Brad > Recent Status Updates

"‘One finds mention, here and there, of ‘peasant revolts,’ Jean Bottéro writes, ‘but these appear to have been provoked by terrible catastrophes such as famine, and are directed against an individual such as a king, not against an institution. In reality, the old inhabitants of Mesopotamia appear to have been devoid of any revolutionary spirit,’ as there was no idea of an alternative way to organize society."

The Sumerian interest rate on commercial loans, denominated in silver, was "set by ease of calculation rather than reflecting profit rates or productivity, and remained remarkably stable century after century.”

"...A similar grounding of the interest rate in the prevailing arithmetical system of weights and measures is found in subsequent regions for their local fractional system."

Even in the case of fines…the intention seems not to have been to impose such permanent distress on offenders as would deprive the social body of the wrongdoer's ability to meet his normal commitments.

Hudson ties the shifting of legal authority to creditors lacking such high-minded, longue durée concerns with civilizational decline. See: financialized debt in modern America.

"The relevance of studying antiquity's financial destiny is to see how the initial safety valves it enacted were dismantled by creditor oligarchies that imposed debt-ridden austerity as credit and markets became increasingly privatized."

"During times of a powerful state, i.e. Ur III, the state attempted to monopolize all propertyabd establishall production by state command; when the state was weak, i.e. Kassite Babylonia, property and production fell into the hands of private families and individuals."

"In addition to preserving economic solvency for the population, rulers thus found debt cancelation to be a way to prevent a financial oligarchy from emerging to rival the policy aims of kings."

In all the coups documented in this book, Ottawa worked in tandem with the U.S. government. However, that does not mean Ottawa was coerced into supporting these anti-democratic forces...In short, Canada's ruling class views the world much like their U.S. counterparts do and profits from global exploitation in a similar way.

Rarely do coups begin the day the leader or government is overthrown, and there are generally many opportunities to stop them.

"While endorsing Western interference in left-leaning countries like the Congo, Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Ghana, Ottawa argued that supporting anti-fascist forces in Greece amounted to interference in a friendly country."

Crazy how much Lester B. Pearson's name comes up as a Cold War hawk explicitly backing military juntas against popular land reform. Growing up being taught all about Canada's 'role as peacekeeper', the contrast is stark.

professional historians will have to position themselves more clearly within the present, lest politicians, magnates, or ethnic leaders alone write history for them.


While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it in their own hands.

"Public history is often now a tale of sheer power clothed in electronic innocence and lexical clarity. Image makers can produce on the screen, on the page, or on the streets, shows, slogans, or rituals that seem more authentic to the masses than the original events they mimic or celebrate."

The claims of the {Haitian] revolution were indeed too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds. Victorious practice could assert them only after the fact. In that sense, the revolution was indeed at the limits of the thinkable, even in Saint-Domingue, even among the slaves, even among its own leaders...discourse always lagged behind practice.

"Lest accusations of political correctness trivialize the issue, let me emphasize that I am not suggesting that eighteenth-century men and women should have thought about the fundamental inequality of humankind in the way some of us do today. On the contrary, I am arguing that they could not have done so. But I am also drawing a lesson from the understanding of this historical impossibility."

Access to human status did not lead ipso facto to self-determination. In short...in Condorcet, as in Mirabeau, as in Jefferson, when all is said and done, there are degrees of humanity.

If the account was indeed fully comprehensive of all facts it would be incomprehensible.

Much like a note-taker who highlights almost everything...

Selectivity is functionally necessary, and revelatory.

The presences and absences embodied in sources or archives are neither neutral nor natural. They are created...Mentions and silences are thus active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis.

Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives; the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives) and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance.

What matters most are the process and conditions of production of [historical] narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity ["what happened" & "that which is said to have happened"] intertwine...Through that overlap [we] discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.

"Canadian workers worked at their own pace—something that was obvious to us migrant workers. They also did not receive the same pressure from supervisors…The key difference [is] that they were not on a tied work permit, with the threat of deportation hanging over them.

...my experience in the greenhouse definitely showed migrant workers to be head and shoulders above Canadian workers in terms of productivity."

Never forget that there are pockets of the periphery in the imperial core.

[A] 1997 ruling by the WTO that ended Caribbean countries’ preferential access to European markets for banana exports. The United States had brought a complaint to the WTO, protesting the protected market share that European countries had granted their former colonies in the Caribbean, claiming it was a violation of the principles of free trade.

Also known as kicking away the ladder.

"I am a Lab Rat in a grand experiment. Everything that is being introduced into the Canadian workplace--short-term, contract, 'flexible' employment--has been tried on us for fifty-seven years.

What they try on migrant farm workers, they'll try on you next."

The ruling class is a powerful and important concept; it should not be spread thinly across all capitalists, simply because capitalism is a predominant way of producing within a given society; nor is it a title that should be denied to those actors who wilfully and meaningfully abet capitalist development, even if they are not formally capitalists in their own right.