## Metadata - Author: [[Sathnam Sanghera and Marlon James]] - Full Title: Empireland - Category: #books ## Highlights - Looking around Bristol and Liverpool, I wondered how I was supposed to get over all the bad that had been wrought by the empire, while the empire itself held on to all the good. ([Location 71](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B2MK82V6&location=71)) - But a buoyant international book trade made the Enlightenment an international affair, and a glance at what major Enlightenment thinkers around the planet had to say on race reveals how white supremacy emerged simultaneously on both side of the Atlantic. So we had the celebrated Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume remarking in 1753 that “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to whites.” We had German philosopher Kant acknowledging in his Lectures on Physical Geography (published in 1802) that “the yellow [Asian] Indians do have a meager talent,” but asserting that the “Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples.”[22] We had John Locke arguing in seventeenth-century England that “Negroes” were the product of African women sleeping with apes and therefore that they were subhuman.[23] Then we had founding father Thomas Jefferson asserting in the United States in 1785 that “the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”[24] ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B2MK82V6&location=245)) - by the late nineteenth century, Britain absorbed 60 percent of all meat traded globally, the imports from places like Australia and New Zealand permitting the working classes their weekly roast.[10] ([Location 499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B2MK82V6&location=499)) - Processed food? The British pioneered the technology, thanks to centuries of experience in transporting foods to feed their colonists at every corner of the globe, with the first food-canning factory opened in Bermondsey in 1813. ([Location 511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B2MK82V6&location=511)) - It has been pointed out that this country has a history of first developing and perfecting its policing methods in the colonies before bringing them to Britain. For instance, our very first official police system was tried out in Ireland before being initiated in Britain in 1829; fingerprinting was developed in India as a tool to control the population, before being brought to Britain to be used in the detection of crimes;[*3] then, in 1883, the Special Branch of the London Metropolitan Police was established in order to deal with Irish troublemakers, and was led by those with experience in Ireland and India.[12] ([Location 533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B2MK82V6&location=533))