The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism

This book articulates an analytical framework for understanding how race, nature, and capitalism are co-constituted on a planetary scale. The framework of the 'political ecology of colonial capitalism' elucidates how the co-production of race and the society/nature distinction operates as a foundational structure of capitalism. In order to express the relationship between global inequality and planetary ecological crises, the book applies this framework to a theoretical and historical analysis of the 'global land grab', which refers to the intensification, beginning in the 2010s and continuing into the 2020s, of large scale transnational agricultural land acquisitions in the global South. It orients analytical attention towards how capitalist development has proceeded, over its long history, through a succession of accumulation cycles that rise and fall in correspondence with the racialized construction, and ultimate exhaustion, of frontiers of "unused" natures. At one level, the book foregrounds how colonialism materially opens, through violent dispossession of colonized peoples, frontiers provisioning the necessary cheap inputs for capitalist development. It then proceeds, on a second level, to reveal how the accompanying conceptualization of the frontier as an 'unused' nature distinct from human society is contingent upon a technology of race which re-presents Indigenous sovereign earth-worlds as unused and wasted virgin natures. The book thus demonstrates how the global land grab is driven by a systemic colonial-capitalist logic of racialized frontier re-generation attempting to overcome the crisis context marking the exhaustion of the neoliberal epoch of capitalism.