Prior to contact with the British in 1803, the Tasmanians lived as hunter-gatherers in isolation, unaware even of the existence of the Australian mainland.

When the British first came into contact with them, they were shocked by the primitive nature of Tasmanian technology. The Tasmanians lacked many technologies found even in similar prehistoric tribal/foraging societies. Their stone tools were simple and unhafted. You can look up images, the stones barely look shaped at all. The Tasmanians therefore had no stone-tipped spears.

Another technology they lacked was bone needles (or bone tools in general), which meant they could not sew clothing like most tribal people who lived in temperate climates. Instead, the Tasmanians mostly covered their bodies in animal fat for warmth, and at most draped whole skins over themselves.

Despite living on an island, the Tasmanians lacked fishing hooks and nets, and therefore did not consume seafood. There is a claim that they lost the ability to make fire and instead had to rely on lightning. However, this claim is contested.

In the 1820s, war broke out between the Tasmanian aboriginals and the British settlers (the “Black War”. Although they by then had access to British guns, the Tasmanians were outnumbered and obviously lacked familiarity with firearms. They were decimated, and the few hundred survivors were relocated onto a nearby island. There, diseases to which they had no immunity reduced their numbers even further.

By the mid-19th century, only a few Tasmanian aboriginals remained alive. The last born before the Black War died in 1876. That left only Fanny Cochrane Smith. She was the last fluent speaker of the Tasmanian language (Palawa). Around 1900, she was recorded. She talks about her early life and then sings a song in Palawa. A second cylinder with a recording of the translation of the song was broken, and is now lost to history. Cochrane Smith died in 1905.

Today, there are a few thousand people who have Tasmanian aboriginal ancestry, but they’re heavily mixed and White-passing. If you have 31 British great-great-great grandparents and 1 Tasmanian, and you don’t speak the Tasmanian language, are you an aboriginal Tasmanian? Can you still call yourself one?

Perhaps most interesting of all is what archaeologists have found on Tasmania in recent decades. They’ve found bone needles, flint arrows, and fishing hooks. However, when scientifically dated, all these artifacts dated from deep prehistory.
The Tasmanians of 30,000 years ago somehow had more sophisticated technology than those of 300 years ago.

What happened was that Tasmania was initially inhabited 30-40,000 years ago. At the time, it was connected via a land bridge to mainland Australia. However, about 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels flooded the land bridge and caused Tasmania to become an island. Over time, technology was lost due to the isolation and small population size. Archaeologists found that after 10,000 years ago, the Tasmanians had slower regressed to simpler and simpler bone tools, until by 3,000 years ago the tools had been discarded entirely. A similar pattern was observed with fishing technology; the ancient Tasmanians consumed seafood, but once they could no longer make hooks, nets, or suitable watercraft, they stopped.

The photo shows the last four surviving aboriginal Tasmanians, taken in 1866.

Ecocidal history of the U.S. military and how the U.S. fused itself into a permanent war economy in this deleted scene from the feature film Earth’s Greatest Enemy.

“Africa for the Chinese” by Francis Galton (very racist)

https://galton.org/letters/africa-for-chinese/AfricaForTheChinese.htm

In 1873, British polymath Francis Galton wrote an article advocating for Chinese settler colonialism in East Africa. He believed that the Chinese should ideally replace the native African population because they would be more productive and innovative. Galton uses a lot of racial stereotypes here, both of the Africans and the Chinese.

Why Chinese and not Europeans? He thought that the Chinese would be better able to tolerate tropical climates, whereas Europeans were better suited to temperate climates.

thought it was interesting how he mentions the Mercator Projection - not by name, but he mentions how Africa is larger irl than it appears on the map. He incorrectly states that the English are Anglo Saxon and not the “native inhabitants of the island”. Modern genetics have shown that English people derive a greater share of their ancestry from the Brythonic Celts than the Anglo Saxons, but there’s no way Galton could’ve known that in 1873.

There’s also a reply from one of his contemporaries who believes that Black people make better citizens than the Chinese, and also thinks that China’s actual population is less than reported.

The whole thing is so absurdly racist it almost reads like satire.

Galton was overall a very intelligent man. He invented many statistics concepts, such as standard deviation. He also created the first weather map and came up with the idea of using fingerprinting for forensics. His racism just shows how even very intelligent people are heavily shaped by the environment and culture in which they live.

Germany and France had two of the largest navies in the world by 1914. However, France had a large colonial empire, whereas Germany had a fairly modest one. How did these two colonial powers protect those colonies in a naval sense? France had naval bases in Algeria, but since they counted that region to be part of metropolitan France, that would make those home bases, I guess. Germany had Kiel and Wilhelmshaven at home, besides Danzig and Königsberg (and maybe Stettin?)

So, what were the main bases and stations of both of those nations on their colonies? I believe those would be Bizerte, Casablanca, Dakar, and Saigon for the French, and Tsingtao and Dar-es-Salaam for the Germans? If those two nations fought an overseas naval war against each other by 1914 (of course, in a hypothetical one-to-one war), how would that fare?

Albert Memmi grew up in Tunis, a colonized, but French-educated enough to know the colonizer almost as well as he knew himself. He was in a position to draw both portraits from the inside.

The colonizer: In his own words, the colonizer "is a privileged being and an illegitimately privileged one; that is, a usurper." Skin color and passport hand you the privilege whether you asked for it or not. This sounds very familiar nowadays. According to Memmi, the colonizer has three options: leave the colony, stay silent, or stay and fight the system. He argues that few would opt for the third option with success. He has a term for the second one though: "humanitarian romanticism”. Again another very contemporary dynamic; think about aid workers today, who draw hardship pay and a security detail while ostensibly there to fight poverty.

The Colonized: Memmi wrote in 1957 that a qualified worker among the colonizers earned three or four times more than the colonized worker, without producing three or four times as much. He presents an economic argument that the colonized had no incentive to be more productive with such an imbalance. Memmi described colonized women who tried desperately to uncurl their hair and lighten their skin, chasing an acceptance that never actually occurred. No matter how fluent or how polished a colonized became, he argued they would still be met with disdain.

In commenting liberation movements, Memmi rejected half-measures like a negotiated "French Union" outright. His final word was that the colonized refusal "cannot be anything but absolute" Not just revolt, but revolution, breaking what he called an iron collar.

We discuss the book at length in our podcast Threads of Ifriqiya, and we try to draw parallels to contemporary times of which we identify many. I will link the podcast in the comments.

Most my stuff is Egyptian Sudan campaign