The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism - (Postcolonial International Studies) by Bikrum Gill (Hardcover)

About the Book

The political ecology of colonial capitalism reveals how the co-production of race and nature is a fundamental dynamic of the capitalist world-system.

Book Synopsis

This book situates the post financial crisis phenomenon of the "global land grab" within the longue duree of the capitalist world system. It does so by advancing a theoretical and historical framework, called the political ecology of colonial capitalism, that clarifies the key role played by the co-production of race and nature in provisioning the "ecological surplus" that has historically secured the emergence and reproduction of capitalist development. The key premise of this book is that the global land grab constitutes another such attempted moment of re-securing the cheap food premise through racialized frontier appropriation. The argument advanced here is that, within the neoliberal crisis conjuncture, the hegemonic resolution of capital's escalating social-ecological contradictions necessitates, through the practice of "global primitive accumulation," the racialized construction of frontiers of unused nature in emergent zones of appropriation.

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Bikrum Gill is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech