Abstract
This chapter examines the patterns and processes of natural resource extraction at the global scale. A mental map begins to take shape: extensive regions extracting, cultivating and shipping resources elsewhere; industrialized areas importing these raw materials, metabolizing them, assembling new products, and shipping them on; a scattering of places producing new knowledge about the location, use and value of resources; and the vast spaces and chokepoints of transit. In the armoury of words describing social relations, ‘exploitation’ is surely one of the most potent. It is also a curiously flexible term, able at once to convey affirmation and opprobrium about the same process. From the Middle Ages until the late 1700s the Holy Grail of chemistry was alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into gold. Resource exploitation is a narrative of domestication and improvement that is closely bound to notions of development and state formation, and it continues to play a role in the organization of contemporary society.
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