An unexpected realisation that has come with years spent alive and reasonably aware is of how people find explanations for the past in the anxieties of the present. This ia particularly true in academia. I listened to a podcast interview today with a historian who wrote about the Black Death and described how that pandemic was a cause of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Or there are all the many, many accounts I’ve heard of civilisational changes, cultural changes, changing habits, etc which are attributed to climate change in the past. Similarly with race and, back when I first started becoming aware of the world, with orientalism and with the postcolonial condition.
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