Tag: imperialism

Potosí, Then and Now

Jonathan Wilson

This week, in my modern world history survey course, we discussed 16th-century empires in America and Asia. In the week’s second lesson, we focused on the role of silver—and especially silver production controlled by the Spanish empire—in early modern Asian history.

To bring clarity to the concept, I played about half of a 2014 BBC News short film about the miners who still work in the mountain at Potosí. Cerro Rico was the most important site of silver production in human history, as well as a crux of Spain’s imperial power:

This film is a good way to make a contemporary connection. And it’s a good way to humanize an abstraction. Viewers get to see and hear extensively from actual miners at Potosí. That means this film is also a good way to get students thinking about the ethics of historical narrative, including the “presentism” question.

For my purposes this week, it’s a good thing that this film—while acknowledging the mine’s early modern history—is mostly about Bolivian society and politics in the 21st century. I had already assembled plenty of ways to talk about the 16th and 17th century; I wanted to add a story about our own world. Then we talked. I trusted my students to be willing to think about the right and wrong ways to connect these stories.

“Ignorance of History Serves Many Ends”

Jonathan Wilson
Simukai Chigudu (photographed by David Levene)

The more time I spent in Oxford, the more I realised how colonialism had remade the entire material and intellectual world of the British empire, especially its most elite university. Oxford is strewn with tributes to men of empire who have scholarships, portraits, busts, engravings, statues, libraries and even buildings dedicated to their memory. …

From the start, the quest for knowledge of Africa was motivated by the aim of conquest. Even today, African studies has an air of the 1884 Berlin Conference, which heralded the ‘Scramble for Africa’—but instead of European powers claiming and trading different parts of the continent, it’s mostly white scholars staking out their territory and asserting expertise over ethnicity in Kenya, democracy in Ghana or refugees in Uganda. After I stayed on at Oxford to pursue a doctorate, I began attending African studies conferences throughout the UK, only to find mostly white scholars talking to predominantly white audiences.

In other words, I was surrounded in Oxford not by the ghosts of colonialism, but by its living dead. As at [St. George’s College in Harare], colonialism at Oxford had never really ended, and couldn’t. It wasn’t a period that had passed, but a historical mass that bent everything around its gravity.

—Simukai Chigudu, “‘Colonialism Had Never Really Ended’: My Life in the Shadow of Cecil Rhodes'”