{"id":2525,"date":"2014-11-03T03:19:59","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T08:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/?p=2525"},"modified":"2014-11-03T03:23:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T08:23:04","slug":"the-new-colonialists-and-local-agriculture-to-shape-our-own-local-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/the-new-colonialists-and-local-agriculture-to-shape-our-own-local-economy.html","title":{"rendered":"The new colonialists and local agriculture to shape our own local economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nThis sums up both \r\nBill Gates’ sudden surge<\/a> of\r\n\r\nagricultural land purchases<\/a>\r\nand\r\n\r\nthe fossil fuel industry’s sudden surge of fracked methane pipelines<\/a>:\r\n“on a global scale, that the global problem, from the\r\nperspective of European colonialists and European entrepreneurs, is\r\nreally how to transform the countryside.”\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nIn both cases, we here in the southeast are just peasants\r\nor backwards natives from the perspectives of the\r\nthe new colonialists as they try to transform our countryside.\r\nSo what if such transformation results in\r\ndust storms<\/a>\r\nor\r\nleaks, explosions<\/a>, or\r\nhigher domestic natural gas prices<\/a>?\r\nThe new colonialists would profit!\r\n

\r\nJonathan Shaw wrote for Harvard Magazine November-December 2014,\r\n\r\nThe New Histories: Scholars pursue sweeping new interpretations of the human past.<\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n

\r\n

\r\nGlobal history is “the kind of idea that, once you have it, is\r\nimpossible to go back from,” Beckert continues. “You\r\ncan’t. It’s going to be with you forever because it’s just a\r\ndifferent way of seeing history.” While it opens new\r\nquestions, it “also opens up totally new understandings of\r\nparticular historical problems such as the problem of slavery. You\r\nunderstand,\r\non a global scale, that the global problem, from the\r\nperspective of European colonialists and European entrepreneurs, is\r\nreally how to transform the countryside.<\/span> The resulting\r\ntransformation takes different forms in different parts of the\r\nworld, but sometimes it’s also quite similar. After the Civil War,\r\nfor example, sharecropping becomes dominant in the United States,\r\nbut it’s also important in Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, and other parts of\r\nthe world. People in these places learn from one another. They\r\nobserve one another.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nCapitalism can make strange bedfellows. Beckert relates how in 1898,\r\nthe German ambassador to the United States approached Booker T.\r\nWashington, asking him to send students and professors—the\r\nsons and grandsons of slaves—from Tuskegee to Germany and then\r\non to the West African colony of Togo to transform cotton\r\nagriculture there: “an amazing story of African Americans\r\nadvising deeply racist German colonialists in Togo about how to make\r\nlocal peasants produce cotton for world markets.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nAndrew Zimmermann, Lecture at the GHI, 24 April, 2008,\r\n\r\nBOOKER T. WASHINGTON ,TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE, AND THE GERMAN EMPIRE: RACE AND COTTON IN THE BLACK ATLANTIC<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nIn January 1901, four African American men from Tuskegee Institute in\r\nAlabama arrived in the German Colony of Togo in West Africa.1<\/sup><\/small>\r\nTheir\r\nexpedition was financed by a German business organization that worked\r\nclosely with the government on agriculture in the German overseas em-\r\npire, the\r\nKolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee. The agricultural attach\u00e9 at the\r\nGerman embassy in Washington DC had approached Booker T. Washington the previous summer to organize this expedition, which was to\r\ntransform cotton growing in Togo so that it would supply the world\r\nmarket with raw materials for European industry rather than supply local\r\nspinners and weavers.\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nHm, sounds like Bill Gates wanting to use south Georgia and north Florida land \r\nto feed the world (or profit his investment firm),\r\nor Spectra Energy and FPL wanting to build that Sabal Trail pipeline\r\nthrough here that goes to already-authorized LNG export operations in Florida\r\nto meet foreign natural gas needs (or profit their executives and investors).\r\n

\r\nAndrew Zimmerman also wrote a book about that for Princeton Press in 2012,\r\n\r\nAlabama in Africa:\r\nBooker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South<\/a>.\r\nMaybe we should all read it, since it seems to be the script for our\r\nnew colonialists.\r\nThe book’s introduction reads in part:\r\n

\r\n

\r\nThe cross-fertilization of histories and practices led to the\r\nemergence of a global South, reproduced social inequities on both\r\nsides of the Atlantic, and pushed the American South and the German\r\nEmpire to the forefront of modern colonialism.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nZimmerman shows how the people of Togo, rather than serving as a\r\nblank slate for American and German ideologies, helped shape their\r\nregion’s place in the global South.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nMaybe we should all help shape our own place, here in the old South.\r\nMaybe we should organize our own local agriculture and economy<\/a>.\r\n

\r\nIt’s either that or welcome our new colonial overlords.\r\n

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