Sublime

Rubber—once the cause of war, colonization, and mass death—became a commodity that Washington could be cavalier about. In 1952 a blue-ribbon commission convened to assess U.S. raw material needs concluded that rubber shortages could no longer pose a serious threat to national security. Natural rubber, coming mainly from Indonesia, Thailand, and Mal

As the intelligence agencies that arose in the wake of World War II moved to take up their “deep cover” positions as the masterminds of the international narcotics cartels, the popular mind was turning on to television. Flattening, editing, and simplifying, television did its job and created a postwar American culture of the Ken-and-Barbie variety.

By the early 1800s the tea trade was showing signs of strain. On the European continent the Napoleonic wars had left coffers depleted. The response had been to print paper money unsecured by gold, and this practice eventually resulted in serious inflation: costs rose, product values rose much less, resulting in economic misery. The panacea to this

I realized that my gloss as chief economist, head of Economics and Regional Planning, was not the simple deception of a rug dealer, not something of which a buyer can beware. It was part of a sinister system aimed not at outfoxing an unsuspecting customer, but rather at promoting the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever

Finally, there are transfer of resource frontiers. Unlike geographic and technological frontiers, transfer of resource frontiers are inherently a form of theft.

By 1960, the U.S. Empire had visibly diminished. The Philippines was independent, Hawai‘i and Alaska were states, and Puerto Rico had the nebulous status of “commonwealth.” The remaining colonies were small: Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa—total population 123,151—plus another 70,724 living in the United Nations’ “strategic trust terr

Colonizers and corporations have historically used intellectual property laws derived from Eurocentric conceptualization of property, ownership, knowledge and authorship to maximize their profits; patenting products developed through bioprospecting. In 2020, 6.2 per cent of plant species were associated with patents, including 7,595 patents in medi

There was, however, one other concomitant shift that also impelled the movement towards neoliberalization during the 1970s. The OPEC oil price hike that came with the oil embargo of 1973 placed vast amounts of financial power at the disposal of the oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. We now know from British intelligen

The Philippines was the largest U.S. colony. A similar story played out in the second-largest, Puerto Rico. The Depression had wreaked havoc on the island: unemployment, strikes, and—egged on by Pedro Albizu Campos—violence. It was the assassination by nationalists of Police Chief E. Francis Riggs that truly rattled the colonial authorities. He was