Exterminate All The Brutes

Not sure what you would call this approach that is shared with A History of Bombing. Writing by index card? Micro-chapters? In any event it’s quite effective and he charts an interesting thread illuminating genocide in Africa and more generally as part of the imperialist project, pointing the way to Auschwitz as really something that had already been normalised for ‘brutes’. As long as you could sufficiently ‘other’ a population then the logic of ‘clearing away’ an inferior race, or them mysteriously and conveniently dying of sheer inferiority. I like these ‘unusual approach’ studies as long as they are not too arch and Adam Curtis-y. Lots to think about and many lines of enquiry - Omdurman and Kitchener and also the relationship between writing of Wells and Conrad, Imperialism in War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr Moreau.

You long for trees in the desert, not just for the shade they provide, but also because they stretch up toward space. When the ground is flat, the sky sinks. Trees raise the sky by being so big and yet having so much further to go. Trees create room.

In 1492, Columbus arrived in America. The extent of the so-called “demographic catastrophe” that followed has been estimated differently by different scholars. Certainly it was without equivalent in world history. Many scholars today believe that there were roughly equal numbers of people in America as in Europe - over seventy million. During the following three hundred years, the population of the world increased by 250 percent. Europe increased fastest, by beween 400 percent and 500 percent. The original population of America on the other hand fell by 90 or 95 percent.