Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
I found a press release inside this (the oldest book on my TBR!), proving my hunch that the social justice books that appear in our local Oxfam Books are from a book reviewer of some kind. I’m pleased to say that I have now read all the print books I bought in November 2021, including the four I brought home from Oxfam together. It’s the second of the three books I set an intention to read this month. It ticks off another number in my 2024 TBR project, too, the first one this month after a run of NetGalley and newer books.
Kehinde Andrews – “The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World”
(23 November 2021, Oxfam Books)
There is a reason and a logic behind global poverty. Although you would never guess it from the analysis of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund or Western governments, racism still governs the entire political and economic system. Truly addressing this inequality cannot be done without a transfer of wealth and resources that would be transfomative to the West. As long as we delude ourslves with rebranding and tinkering at the margins we will never be able to address the issue of racism. (p. xii)
Andrews is the first British Professor of Black Studies and is based at Birmingham City University; I went to a fascinating bookshop event around his third book, “The Psychosis of Whiteness” knowing I had this TBR. This is very much an academic text and is based around the economics of colonialism to a large extent; it’s still well-written and readable but doesn’t have the personal interaction and experiences of some of the other books around on the topic. It also doesn’t address intersectionality, although Andrews gives a list of useful authors to look at on that side of things. He does spend some time on Australian colonial practices which I found unusual in a book in this vein.
Much of the information Andrews pulls out is familiar to anyone who’s read about slavery and colonialism but there’s a lot more, too. With an anti-capitalist and economic lens, he makes useful links to current structures such as the World Bank, UN and International Monetary Fund, pointing out the use of debt and repayment by the US in particular to control and reward various countries as they come in and out of favour. He points out that reparations, while a valid idea in many ways, would basically transfer all the money out of the West, and debunks the idea that Africa did “well” in the pandemic: the death toll was only lower because there are far fewer older people in the continent as a whole, with a lower life expectancy by far. He explains the Chinese “scramble for Africa” clearly and I understood that properly for the first time: providing infranstructure that often pays money straight back into Chinese firms in exchange for mining rights is the impetus behind this.
His view is that there should be an actual revolution and that structures won’t change without that (not a Marxist one though as Marxism is based on colonial principles and any Marxism that arose in the Global South has been suppressed). He’s great on how countries seen as Black and Brown orientated can still cosy up to the Washington Consensus, gaining power and money from being West-adjacent, and scathing about any White liberals looking for easy answers in the final chapter. An uncompromising, intelligent and interesting book. It’s chewy and detailed and I can’t hope to have done it justice here.
I’m not sure if this really counts as a Bookish Beck Book Serendipity entry, but this was the second book I read in a row that unpicked the colonial roots of the Rwanda Genocide, the first being “An African History of Africa” by Zainab Badawi (not yet reviewed).
This is Book 28 in my 2024 TBR project – 113 to go!
Adventures in reading, running and working from home 
Recent comments