Daniel C. Blight

THE BRITISH, FRENCH AND DUTCH EMPIRES WERE THE WORST! In this exchange on Mehdi Hasan's Head to Head with Nigel Biggar, post-colonial sociologist Gurminder K Bhambra dismantles a core myth used to rehabilitate empire: the idea that all empires are essentially the same. Her intervention is historical, precise, and deeply human. Bhambra challenges Nigel Biggar’s claim that empire is a universal and morally neutral feature of human history. She argues that this framing deliberately erases a crucial distinction between empires of incorporation and empires of extraction. The Ottoman, Mughal, and Chinese empires governed through incorporation, integrating populations into administrative, economic, and social systems. European empires, by contrast, were built around extraction; wealth was siphoned out, societies were reorganised for profit, and human life was treated as expendable. She grounds this distinction in one of the most basic measures of governance: food and survival. Famines occurred across history, but their causes matter. Under Mughal rule, Bengal did not experience mass famine deaths over the course of four centuries. Under British control, the East India Company presided over a famine that killed more than 10 million people while continuing to extract taxes. During World War II, under direct British rule, another famine killed an additional 3 million. These were not natural disasters; they were policy outcomes. Bhambra’s point is simple and devastating. Empire is not an abstract idea. It has material consequences. Who eats, who starves, and who profits are political decisions. To flatten all empires into a single category is not scholarly neutrality; it is moral evasion. Her analysis exposes how colonial violence is often rewritten as inevitability, progress, or tragedy without perpetrators. By restoring historical specificity, Bhambra refuses that erasure. This is not about guilt or virtue. It is about truth, accountability, and recognising that millions died not because of scarcity, but because extraction was prioritised over human life. @VoxUmmah @venanalysis @qiaocollective @ProgIntl @KawsachunNews @OrinocoTribune @blkagendareport @SoberaniaPod

This is censorship and a political statement

The more international attention the case gets, the more likely the HO is to overturn it - please share if you can, international friends and colleagues

Israel has bombed Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and even Egyptian territory in the last month. An Israeli air force commander just stated that there are plans to strike Yemen too. Do you understand now?

On point

When you work on racism, colonialism etc, you do get complacent--you think, come on, everyone gets this now, the world will surely, has surely, moved on. Then you are reminded: absolutely not. Same old routine, same old racism, same civilisational talk, same double standards.

Oh man he’s so lost. Genuinely makes me sad. 'illiberal ideological capture' of universities | Eric Kaufmann talks on... youtu.be/ZUHk2T4MTIM?si…

This is our 14th week of indefinite strike action. @uniofbrighton's attempts to bully us, to break our resolve & to starve us out have not worked! We won't return to work until every job is saved! Help us #savebrightonuni Donate here: justgiving.com/crowdfunding/b… #BoycottBrightonUni

@LozzaFox Hi Lawrence, happy to talk through the invention of race with you if you’d like to explore that idea of immutability in a little more detail?

London is a multiracial city. A persons value has nothing to do with their skin colour. Britain is an extremely tolerant nation which “truly values” people irrespective of their skin colour. Genuine diversity is in thought and expression. Your “diversity” seeks to divide people down immutable racial lines. It’s a horrible way of categorising people. A whole month of your race baiting incoming… Dear lord. Still getting over child mutilation month.

Thanks for your solidarity @johnmcdonnellMP! Great to see you at the @WorkersSummit23 We will not come back to work until every compulsory redundancy is rescinded! #SaveBrightonUni #BoycottBrightonUni #Brighton25

@SwipeWright Gender is not the same thing as sex – this is a well-established norm in sociology – so why are you conflating the two and using it to underpin this flimsy single case analysis?

Gender activists like to insist that everyone has a "gender identity," which is said to be some deep, internal sense of their sex. The case of David Reimer, the boy who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision and later came to the realization he was actually a boy, is commonly cited as proof that we have have this internal sense. But why is the fact that Reimer happened to be right about his sex touted as proof that we all have an internal sense of our sex (i.e., gender identity), when there are plenty of people (people who identify as trans) who get it completely wrong? If the hypothesis is that everyone has a deep, innate sense of their own sex, then the existence of people who are categorically wrong about this feeling should totally undermine this hypothesis. Most likely, this feeling—gender identity—that some people claim to have is anchored to external factors like sex-based stereotypes and other sex-related norms.

Love that to pass our national citizenship test you have to agree we like to have a good laugh at ourselves or we'll fucking deport you

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

Wow

Paul Gilroy set Eyerman the challenge 20 years ago apparently, and he’s now written it. I hope it’s good.

@wokal_distance Ideas of social construction have been present in philosophy (e.g. classical rhetoric) for thousands of years. The idea that this is postmodern and explains “wokeness” isn’t right at all.

23/ You must force the woke relativist on to the ground of objective truth. Don't let them advance relativism while acting like their view of wokeness is objectively true. /fin

1/ 🚨RELATIVISM!🚨 Relativism says truth claims are not objectively, absolutely, universally true, they're only true relative to the culture they emerge from As John Searle explains, this view has eroded standards of quality with disastrous results So, Relativism: A Thread🧵

Shocked to hear that Cathy Bergin, R&C author and leading scholar in the field of histories of race and resistance, is facing being sacked by @uniofbrighton Solidarity with Cathy and all those facing planned redundancies #savebrightonuni

@jeremy_millar_1 He has the right and freedom to express his desire to get paid by any visual means he deems most likely to get him paid.

@TomSeymour versobooks.com/en-gb/products…

The left need to care more about growth, I agree. But the way we measure growth is outdated. GDP is a relic unfit. We’ve seen how wildly the financial markets swing due to unforeseen events. We need to care more about growth. But we also need to redefine what growth actually is.