From gold to rosewood

Abstract

This chapter builds on the hybrid concepts of “extractive peasants” and “smallholder miner-farmers” in order to rethink agrarian change and resource frontiers in a highly speculative, late capitalist global economy. Speculation, boom and bust, uncertainty, and violence are, of course, not new, but their emergence in rural areas, experienced by often marginalized rural peoples under new political economic and geopolitical terms now manifests in unprecedented ways. We use the examples of gold and rosewood booms to argue that the global geographies of late capitalism are generating new, flexible subjects in rural agrarian settings who must increasingly navigate volatile price dynamics, emergent export opportunities, changing political ecologies, and multiple and overlapping resource frontiers manifesting at the rural margins. These flexible agrarian subjects provide a parallel to the late capitalist flexible subjects of the Global North; they comprise a new class of flexible frontier-makers that will be a defining feature of the rural twenty-first century moving forward.