millet' (the term given in the Ottoman Empire to a non-Muslim community protected by law) as in Ottoman times.

"We are fooling ourselves if we think that what is called the 'two-state solution,' meaning the Arabs agreeing to accept 15% of what they see as 100 percent theirs, will end the conflict. Anyone who thinks so is simply living in La La Land. No chance in hell, it's not part of the mindset of the Arabs". 

Q: We recently made peace with Arab states like the United Arab Emirates. Can this not happen with the Palestinians?

"The Arab consciousness of patience plays a very central role. In their eyes, the Palestinians have gone through the Turks, the English, and the Jordanians, and they will also go through us. 'Now' is an Israeli concept, and as for the concept of 'peace' the question is what do you mean? There is the  'peace' that is an agreement between countries that recognize each other, and accept each other's sovereignty and borders. This can exist between us and the Arabs. It is a fact that it exists with Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, and perhaps in the future with Saudi Arabia. And there is the peace of the end of days, of 'the wolf shall dwell with the lamb' – a peace that will probably never happen with the Arabs, because we are a foreign transplant for them. And with the Palestinians, peace of the first kind cannot happen either.

From the Chinese farm to the University of Haifa 

History is a family affair for the Gelbers. Nathan Michael Gelber, Yoav's grandfather, was a historian of Polish Jewry and early Zionism. "In my childhood, I spent quite a lot of time in grGrandpa'sibrary, a huge library that is now at Ben Gurion University in the Negev. His father, my great-grandfather Nachman, was also an amateur historian." Yoav Gelber's father, Emmanuel Gelber was a colonel in the IDF and commander of the IDF Ordnance Corps (today's Logistics Corps) in the 1950s. Later he joined the Foreign Ministry and served as ambassador to several countries. According to his son's testimony, "he too loved history, and as a native Austrian he helped me with the book I wrote about the 'yekim'[German-speaking Jews who arrived in the Fifth Aliyah]. So you can definitely say we are a line of historians," Prof. Gelber says. 

He remembers his first encounter with the field that would become his main occupation. "In second or third grade I read historian H.A.L's 'A History of Europe'. I was missing only the third volume out of the six, so I had to complete the 16th century later," he laughs.

In his youth, Gelber considered a military career. He began his service in the Paratroopers Brigade reconnaissance unit, and from there went to officer training. After several military roles, he went to study for his bachelor's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and returned to the army as commander of the military academy for education when the Yom Kippur War broke out.

"On October 6, 1973, the day the war broke out, I went to the headquarters of the Chief Education Officer at the General Staff and told them 'hello, see you after the war'. I went to Tel Nof, there were 30-40 officers, and they created a unit from us. One of the company commanders was killed in the battle of the Chinese Farm."

As part of the offensive to cross the Suez Canal, the battle of the Chinese farm was known as one of the harsh and bloody battles of that war; 163 soldiers lost their lives there. "One of the things that contributed to the fact that I did not get traumatized from the battle at the Chinese farm or the war in general was the fact that I was in charge of people. The responsibility helped me get through it," says Gelber. Shortly after the end of the war, Gelber was appointed as a staffer of the Agranat Commission, which investigated the failures that led to the blunder. "I got a reputation there as someone who could get a handle on a large amount of documents, and my role was to organize and make accessible the large amount of material that had accumulated. Later I was assigned additional tasks, and at the end of the work I had the privilege of drafting the final report," he says.

According to Gelber, "the lapses of October 7 are much greater than the failure of '73. It's a whole different order of magnitude. On Yom Kippur 1973, the IDF failed to defend Israel's borders, and then corrected the failure, at least partially. On October 7, 2023, it failed to defend Israeli civilians, which is its primary purpose. Borders can be regained, those who were murdered that day cannot be brought back.

After his release from the IDF, Gelber wrote his doctoral dissertation on the history of volunteering from the Yishuv (Jewish community in pre-state Israel) to the British armed forces in World War II. Later he expanded his work into four monumental volumes. Over the years Gelber has published a long series of books and studies covering various angles and areas in the history of Zionism and the State of Israel. He taught for many years at Haifa University and is currently a professor at Reichman University in Herzliya. Gelber and his late wife Ruth, who passed away in 2021, have four children. One of them, Anat, was a world champion in debate. "I'm not so good at it. Someday they will say I was her father," he smiles.

Gelber has also become famous for his intense sparring with the "New Historians" – a group of scholars, historians, and sociologists who have revisited the history of the Yishuv in general and the study of the War of Independence in particular from a post-Zionist perspective that is critical perspective towards the accepted Israeli narrative. During the 1990s and the 2000s th, eir arguments received much resonance in Israel and especially abroad. Among the prominent figures in this school of thought are Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe, and sociologist Tom Segev. Gelber has frequently lashed out, sometimes vociferously, against them. He also directed criticism against publications of other figures from the Left in academia.

In his aforementioned book "History, Memory and Propaganda", Gelber defines part of that they wrote as "the process of the displacement of history in the face of propaganda." In his view, this expresses an anti-Zionist ideology that continues the intra-Jewish opposition that accompanied Zionism from its inception, from three focal points:  the ultra-Orthodox, the socialists, and the liberal-assimilationist. What's new in the post-Zionist approach was that they turned what was essentially a Diaspora phenomenon into a blue-and-white, indigenously made phenomenon.

"My arguments are not with the 'New Historians' because there isn't such a school of thought to officially speak of," says Gelber. "As has already been shown, each one stands alone. I also differentiate between Benny Morris and the others. Benny is a serious scholar who has gone to archives, compared different versions, and sought to get closer to the truth. The historical truth did not really interest the rest, or they just simply trampled it."

Over the years, Morris has changed his views on the conflict and has himself become a prominent critic of Avi Shlaim and especially Ilan Pappe. I show Gelber an article in which Morris calls Gelber "a die-hard right-winger." Gelber is surprised. "I have never been a 'right-wing man'," he says. "I try to examine every issue on its own merits. There are issues where I am more left-wing than Meretz, and others where I am more right-wing than Likud. I'm not politically committed to anyone, and my worldview is Zionist."

Zero Sum Game

Over the years, a major personal dispute has erupted between Ilan Pappe and Gelber and other scholars at the University of Haifa. Pappe, who was at that time from the University of Haifa, argued that they were seeking to remove him from his position due to his critical political views. The university argued, as did Gelber, who was Pappe's colleague in the Department of History, that these were professional considerations. Pappe, who identified himself as a supporter of the Hadash party, emigrated to Britain and openly supported the boycott of Israeli academia from there, claiming that it had expelled him from its ranks due to his views while violating freedom of expression.

Gelber sees Pappe more as a propagandist than a researcher and accuses him of using his status as a historian to spread pro-Palestinian propaganda while distorting facts, and contexts and defaming colleagues. "When I still had a dialogue with Pappe," he recounts, "he once explained to me that the kindergarten teacher had deceived them. In other words, he discovered during his academic studies that the Zionist narrative he learned in school was false. So he went to look for the right story. That supposedly motivated him. But as I have revealed, some of them also had political or ideological agendas that they brought from their home, where one of the parents could have been a Bundist, or assimilationist in central and western Europe, or was a communist in Eastern Europe."

Q: And the kindergarten teacher didn't deceive us?

"To some extent. The Zionist narrative has weaknesses, I don't buy it wholesale, but at the same time I try, and I hope I am successful, to reconcile it with the fact that I see myself as a Zionist, with an effort to write the truth even when it is not pleasant for the Zionist narrative. I think the central issue is whether the approaches of the 'new historians' were derived from research. People went to archives before them too, that is not something new. The only major novelty they brought was shifting the focus from Israel's victory to the suffering of the Palestinians. The anti-Zionism that was present in some of their research is not new either. It is as old as Zionism itself. This debate was usually conducted between Zionists in Israel and communists other Jews who were in exile. The 'new historians' opened an internal Israeli blue-and-white debate on these issues, one that did not exist here before."

Q: Benny Morris recently stated that he was going to publish a book showing that Jews committed more massacres of Arabs in 1948 than they perpetrated against us. What do you think?

"There might be a basis for this," replies Gelber. "The Arabs didn't have many opportunities to do so, and we had more. Second, regarding one of Benny's studies, which exposed several atrocities that the IDF committed in the years after the War of Independence, Meir Pa'il (IDF commander, military historian, and left-wing activist) once wrote that if this is what Benny managed to glean from among tens of thousands of incidents, it is a badge of honor for the IDF that there were only ten such cases. I agree with that statement."

Q: How do you view the conduct of the IDF in comparison to other armies in history?

"In general, such comparisons are misplaced. They are abstract and ignore the contexts of time and place. Three years after the end of World War II, no one in the young State of Israel thought that of all the people who suffered in the twentieth century, only the Palestinians were not allowed to suffer. Among the fighters were Holocaust survivors, people who had seen a lot of atrocities in their lives. Last year I was in Vietnam and visited the My Lai museum, the village where the Americans committed a famous massacre. One can also think of the Red Army arriving in Germany and carrying out one of the largest rape campaigns in history in order to harm the 'German racial purity,' or contemporary organizations like the Taliban or Al-Qaida, and understand the broader context. I don't agree with all kinds of clichés that 'the IDF is the most moral army in the world,' but at the same time one must understand the proportions, and we are definitely in a good place in the league of moral armies."

Q: What about the 1948 expulsion incidents, engraved in Palestinian memory?

"The expulsion cases by the IDF were relatively few. It was mainly about panic or escape before the IDF arrived. There are also cases that need to be understood more specifically. Take for example the flight of Lod's Arabs. After they understood what small force of the IDF conquered the area, they revolted, and the response to that was definitely brutal, albeit understandable in its context, also because of the proximity to the center of Jewish settlement in Tel Aviv and surroundings."

Q: So as a Zionist historian of the War of Independence, do you sleep well at night?

"Yes. What helps me is that this conflict was and still is a zero-sum game – either us or them. That solves most of the moral questions for me."

I ask Gelber whether the events of October 7 could bring about a Zionist transformation in Israeli academia, certainly in light of the sense of betrayal that many experienced from their colleagues abroad.

 "One must be careful not to make generalizations that are misplaced, as when they speak of the 'disillusioned phenomenon' too broadly. So there are some on the Left who have sobered up and there are those who have not. I do not read enough of 'Haaretz' [Israeli left-wing newspaper] to be informed," he quips. "The question is how long this will last. In general, I am skeptical, because the focus of Israeli academia is first and foremost the outside world. And the problem is not that most academics are ideologues, but that this all boils down to social norms and status. Someone who wants to get a sabbatical abroad, to be invited to a prestigious conference or to publish in a foreign journal – and the academy encourages and sometimes even conditions promotion on this — or to receive a research grant for which he needs overseas recommendations – depends on what they say about him abroad. And unfortunately, the Palestinian narrative is accepted almost without question in today's world."

Q: Prof. Moshe Zimmermann recently stated in Haaretz that October 7 proved that Zionism failed because it was created in order to prevent pogroms like this.

"To some extent he is right ... His mistake is that we are not talking about perpetual and total failure, but temporary failure that needs fixing. Now it's up to us to fix it."

Another debate Gelber conducted was with sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, who brought forward the birth of Palestinian nationalism. Gelber calls Kimmerling "my good friend", a surprising term given that in his writing he is not shy about sparring with him. "We studied together in high school at Ohel Shem in Ramat Gan, and we were good friends," he says. "He and others argued that an event that took place in 1834, in which peasants in the Galilee decided to rebel against the Egyptian ruler Ibrahim Pasha, was in fact one of the seminal events in the birth of the Palestinian nationalist movement. But in truth, the focus of the rebellion was actually Syria and only its outskirts reached the Galilee, not to mention that the cause of the rebellion was the taxes Ibrahim Pasha levied on them, which were higher than what the Sultan had imposed before. This was a local, very specific event, centered on Syria and not 'Palestine', which did not exist then at all.

"My view is that one should see the 1919 Palestinian Congress, the first Palestinian Congress, as the seminal founding event of an Arab-Palestinian identity. Until then, the Arabs of Palestine saw it as southern Syria. After the French expelled King Faisal from Damascus in the summer of 1920, a representative of the Arabs of the Land of Israel in his court, Musa Kazem al-Husseini, arrived in Jerusalem, gathered the notables of the city and declared: 'Southern Syria is dead. Long live Palestine!' This was the beginning of the process of formation of an Arab-Palestinian national identity. It progressed relatively quickly and was the first to rebel against the colonial rule of the British Mandate and failed. That was its great mistake. This was a clash with a much larger force – and Palestinian society was destroyed.

"In the 1948 war t, the Palestinians were completely dependent on the Arab states, which looked down on them. They disappeared from the scene and became hyphenated Palestinians: Egyptian-Palestinians in Gaza, Jordanian-Palestinians in Jordan, and so on. Of course t, there were also Palestinian refugees, but there were no plain Palestinians without some hyphen. Only after the change created by the Six-Day War, the Egyptian and Jordanian Palestinians ceased to be Egyptians and Jordanians, and since they did not become Israeli-Palestinians like the Israeli Arabs they returned to being just Palestinians, a people who over the years detached themselves from the surrounding Arab states, and stood alone."

Q: In the Israeli Right there are theses according to which the tribal loyalty of the Palestinians is stronger than their nationalism, and therefore the idea of Palestinian cantons can be seen as an option for resolving the conflict, without giving them a state.

"That's not realistic. We should have realized this for a long time – we are unable to, and in my opinion should not, decide when another people becomes a people. This is being talked about in Gaza now, and it's just a waste of time in my view."

Q: Ten years ago you published an article about the missed opportunity after the Six-Day War, to encourage the Arabs of Gaza to emigrate. You wrote that not enough money was invested in this at the time, and Levi Eshkol hesitated. Maybe now there is another opportunity for this?

"Absolutely not. First of all, we are talking about completely different orders of magnitude. Today there are five times, if not more, Arabs than there were then in Gaza. Secondly, even then the talk was not about removing all the Arabs from Gaza. After the conquering of the strip t, there were about 400,000 Arabs there, a quarter of them Gazans who were residents of the place from the 18th century at the earliest, and the rest were 1948 refugees. Moshe Dayan said after the war that he wanted to move them out of there, not because he wanted to expel them but because they had nothing to do there. Today no one will accept them. Even then, the Jordanians quickly understood what those buses traveling in convoys to the Allenby Bridge in June-July 1968 were. At first t, they made it difficult for these buses to cross and this ultimately deteriorated when there was a bloody clash on the border after the Jordanians refused to let them cross.

"For 75 years the Arab world has been telling us, 'You shouldn't have been here in the first place, but right now there's nothing we can do about it and you're here, but don't expect us to accept your foreign, Western code of life.' In the West, if a person loses his home in war and at the end of it the house remains in enemy hands, he builds a new life elsewhere. In the Middle East, a war ends when the refugees return home. That's one message. The other, much worse message: 'Guys, you created the problem of '48, and you solve it. We won't help you with that.' Neither the Egyptians nor the Jordanians will be willing to accept even one refugee from Gaza now."

Q: Some say that this war must end with Israel taking land, precisely because it is more important to them than anything.

"I think exactly the opposite: if you take land from them now, it will only increase their motivation to take it back in the future."

Q: How can Israeli society emerge stronger from this war?

"First, I admit I was surprised by the acts of heroism we saw on October 7. I did not expect your generation to perform such acts, and I think they too were surprised by it. Of course, older people also had their share of heroism that day.

"Second, one must remember: Historical research, for example on Egypt, teaches us not to trivialize what Arab leaders openly state. You have to listen to them. For example, Anwar Sadat spoke in one way to the West, another to the Russians, a third to his army, a fourth to his party, and a fifth in his public speeches. Looking back, the things closest to reality were actually in his public speeches.

"But the most important message, which I wrote already twenty years ago, is the importance of returning to the collectivist ethos. Many of our root problems stem from the fact that we replaced the pioneering ethos, the 'we' before the 'I', with the victim ethos of the Holocaust. We deliberately use the victimhood card ad nauseam and compare ourselves to other victims in the world. I'm not saying we should repeat past mistakes, but if we're talking about continuing life in the Middle East, it is impossible to live in this region as if we were in America's Midwest. It can only be done with mutual tolerance. I have friends from the most extreme Left, so what? When there is tolerance and respect, it's possible.

"I am non-religious Zionist, but when I see the collectivism of the religious, I would like the secular to adopt these traits as well – along with openness and interest in the wider world, which we once did more, and in recent years, due to various processes, we are increasingly closed in on ourselves. We have lived here for a hundred years, with internal rifts that are neither new nor easy. We have progressed not badly, although many of us are quick to lose hope. When you look at the Palestinians, on the one hand, t, they still have the hope of not seeing us here someday. On the other hand, would anyone want to switch places with them? We live relatively well, and that's no small feat."