Aneurin Bevan once famously said: “This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. However, in the absence of fields of waving soya beans, it is probably more like desert-like Chad with missiles and banks. The US is now Upper Volta with missiles – and banks, of course.īritain sells a lot of weaponry as well, of courser.
#Ird fr upper volta colonial free#
When the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher era straddled the Atlantic, manufacturing collapsed in both countries, and subsequent governments in Washington and London effectively encouraged the process in the name of free trade and free markets.Īs a result, the US, like the Soviet Union, hardly produces anything anyone wants to buy except agricultural commodities and weapons. Obama gave every indication of trying use military sales, especially aircraft, to stimulate the United States economy and provide jobs. Taiwan, Japan and others were in line for a visit from the arms salesperson. He had already offered fighters to Israel (for free, naturally). On his tour, he was selling fighters and transport aircraft to India and Saudi Arabia. Watching President Barack Obama tour the world, the phrase came back. Myriam Cottias, Historian at CNRS, Director of Centre international de recherche sur les esclavages (CIRESC).Dismissively, but not entirely inaccurately, American commentators used to dismiss the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with missiles” – a country that failed to provide the goods for its own people, but excelled at military production. This book opens up new and promising areas of research. Odile Hoffmann démonstrates masterfully how maps record colonial conquests, the power play between imperial powers, and how they register the domination of the vicorious within a space. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Professor Emeritus of Economics, London University. In this well-researched and beautifully illustrated book, Odile Hoffmann brilliantly captures the drama of Belize’s history in its early years.
Dana Professor of Sociology and Caribbean Studies, Emeritus, Colgate University. Maps contribute to territorial claims and disputes both between and within states and Hoffmann’s book helps us to understand the conflicting visions and versions that created first the colonial and then the national territory of Belize. Maps reveal the purposes and power of those who make them and so are part of the historical process of domination and contestation that shaped Belize’s history. Odile Hoffmann adds to it her analysis which shows that maps are not neutral instruments. The collection of maps reproduced in this book is itself priceless. Through descriptions, narratives, and maps, this monograph brings the territory into existence and displays the articulation between the collective imaginaries, the subjectivities, and the spatial practices of the social and political actors-political authorities, residents, cartographers-who interacted in the territorial construction of Belize. No territory exists on its own only social, political, symbolic and emotional constructions grant it substance and reality. The purpose of this monograph is not to retrace the genesis of a nation, but more modestly, to recount the invention of a colonial territory. In the 18th Century it was integrated into a colonial structure as a territory to be controlled and administered by Great Britain in the 19th century.
Until the 17th century, the area currently occupied by Belize appeared in maps as a portion of space in the American world with no particular attribute other than being at the confines of a territory poorly known to Europeans, some of whom stopped there without making any political or social commitment before the area became coveted, delimited, and negotiated between empires.
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