Babel

by R.F. Kuang

‘But how does this happen?’ he continued. ‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism. Ask yourself why the Literature Department only translates works into English and not the other way around, or what the interpreters are being sent abroad to do. Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire. Consider – Sir Horace Wilson, who’s the first endowed chair in Sanskrit in Oxford history, spends half his time conducting tutorials for Christian missionaries. ‘The point of it all is to keep amassing silver. We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward. And we enforce those trade deals with the very same silver bars, now inscribed with Babel’s work, that make our ships faster, our soldiers hardier, and our guns more deadly. It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world. ‘We are that outside force. Hermes. We funnel silver away to people, communities, and movements that deserve it. We aid slave revo...