Duff Hart-Davis, Ascension: The Story of a South Atlantic Island (Merlin Unwin Books, 2016).
Quoted in Alex Ritsema, A Dutch Castaway on Ascension Island in 1725 (pub. by author, 2010), 102.
The most extensive study on Hasenbosch, which cross-checks his diary with the East India Company archives, is Michiel Koolbergen, Een Hollandse Robinson Crusoë: Dagboek van de verbannen VOC-dienaar Leendert Hasenbosch op het onbewoond eiland van Ascension A.D. 1725 (Menken Kasander & Wigman Uitgevers, 2002).
Koolbergen, Een Hollandse Robinson Crusoë.
On the East India Company and the definition of “sodomy,” see Diederick Wildeman, “1727: Sodomy, the Zeewijk and the Dutch East India Company,” in The Wreck of the Zeewijk, ed. Drew Pettifer (Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2020).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000), 354.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Empire, Twenty Years On,” New Left Review, no. 120 (November–December 2019): 69.
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 198.
Negri summarizes the end-of-history thesis in this way: “The globalization of capital is in itself a globalization of democracy.” He goes on to note that “this position has been carried to the extremes, even to the point of caricature, by Francis Fukuyama.” Antonio Negri, Reflections on Empire (Polity, 2003), 7.
The terms “neo-feudalist” and “techno-feudalist” describe a shift in capitalism where trillion-dollar companies like Amazon replace the neoliberal market with a full monopolized environment. They grant digital fiefs to vassals (vendors) in exchange for rent. Consumers themselves are exploited as unpaid data workers who train algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence. See Jodi Dean, “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12, 2020 →; Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (The Bodley Head, 2023); and Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from Another Present (The Bodley Head, 2020), 145–46.
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (P. F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1909), 495–96.
“The word ‘propaganda’ comes from the ablative singular feminine of propogandus, which is the gerundive of the Latin propagare, meaning ‘to propagate.’ The original use of the word stems from the field of biology.” Erwin W. Fellows, “Propaganda: History of a Word,” American Speech 34, no. 3 (October 1959): 182.
Trees and forests increase rainfall intensity through the fungal spores, pollen, bacterial cells, and other particles they release into the atmosphere.
David C. Catling and Stedson Stroud, “The Greening of Green Mountain, Ascension Island,” in XXL-XS: New Directions in Ecological Design, ed. Mitchell Joachim Mike Silver (ACTAR Publishing, 2017).
Mihnea Mircan, “A Biography of Daphne” (PhD diss., Monash University, Melbourne, 2022), 154.
Mircan, “Biography of Daphne,” 145.
While this is partly like other colonial terraforming projects, such as the introduction of European vegetation into occupied Palestine, the difference is that Israeli settlers brought pines from Europe, whereas Darwin and Hooker brought samples from existing colonies to a new colony.
George Johnson, The All Red Line: The Annals and Aims of the Pacific Cable Project (James Hope and Sons, 1903).
Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
This is where the name of Mike Linley’s documentary Wideawake Island (1984) comes from.
Hart-Davis, Ascension, 175–90, 200–7.
Sarah Mainwaring and Richard J. Aldrich, “The Secret Empire of Signals Intelligence: GCHQ and the Persistence of the Colonial Presence,” International History Review, no. 43 (2021).
See Michael Orrom’s film Apollo in Ascension (1967).
Editorial, The Islander, October 2015.
Kevin Rawlinson, Diane Taylor, and Aletha Adu, “UK May Try to Send Small Boat Arrivals to Ascension Island, Minister Confirms,” The Guardian, August 7, 2023 →.
The agreement that users of Starlink, Musk’s SpaceX subsidiary, must sign embodies the techno-feudalist strategy for monopolizing outer space. The tenth clause reads: “For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.” Referring to Mars as a “free” planet in this context does not mean that Mars or its future inhabitants will have political agency themselves; rather, it speaks to the proprietary rights of SpaceX to extract and geoengineer the planet without any governmental or democratic interference.
Isobel Sarah Black Gill, Six Months in Ascension: An Unscientific Account of a Scientific Expedition (John Murray, 1978).
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 19.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin Press, 2004), 323, xiii–xiv.
Negri, Reflections on Empire, 101.
Negri, Reflections on Empire, 101.
On the concept of “earth workers,” see Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (Framer Framed, 2024), 10–21.
Paraphrasing China Miéville, The City & the City (Pan Books, 2011).
Koolbergen, Een Hollandse Robinson Crusoë, 115–16.
Quoted in Koolbergen, Een Hollandse Robinson Crusoë, 126.
David M. Wilkinson, “The Parable of Green Mountain: Ascension Island, Ecosystem Construction and Ecological Fitting,” Journal of Biogeography, no. 31 (2004): 1.
Wild World: Ascension Island, produced by Ned Kelly, 1973, BBC Bristol. See also Philip Ashmole and Myrtle Ashmole, St. Helena and Ascension Island: A Natural History (Anthony Nelson, 2000).
D’Souza and Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes.
I want to thank Andreas Petrossiants for his editorial guidance, Mihnea Mircan for his important study of Ascension Island in A Biography of Daphne (2022) and his essential council on my research, and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, iLiana Fokianaki, James Bridle, and Filipa Ramos for the critical conversations and exchanges that further informed this text. Thank you also to the team of Prix de Rome, who commissioned Empire’s Island, Video Study (2023), from which this essay emerged.