David Martin Jones

I was devastated to learn yesterday of the death of David Martin Jones, an editor and frequent contributor to Cieo. David was a good friend. He inspired many people politically and intellectually. He will be very much missed.

I would like to share some of David’s work.

I think my favourite piece is also his most recent, and most personal, article for Cieo. In Woke Wales, David wrote about the beautiful village in which he spent much of his childhood but had been besmirched by bogus links to the slave trade.

You’ve probably never heard of Abergynolwyn. This small village in the Dysynni valley in Merioneth, sits at the southern end of Lake Talyllyn, in the foothills of the Snowdon massif and beneath Wales’ second largest peak, Cadair Idris. Now home to just 400 people, Abergynolwyn was established in the nineteenth century to house workers at the nearby Bryn Eglwys slate quarry. It ‘stands close to the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway, which served both the quarry and the village’, in ‘the slate landscape of Northwest Wales’ – a region designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2021.

Continue reading: https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/woke-wales/

David’s most read piece was a review of Nigel Biggar’s book on colonialism, in which David asked: Was the British empire evil?

The British empire went through numerous permutations between 1600-1960 yet the conventional view, dominant in universities and the mainstream media, is that it was throughout a morally deplorable exercise in colonialism, racism, brutal exploitation and violence. This view of the empire is not merely an act of historical revisionism, it also legitimates a progressive assault on British institutions in the present. It has been disseminated to Anglosphere states like Australia, New Zealand and Canada where it demands the re-education of the former empire’s deluded white subjects who are ipso facto permeated by both conscious and unconscious racism as a consequence of their benighted imperial past.

Continue reading: https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/was-the-british-empire-evil/

Finally, David’s work that inspired my own thinking the most was undertaken with his colleague and friend Michael Rainsborough - and which emerged from their womderful book, The Strategy of Maoism in The West - The West’s Maoist Moment:

BLM ideology considers racism systemic and institutional. In one sense they are correct, but not for the reasons that they assume. Slavery is systemically embedded in the deep structure of world history, etched into the human experience since the dawn of civilisation. Slavery, moreover, has not always appeared wicked or evil. From Babylon, Egypt, and Rome to the Conquistadores in South America, the Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia and eighteenth and nineteenth century North America, slavery was the basis of economic and political development. Slave labour is still prevalent today. In China, its laogai (prison camps) enables Chinese enterprises to undercut the prices of its economic competitors, a facet of modernity that the designer clothes wearing, mobile phone carrying members of the BLM and Antifa crowds somewhat conveniently manage to overlook. As some historians still appreciate, conquest, slavery and oppression mark the troubled origins of most empires in the non-western as well as the western world. 

Read the full piece here: https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/maoist-moment/

And see all of David’s work for Cieo here: https://www.cieo.org.uk/authors/david-martin-jones/