Robert Clive: An ‘unstable sociopath and a racist’, hated both in India and England
By August 1756, when news of the fall of Kasimbazar in Murshidabad and the siege of Calcutta by Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah reached the British outpost in Madras, everyone in the English East India Company (EIC) had come to realise the full scale of the disaster it entailed. Going by customs, there would have been a drill to follow: the Company would send a delegation to Murshidabad, negotiations would take place, an indemnity would be paid, and trading resume like before.None of that happened, because a young, ambitious British military officer had just arrived with his regiments on the C...
Jeremy Bentham on Freedom of the Press, Public Opinion, and Good Government
Two major defences of the freedom of expression were articulated in the nineteenth-century utilitarian tradition. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was concerned with establishing the freedom of expression, and in particular the freedom of the press, as a protection against despotism and thereby furthering his schemes for the introduction of a democratic form of government, while John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) in On Liberty famously defended freedom of expression ...
THE VIETNAM SYNDROME
To be writing these words is, for me, to undergo the severest test of my core belief—that sentences can be more powerful than pictures. A writer can hope to do what a photographer cannot: convey how things smelled and sounded as well as how things looked. I seriously doubt my ability to perform this task on this occasion. Unless you see the landscape of ecocide, or meet the eyes of its victims, you will quite simply have no idea. I am content, just for once—and especially since it is the work of the brave and tough and undeterrable James Nachtwey—to be occupying the space between pictures....
Justus von Liebig Makes the World: Soil Properties and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century
Just as capitalism’s exchange of commodities between disparate locations requires a singular referent of value, so does the movement of ideas and practices necessitate consolidations of meaning through complex fields of people, landscapes, and things. Introducing key innovations in agricultural and chemical science, Justus von Liebig’s chemical model of soil fertility involved a profound reenvisioning of organic development, distilling complex processes to a series of chemical relationships easily recognized in any geographic context. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s (1984) arguments...
Looking at Nature through the Eyes of Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt, the famous Prussian explorer, geographer, and naturalist, was the subject of the Keynote Address by Andrea Wulf at the 2016 Esri User Conference (Esri UC) in San Diego, California, this past June.At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Humboldt was the embodiment of a Renaissance man. During an expedition to the Americas, he climbed steep, icy Mount Chimborazo, an inactive stratovolcano in today’s Ecuador; battled oppressive heat, rain, and mosquito hordes while trying to steer clear of crocodiles during a trip down one of South America’s longest rivers, the Or...
