#geog11

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We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath – [Robert] Clive.

William Dalrymple, “The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders,” The Guardian (4 March 2015)

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"Quite a few people told me they could sense that the Communist Party leaders were losing control and the Springsteen concert was like a last-ditch effort to change it, but it was too little, too late," said Kirschbaum. "Springsteen only made them want more freedom."

Woody Guthrie's guitar killed fascists, and according to Erik Kirschbaum's new book, Bruce Springsteen's guitar tore down walls. Like a boss.

[brewinggeographer]

Language is fun.

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Haber, the anti-hero of this awful, riveting story, embodied in his own life the two-faced, Janus-like nature of modern science, providing unimagined advances in prosperity and health on the one hand, and inconceivable tools to inflict suffering and evil on the other.

Martin Sieff, on the legacy of Fritz Haber, the German Nobel-laureate chemist whose work made possible both the prolific human life and death of the 20th Century. "Seven Billion Humans: The World Fritz Haber Made," The Globalist (2 November 2011)

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Immigration is, on the whole, good for economies; and right now, rich countries can do with all the economic help they can get. Rather than sending immigrants home, with their skills, energy, ideas and willingness to work, governments should be encouraging them to come. If they don’t, governments elsewhere will.

The Economist makes the case for immigration. I, for one, wholeheartedly agree and find anti-immigrant attitudes in the more affluent regions of the world to be a prime example of looking the gift horse in the mouth.

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most of Tripoli is now in the hands of Transitional National Council forces and supporters, two of Muammar Khaddafi's sons are in custody, and the backbone of Khaddafi's military has been broken. ...The whereabouts of Gaddafi, Khaddafy, and Qaddafi are still unknown, however.

Foreign Policy magazine's Daniel Drezner provides a quick and preliminary accounting of the winners and losers of this weekend's apparent climax to the 6-month-long Libyan revolution. And while it's got a few moments of tongue-in-cheek humor, such as the quote above, it's also a serious (and opinionated) analysis well worth reading.

[brewinggeographer]

I'm not fond of this style of journalism, which takes a very interesting and important story but then insists on wrapping it in an extreme example—something certain to provoke a "did you see this?" response but in the process distract attention from the real meat of the story. It's a style of journalism perfected in the ratings-chasing United States, and while media outlets elsewhere are hardly innocent of such practice, it's one of the main reasons why I spend more time looking at overseas publications than American ones.

Forget 8-year-old Happy Rogers, then, and her über-affluent, über-ambitious family. That's just window dressing designed to catch our ever-wandering gaze. Get down to the fifth paragraph of this Newsweek piece and you'll see it discuss issues of immense significance. How do we, after all, educate future generations to be effective global citizens? Whether viewed from a patriotic stance of preserving American competitiveness, or a global idealist's stance of harmoniously contributing to a world-wide community, this is an important question for all of us. It's important because, in the words of Newsweek,

America is so far utterly failing to produce a generation of global citizens.

Now, the tone of the article isn't always so blunt and hyperbolic. This is a nuanced issue, and the author, Lisa Miller, is correct to point out that, "There is no consensus on remedies." Does a global education mean more (or at least some) foreign-language development? Most certainly, yes. Does a global education mean more (or at least some) meaningful experiences in other countries? Yes, again. Does a global education mean more (or at least some) study of world geography and history, as well as important global political-economic and environmental issues and systems? Of course. And what about philosophy and the great questions of the humanities? It seems essential that we develop literacy not only in our cultural inheritance from "western" civilization(s)—which itself is lacking—but also in other great traditions of what it means to be a citizen of planet Earth and its countless local communities. There is no single "global" approach to education, and this one article's headline would have been more appropriately written as an open-ended question rather than a statement: How do we raise a global kid?

Hopefully most of those who read the article will realize that one doesn't have to go to the length of the Rogers family, or even that of Miller's family, who were able to spend a year in Amsterdam when she was 15. Such commitments to a lengthy immersion in another country require a combination of zeal, financial resources, and personal flexibility that very few of us have—a major reason why the geographically far-flung military is perhaps the greatest globalizing institution we have in the United States. Fortunately, though, global education is not an all-or-nothing proposition, nor is it confined to one's childhood. Becoming a global citizen is a project of lifelong learning that is, indeed, about one's attitude and values as much as anything else.

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Ian Goldin and Geoffrey Cameron, of the University of Oxford, summarize their case for immigration. It's an even-handed, fair-minded commentary on both the benefits and the costs to receiving societies. One big political challenge is that those benefits tend to accrue in a geographically diffuse pattern over a relatively long period of time, while the costs tend to be borne more acutely and immediately in particular locales.