Tag: Geography

  • Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

    This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

    This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

    “There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

    The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Global History of Sugar

    This book review in the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses Ulbe Bosma’s book The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environmentover 2,000 Years.

    Earlier scholarship had established decades ago that “early modern European aristocrats […] decorated their salons with sugar sculptures” while “millions of enslaved men and women, overwhelmingly of African origin, […] were overworked so mercilessly on Caribbean plantations that they regularly lost fingers, arms, or even their lives when they collapsed on whirring mill machinery or fell asleep atop boiling vats of sugarcane juice.” 

    According to the reviewer, “Bosma breaks some new ground” by adding to previous scholarship: 

    “The World of Sugar brings Asia to the forefront, particularly India, China, and—a little later—the Indonesian island of Java. A sophisticated sugar economy existed in Bengal and North India by the time Marco Polo visited in the 13th century. It employed professional boilers and entrenched systems of monetization and wage labor within the village economy. […] Ming China became a global hub of sugar trade, with cane dominating the landscape, and with new technological innovations—perhaps introduced by Egyptians in the early Islamic era—increasing the efficiency of refining. Elsewhere, Barbarossa, fresh from crusading in the Holy Land in the mid-12th century, brought skilled Syrians to breathe new life into the sugar economy of Sicily.”

    The reviewer shares some interesting tidbits about the global history of sugar from Bosma’s research: 

    “In the late 1600s, sugar confectioneries were introduced into Siam by a Catholic woman of Japanese and Portuguese descent, Marie Guyemar de Pinha (also known as Marie Guimard in French), who married the king’s Greek prime minister. Two centuries later, a sugar planter like Leonard Wray could effortlessly move between the Malay Peninsula, Natal (in today’s South Africa), and the American South, receiving land in Algeria from Napoleon III and conducting sugar experiments under the auspices of the former governor of South Carolina.”

    Since at least the “early 20th century onward,” the problems with the sugar industry have been far from secret:

    “Sugar was only profitable when churned out in mass quantities: consequently, sugar industrialists deliberately overproduced, which artificially drove down prices (and workers’ wages). Governments, meanwhile, helped save corporate sugar from a race to the bottom. They realized that national sugar industries, increasingly financed by Wall Street and the City of London, were “too big to fail” and thus protected them behind stout tariff walls. Today, national governments spend around $50 billion a year to subsidize the global overproduction of a commodity responsible for serious health epidemics.”

    Apparently, “Bosma is hopeful that movements such as conscious capitalism and green capitalism will prod the global sugar industry into reform: he establishes a parallel with the consumer-driven activism of the abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.” But the reviewer argues that “[f]or products of mass consumption like sugar, conscious capitalism remains a fringe movement”: “The abolitionist movement, as Bosma notes, was itself undone by consumer demand for cheaper (and thus slave-produced) sugar.”

     As Bosma’s own scholarship shows, “the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 was followed, a bit more than a decade later, by the resumption of British mass imports of slave-grown sugar from areas beyond London’s imperial control” like Brazil and Cuba. Similarly, “Saint-Domingue sugar workers might have cast away their chains during the Haitian Revolution, but French planters simply carried those chains across the Windward Passage to Cuba, where they got to work establishing a new, brutal sugar frontier powered by yet more slaves.” 

    Read the full book review here.

  • Including the Global South in Science Writing in the West

    In this piece for The Open Notebook, which “is widely regarded as the leading online source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science,” freelance science and technology journalist Karen Emslie talks about coming to the realisation that the Global South is under-represented or often completely absent from science writing and reporting: 

    “As a Scottish journalist reporting predominantly for publications in the United States, I have spent most of my career writing in English and interviewing expert sources in Europe and the U.S. That has been the easy path for me and many others. After all, most leading scientific journals are published in English; many studies’ corresponding authors are in the U.S. or Europe. And it generally takes less time for me and other English speakers to connect with sources in these countries than in others where we might run up against language and cultural barriers.”

    As she points out, this is an important issue because its consequences “aren’t just about a loss of narrative detail—they risk misportraying what science is, and whom it is done by.” 

    Realising that she “wasn’t entirely sure where to start looking for geographically diverse scientists to talk to,” Emslie sets out to remedy the situation. To that end, she shares “a few tips to leverage some of the tools and strategies you probably already use in cultivating sources.” 

    Furthermore, she has compiled a nonexhaustive yet growing “sampling of directories and other resources that can help reporters find expert sources around the world, with a particular focus on regions of the Global South.” 

    Read the full article and access the directory here.

  • New Study Raises More Doubts About the Theory That Humans Originated in A Single Region of Africa

    As widely reported, including in this article in Nature, “[m]odern people evolved all across Africa, not from a single location, a new study exploring the diversity of human genomes has found.” 

    The study adds to the scepticism about the long-popular “single-origin theory.” Reportedly, what sets this study apart is that it uses more parameters than earlier models to establish the idea of “the weakly structured stem”: 

    “The ancient hominin species, or ‘ancestral stem’, had localized populations which are thought to have interbred with each other over millennia, sharing any genetic differences that they had evolved. They also moved around Africa over time. […] The intertwining of these stems, separated only weakly by their genetic differences, gave rise to a concept of human evolution that the researchers described as a “weakly structured stem” — more like a tangled vine than a ‘tree of life’.”

    Apparently, this study gives a “clearer explanation for the variation seen in humans today” than the explanations previously put forth.

    Read the full Nature report on the study here.

  • Excavated Buddha Statue Seen as Proof of Trade Between Ancient Egypt and India

    As this report by English-language Egyptian news portal Ahram Online states, archaeologists from a joint “Polish-American archaeological mission” have found a statue depicting the Buddha at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Berenike while excavating in a temple complex “dedicated to the Goddess Isis.”

    The find, along with other excavations on the site, like “an inscription in Sanskrit” and “two second-century CE coins” from a central Indian kingdom, is said to show “a connection between Egypt and India during the Roman Empire.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Cities in Pre-colonial Africa

    Portuguese author Bruno Maçães visits Kilwa, “an island city-state on the East African coast” and writes:

    “One of the oldest misconceptions about Africa is that the continent south of the Sahara had no cities before the Europeans got there. To this day, Africa is seen as the land of the village, an intensely communal space, where everyone shares his life with everyone else. In fact, cities such as Kilwa and Sofala on the east coast existed, but the process of their destruction began with the European arrival and Portugal’s control over the Indian Ocean’s trade routes (after 1505, the Kilwa sultan fled and was replaced with a ruler acceptable to the Portuguese). Rhapta, which probably lay somewhere in the delta of the Rufiji, just north of Kilwa, has yet to be found. As for Timbuktu and Lalibela, enough is already known about their global importance.”

    Read the full article here. 

  • Nalanda: An Ancient Indian University

    The BBC recently published a succinct introduction to Nalanda, “[f]ounded in 427 CE,” and “considered the world’s first residential university, a sort of medieval Ivy League institution home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era’s most revered scholars.”

    Read the full profile here.