Colonial Dispossession and Extraction

The historical development of the modern, capitalist world economy systematically bound colonizers and colonized into unequal relationships of extraction, colonization and dispossession over the past 500 years and more. Material realities are central to understanding what we mean by ‘colonization’ - of materials, life and labour. Colonialism occupied land and turned people and nature into human and natural resources for a singular aim – the accumulation of capital.

Historical processes of extraction, dispossession, replacement and extinction drove colonization and ecological imperialism as structural imperatives of modern capitalism. Land-grabbing, wars and slavery connect with the extensive spread of commercial monocultures as economic structures displacing and threatening much of the world’s human biological and cultural life with extinction.

Law and conservation have colluded in these colonizing processes – ‘emptying’ lands and displacing or dispossessing indigenous nature and people, in order that material resources can continue to be extracted, monetized and mobilized for the accumulation of capital.

Readings

• Acuna-Soto et al (2002) Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico Emerging Infectious Disease 8(4): 360–362.
• Clark, Brett; Foster, John B (2009) Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade, International Journal of Comparative Sociology Vol 50(3–4): 311–334.
• Fields, S (2008 ) Pestilence and headcolds: encountering illness in colonial Mexico.
• Guha, R et al (2012) Deeper Roots of Historical Injustice: Trends and Challenges in the Forests of India, Rights and Resources Initiative.
• Hickel, J (2020) Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary Lancet Planetary Health 2020; 4: e399–404. For a 10-tweet summary.
• Kampmann, U (nd) The impact of silver from the New World.
• Moore, Jason (2007) Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640. In Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change, J.R. McNeill, Joan Martinez-Alier, and Alf Hornborg, eds. Berkeley: AltaMira Press, pp 123-142.
• Moore Jason W. (2009) Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the "First" Sixteenth Century: Part I: From "Island of Timber" to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506 Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Vol. 32, No. 4 (2009), 345-390.
• Pateman, C (2007) The settler contract, in Pateman C and Mills, C., Contract and Domination, pp 35-78 .
• Pringle, Heather (2010) Sugar Masters in the New World Smithsonian Magazine 12 January 2010.
• Short, Damien (2016) Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide. Zed Press.

Resources

• Materialism, Global Social Theory.
• Settler Colonialism, Global Social Theory
• Vandana Shiva, Global Social Theory
• Patrick Wolfe , Global Social Theory

Questions for discussion

• Examine the problem of colonialism (or neo-colonialism) from the perspective of the ‘development’ of a selected natural resource.
• To what extent might it be said that the histories of empire and colonialism depend on the displacement and dispossession of indigenous communities and the erasure of their prior access to the environment?
• Explore and discuss the ‘colonial’ origins of environmental resource use in the world today, using one specific example er: land, forest, mineral ore, fossil fuel, a particular a crop or type of livestock, or the ‘atmospheric commons’
• What environmental factors are relevant in accounting for historical processes of imperial and colonial extraction and accumulation?