#and wrote an imperialist clown of a king with that

[streets-in-paradise]

It may be absolutely unfaithfull to the true characterization, but I love Troy version of Agamemnon. As a villian he is fucking hilarious, just check on this:

The inside of the throne room of his palace in Mycenae

and now look at the inside of his tent in the greek camp

It looks literally the same, he made it be copied in every detail ... Even the fucking throne.

His throne is right there, i can't get over that. It is unclear if the motherfucker has a replica or may have ordered the original be carried away to Troy with him

#troy 2004 #troy #agamemnon #brian cox #what a fun asshole #is like the writers of the film took two main traits of agamemnon #pride and lack of self awareness #and wrote an imperialist clown of a king with that #they read “dude so ambitious he sacrificed his daughter to get the war” #and were like so... every negative stereotype applied to rancid modern politicians pushing imperialist warfare #he takes the “ fuck agamemnon ” feeling to a whole new level #i do feel sorry for OG agamemnon #he is a complex character #but in the context of the film only #I can't help loving it

[fatehbaz]

Thinking about tropical plants, transoceanic ecological exchange, imperialism, and rebellion ...

So, about the famous “mutiny on the Bounty”: I love the irony, that a ship sent on a mission ultimately designed to subdue rebellion instead actually experienced a rebellion itself. The way that the story of the Bounty is often recounted in Euro-American media? I really don’t like it, and I think that the story is egregiously white-washed. I don’t think the story is told with nearly enough context. What of the erasure of the people of Tahiti? Why was this British ship in the South Pacific? In fuller context, the story of the mutiny is even funnier - like a cosmic joke - featuring some righteous comeuppance and failure-due-to-hubris.

But the fuller context is that the mission to Tahiti was part of Empire’s attempt at instigating a transoceanic global ecological exchange to reinforce hegemony, especially in favor of slave-owners; it was a plot to remake the ecology, soil, and cultural landscape of the Caribbean by establishing introduced non-native plants taken from the South Pacific, in order to strengthen plantation owners’ power and monopoly over food crops and to subvert the informal subsistence gardening that had given Caribbean women and slaves some measure of autonomy. (Slaves in Jamaica and St. Vincent grew most of their own food, and British landowners in the 1790s estimated that up to half of the currency in the Empire’s Caribbean colonies was held by slaves. Plantation owners were scared.) And the fuller context is also deeply disturbing: The Bounty was sponsored by British slave-owners from plantations in the Caribbean. The ship was dispatched in 1789, essentially, by order of Kew Gardens, Joseph Banks, and other imperial botanists in London. The intent of the voyage was to steal breadfruit plants from Indigenous people of the South Pacific and to transplant the crop back to the Caribbean and Kew Gardens, for mass production, experimentation, and potential domestication. The reason the imperialists wanted breadfruit? Caribbean plantation owners were desperate to subvert the gardens and markets used by women and slave, and also because American colonies were revolting, and events in France were spreading discourse about revolt. So, based on their own explicit writings, the consensus is that British botanists, imperial agents, and plantation owners thought that breadfruit required little energy to grow and harvest, and these imperialists wanted to create a new, cheap staple crop to strengthen plantation owners’s control; feed slaves; appease the poor; subvert subsistence gardens and markets; feed the subjugated Indigenous people of Britain’s other colonies; and to prevent further uprisings against the Empire.

Check it out:

In the 1770s, as American colonies were revolting, Britain imposed an embargo on most crops grown in those colonies. However, this meant that British plantation owners in the Empire’s Caribbean colonies (Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent, etc.) lost access to these relatively cheap American crops, and now they needed a new, cheap source of food for their slaves. Also, many slaves and free women in Jamaica had established successful horticultural gardens and markets which possibly accounted for over half of money exchange on the island, and plantation owners were scared of this autonomy. The plantation owners, lobbying for many years, had asked Joseph Banks for help. Banks was the most powerful naturalist/scientist in Britain; he was a world-famous naturalist; the president of the “most prestigious scientific organization in the world” (Royal Society) for over 4 decades; and was a close personal friend of King George III, who had, essentially, given Banks free reign over Kew Gardens (global epicenter of plant collection and botanical research). So Banks and other imperial botanists had an obsession with transplanting breadfruit from the South Pacific to the Caribbean. Banks (who, as botanist on Cook’s first voyage, had direct knowledge of breadfruit) and other botanists figured that breadfruit from the tropical South Pacific could relatively easily be transplanted to the tropical Caribbean.

The plan was to take breadfruit from the “newly-discovered” South Pacific to the British-administered Caribbean colonial plantations. (Captain Cook and Banks first visited Tahiti in 1769, while the Bounty was dispatched back to Tahiti in 1789.) Scholars have extensively written about how the plant naturalization experiments at Kew Gardens, especially those focused on breadfruit between the 1770s-1810s were definitely, at least partially, about finding a cheap food to quell the spirit of rebellion. Banks and other contemporary botanists, social commentators, and writers from that era explicitly wrote about how they wanted to use partially domesticated breadfruit (and wild rice taken from Native peoples of the Great Lakes region) to temporarily appease slaves on plantations; Indigenous peoples of Britain’s other colonies; Irish residents; the urban poor of England; and other poor or subjugated people by using breadfruit as a cheap source of food and a new and easy-to-produce staple crop, in order to satiate the subjugated poor just enough to prevent them from revolting against the British Empire.

Anyway. In 1789, with approval of Banks and other “intellectuals” in London, Caribbean plantation owners had sponsored a ship and bankrolled a voyage to Tahiti. The mission: acquire breadfruit, bring it back to Joseph Banks at Kew Gardens. But get this:

Ironically, the very first ship which all of these clowns had contracted and dispatched to Tahiti specifically to collect breadfruit for this very plan? That ship was the Bounty, of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame. These slave-owners and wealthy imperial scientists were trying to engineer a way to use breadfruit to keep slaves; Indigenous peoples in other colonies; poor people; and other “undesirable” subjects pacified and obedient to the whims of Empire ... and their very own ship, functioning as the flagship of this Anti-Rebellion operation, on a voyage literally financed by Caribbean plantation owners ... that ship experiences a mutiny. A grand plan to pacify rebellion hinged on this ship, and the crew of the Empire’s own ship engaged in a rebellion.

--

I don’t know much about her and can’t fully vouch for the rest of her work, but Elizabeth DeLoughrey has written about the Bounty, breadfruit, and exchange between the Pacific and the Caribbean: Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures (2007; book); “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties” (2008, in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History).

[Sorry for not italicizing “Bounty” and the technically-incorrect lack of italicization when addressing the formal name of a seafaring ship. This was deliberate, I’ve no respect for British vessels.]

#sorry for the length of this post