From: punditster@gmail.com   
      
   On 2/21/2026 8:46 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:   
   > On Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:22:54 +0000, Julian    
   > wrote:   
   >   
   >> Earlier this month, an SOS dropped into my inbox. It came from a student   
   >> at the University of Sussex. Lest her repressive professors punish her   
   >> for what I am about to report, let’s call her ‘Emma’. ‘I am in a   
   mild   
   >> state of despair,’ she wrote.   
   >   
   > You must feel sorry for those poor conservatives, they feel despair.   
   >   
   Not sorry. There are only two biological genders: male or female.   
      
   Kathleen Stock resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 following   
   intense backlash, protests, and accusations of transphobia regarding her   
   published views on gender identity and biological sex.   
      
   She argued that biological sex is immutable and not synonymous with   
   gender identity, particularly in the contexts of law, policy, and   
   women-only spaces.   
    >   
   >> "This week alone I have been told that the history of kinship theory has   
   >> been, up until now, ‘Eurocentric and cisgendered’, and another   
   >> anthropology module must be viewed through a ‘queer and trans lens’. The   
   >> word ‘decolonisation’ comes up in almost every lecture. If university   
   >> campuses represent a microcosm of the greater society, then I fear we   
   >> are doomed."   
   >>   
   >> I’m not surprised. After all, Sussex was the university that so failed   
   >> to protect the coolly reasonable, gender-critical philosopher Kathleen   
   >> Stock from a sustained campaign of vilification by students, aided and   
   >> abetted by some colleagues, that it destroyed her faith in academia and   
   >> drove her to resign. While the university was fulsome in its posthumous   
   >> regret at her leaving, it has yet to give any explanation – no matter,   
   >> make a confession – of its own astonishing failure to defend her.   
   >> Indeed, it’s currently litigating against a fine imposed by the Office   
   >> for Students for failures to uphold free speech.   
   >>   
   >> Sussex had moved onto my radar before Emma’s email for two other   
   >> reasons. One is Alan Lester, the professor of historical geography who   
   >> has made it his mission in life to discredit me, lest anyone should be   
   >> seduced by my utterly moderate views of Britain’s colonial record. He it   
   >> was who wrote a 15,000-word takedown of my book, Colonialism: A Moral   
   >> Reckoning, in which he could find nothing positive to say either about   
   >> me or the British Empire. Zilch. Nada. He then organised the   
   >> counter-publication of a collection of essays; every one of them   
   >> targeted at me. Emma reports that, judging by the amount of classroom   
   >> time he devotes to debunking me, I now live ‘rent-free in his head’.   
   >>   
   >> The other instance of Sussex I’d encountered is Gurminder Bhambra, a   
   >> professor of social theory. Two weeks ago, she was on the other side of   
   >> the table in a recorded discussion about empire staged by the Doha   
   >> Debates in Qatar.   
   >>   
   >> Like Lester, Gurminder simply cannot credit the British Empire with any   
   >> positive achievement. When the moderator put the topic of the Empire’s   
   >> benefits on the table, she immediately issued the rhetorical challenge:   
   >> ‘What benefits?’   
   >>   
   >> Flying in the face of obvious historical data, this is a main symptom of   
   >> the ideological character of her view. Her thinking is determined by a   
   >> theoretical axiom – that empire and colonial rule are totally unjust –   
   >> that will not countenance any contrary evidence. Not the fact that the   
   >> British Empire was among the first states in the world’s history to   
   >> abolish slavery and then led the world in suppressing it from Brazil to   
   >> New Zealand. Nor that it introduced liberal institutions of a free   
   >> press, independent judiciary, and representative government to parts of   
   >> the world that had never experienced them.   
   >>   
   >> Similarly, nor that it made India the largest producer of steel outside   
   >> of North America, Europe, and Japan by 1935, and gave her 47,000 miles   
   >> of railway against China’s 17,000 by 1947. Nor that, between May 1940   
   >> and June 1941, it offered the massively murderous racist regime in Nazi   
   >> Berlin the only military opposition – with the sole exception of Greece.   
   >> In Gurminder’s eyes – implausibly – none of this counts for anything.   
   >>   
   >> Behind this stubborn defiance of historical fact lies a more basic   
   >> axiom, namely, that colonialism was fundamentally about economic   
   >> ‘extraction’. In support, Gurminder invoked the argument that, since   
   >> India produced 25 per cent of world output in 1800 but only 2 to 4 per   
   >> cent in 1900, it follows that the British had plundered the country. Not   
   >> at all.   
   >>   
   >> It only shows that industrial productivity in the West increased four to   
   >> six times during that period, reducing India’s share of global GDP. The   
   >> same fate befell uncolonised China. The neo-Marxist view that   
   >> colonialism was essentially about the predatory extraction of colonial   
   >> surplus owes much more to dogma than empirical data.   
   >>   
   >> Over 25 years ago, the leading historian of imperial economics, David   
   >> Fieldhouse, endorsed Rudolf von Albertini’s conclusion, based on an   
   >> exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial   
   >> world to 1940, that colonial economics ‘cannot be understood through   
   >> concepts such as plunder … and exploitation’. Recently, Tirthankar Roy,   
   >> the Bengali-born professor of colonial economic history at the London   
   >> School of Economics, has confirmed this, writing that ‘[t]he proposition   
   >> that the Empire was at bottom a mechanism of surplus appropriation and   
   >> transfer has not fared well in global history’.   
   >>   
   >> But that’s the proposition that Gurminder sticks to dogmatically, with   
   >> the result not only that she denies the obvious – that the British   
   >> Empire did some good – but also that she spins seriously misleading   
   >> tales based on a highly partial selection of data. So, she characterises   
   >> the Empire as consistently callous towards the Indian victims of famine,   
   >> citing two facts. First, when famine hit Bengal in 1769-70, the East   
   >> India Company (EIC) callously increased the tax burden on the starving.   
   >> Second, when famine struck again toward the end of the 19th century, the   
   >> relief fund mandated by the Famine Code of 1880 was found to have been   
   >> spent on yet another Afghan war.   
   >>   
   >> What Gurminder fails to mention is that, in 1769-70, the EIC governor of   
   >> Calcutta, John Cartier, strove assiduously to save Bengalis. That in the   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)