I am reading a fascinating article about colonial engineering. Canay Ozden’s fabulous “Pontifex Minimus” is about the British engineer of the Low (or old) Aswan Dam, and the article just drips with all sorts of wonderful quotable sections. For example, this: The exportation of engineering practices from the metropole to the colony relied on a […]
As always Paul Rabinow’s French Modern is an extraordinary reminder of how transport infrastructures serve functions at once military and commercial – and in fact “war, commerce, and transit” (in Paul Nizan’s memorable phrase) cannot be prised apart. Here is Rabinow about Gallieni’s pacification of Indochina: There were only the most casual asides about more standard ethnographic […]
This post does not strictly have to do with shipping but it is fascinating and it has taken me on a tangent (and I love these tangents that end up weaving the world together). I am reading the memoirs of Violet Dickson, whose husband Harold Dickson (formerly Political Agent in Bahrain, latterly the Political Agent in Kuwait) served […]
And yet these unbearable deaths are borne by those who turn away. As I am left mute with horror, I shall post these poems which I think speak to the deaths of so many in this watery graveyard: from Salt By Nayyirah Waheed you broke the ocean in half to be here. only to meet nothing […]
The indispensable National Security Archives has released a memo by Rumsfeld (dated 6 October 2001) that has loads on the logistics of war. The memo covers Rumsfeld’s visit to Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt and Central Asia, in preparation for the invasion of Afghanistan. The memo has loads of fascinating tidbits including, for example, this: Mubarak offered […]
