I'll be presenting at 11.30am tomorrow morning - though fortunately only once as Alex will take on the duties for our joint paper
Ralph Scott
@ralphscott.bsky.social
2.4K followers 1.8K following 864 posts
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in politics at the University of Bristol. Investigating the effect of education on political attitudes and behaviour, among other things. ralphscott.co.uk
![The Islamic Empire heavily patronized scholars. The money spent on the Translation Movement for some translations is estimated to be equivalent to about twice the annual research budget of the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council.[18] The best scholars and notable translators, such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, had salaries that are estimated to be the equivalent of professional athletes today.[18] The House of Wisdom was a library established in Abbasid-era Baghdad, Iraq by Caliph al-Mansur[19] in 825 modeled after the academy of Jundishapur.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:u7weypg647i7in3zdddiazil/bafkreie2feyq5jdurbs4olrcyzpzv7pxrg5yvqqiuhl3oiy7rehnqrxgie)
![The political activation of ethnocentrism: Enoch Powell and “River of Blood”
The dam finally broke when, for the first time, a prominent member of the Conservative Party elite – Shadow Cabinet member Enoch Powell – broke the taboo and articulated in full the identity-based hostility to migration widely shared in the electorate in the infamous “River of Blood” speech in April 1968, in which he used an emotive rhetoric to attack liberal Commonwealth immigration policies:
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”
Powell was fully aware that such an open and visceral violation of anti-racism social norms would provoke a strong reaction from his colleagues: “I can already hear the chorus of execration...how dare he say such a thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings...?” However, he defended his stance by arguing that the growing opposition of white ethnocentric voters to migration as both legitimate and too important to ignore: “The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so....I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What [my constituent] is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking...”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:u7weypg647i7in3zdddiazil/bafkreibcnfoynbwvfrkvrzxoqqrdpyx6szjyuvhuzztxttqz3yl7fznhw4)
