A fascinating book about how humanity went from being entirely comprised of peoples who were organized in relatively small, mobile groups who met their needs via a bunch of different practices generalized as “hunting and foraging,” through the beginnings of sedentary living, agriculture, and the eventual formation of states. To the extent that we think …
Last year or the year before, I stumbled across the fact that the rural southern Ontario township in which I lived until I was 18 had been the site of a major Black settlement in the mid-19th century. I had no idea, and I suspect the vast majority of people who live there have no …
A wide-ranging, detailed, and highly critical examination of the history of liberalism. It both engages with the ideas of liberal thinkers across various eras and examines the material context in which those ideas and thinkers existed. It centres slavery and colonialism, as well as oppression/repression of poor and working people within the metropole, and not …
This is an academic history of liberalism, in the form of what it calls a “conceptual history” – that is, it explores what its proponents (and to a certain extent opponents) have said over the years about the positions, ideas, and politics associated with “liberal” and its cognates. This is presented with some political history …
I’ve been reading a scholarly history of liberalism. It isn’t directly about this, but as it reminds me of things that I already knew in broad strokes and fills in some details, it is making me think morbid thoughts about the relative historical novelty and consequent fragility of the institutions that, at least in 21st …