Colonial Capitalism Research Articles

Gharbzadegi, colonial capitalism and the racial state in Iran

ABSTRACT This article argues that the political thought of one of twentieth-century Iran’s foremost intellectuals, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969) and his seminal work Gharbzadegi (1962), often translated as ‘West-struck-ness’ or ‘Westoxication’, can and should be understood through the critical study of race and racialisation. In contrast to the paradigms of ‘nativism’, ‘Islamic atavism’ and the demand for a return to ‘cultural authenticity’ that have traditionally framed the significance and reception of his thought, this article contends that Al-e Ahmad’s notion of gharbzadegi provides crucial insights into how predatory forms of colonial capitalism stratify the economic world order in accordance with what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the ‘colour line’. The article submits that Al-e Ahmad’s political thought sheds light upon the conditions of Eurocentric and racialised forms of knowledge production and immanent material practices, and how they structure the lived experiences of colonial and semi-colonial subjects, as well as providing a remarkable perspective on how ‘race thinking’ and the ‘racial state’ were conceived and institutionalised in twentieth-century Iran.

The Rif and California: Environmental Violence in the Era of New Cannabis Markets

This chapter explores the different forms of environmental violence practised against humans and nature (including the cannabis plant) in a context of intensive cannabis cultivation. In particular, it examines the effects of the industrial farming of cannabis since the 1960s on water, land, forests, animals and farmers. It also investigates the exploitation of the labour force, which has comprised vulnerable populations, especially women and landless agricultural workers since Rifian agriculture was first integrated into colonial capitalism in Morocco. While this study focuses on the Moroccan territory, the situation presented is by no means unique at the global level. The phenomenon can be seen developing both within a framework of prohibition and when legal and illegal actors adopt a capitalist system of exploitation, as is the case in California.

HOẠT ĐỘNG XUẤT BẢN, LƯU TRỮ VÀ GIÁ TRỊ TƯ LIỆU CỦA TỜ BÁO LE COURRIER D'HAIPHONG

The French - local daily newspaper in Indochina appeared with the development of commerce and the presence of colonial capitalists (industrialists, miners, intellectuals, civil servants and traders) in the mid-1880s. French daily newspapers not only reflected the change of localities, but also played a role in promoting development through a focus on defending political views, providing economic information. Le Courrier d'Haiphong is a case of a local daily newspaper that balances factors such as operational objectives, publishing conditions, and is a “witness” of Hai Phong's urbanization process and plays a role as “participant factor” accelerating the modernization of one of the trade-industrial centers in the North of Vietnam during the colonial period. Out of the local sphere, Le Courrier d'Haiphong existed as a forum of French capitalists in Tonkin. As one of the very few newspapers that had not been suspended during its lifetime, Le Courrier d'Haiphong newspaper provided a way to publish newspapers in the early stages of journalism in Vietnam. At the same time, it is also a valuable resource for research on economic history, urban history, or cultural exchange and acculturation activities in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

War in the camphor zone: Indigenous resistance to colonial capitalism in upland Taiwan, 1895–1915

Between 1895 and 1915, Japanese police and military forces invaded Taiwan’s Indigenous highlands for control of camphor. At the dawn of the twentieth century, camphor crystals were a vital natural resource used in the production of celluloid, pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemicals. The consequences of this single commodity were far-reaching, as Japanese pacification armies shelled and burned Indigenous villages to the ground, forcibly relocated tens of thousands, and killed both resistance fighters and innocent civilians. This article examines patterns of frontier warfare in upland Taiwan, with a focus on the Japanese colonial state’s confrontations with the northeastern Atayal peoples (also spelled ‘Dayan’). Despite severe material disadvantages and continuous assaults on their communities, Atayal peoples fought back against the violence of dispossession, frustrating the economic designs of a major empire with numerically superior armies and advanced firepower. In revisiting this history, this article hopes to shed light on the dynamics of resistance, strategic accommodation, and conquest that defined relations between expanding capitalist states, their industries, and Indigenous peoples at the height of the imperialist era.

일제강점기 식민지 자본주의 하 경성공간과 미래사회 경성공간의 공간비교 연구-정연규의 혼과 이상촌을 중심으로-

일제강점기 식민지 자본주의 하 경성공간과 미래사회 경성공간의 공간비교 연구-정연규의 혼과 이상촌을 중심으로-

Colonial capitalism and the dilemmas of liberalism

Colonial capitalism and the dilemmas of liberalism

Green Criminology and State-Corporate Crime: The Ecocide-Genocide Nexus with Examples from Nigeria

ABSTRACT Following the lead of researchers in other disciplines, a handful of state and corporate crime, and green criminological researchers have addressed crimes such as genocide and ecocide. Criminologists have drawn attention to the intersection of state and corporate crimes (i.e. state-corporate crime), and illustrated how state and corporate crimes victimized, among other groups and other places, citizens of African nations. More recently, criminologists, particularly green criminologists, have begun to examine the connection between genocide and ecocide, or how the human destruction of ecosystems and people are inter-related, and reflect features of state-corporate crime. The current study examines these issues and extends that discussion by describing how the intersection of genocide-ecocide can be linked to treadmill of production arguments and related approaches in environmental sociology. Specifically, we suggest that the ecocide-genocide nexus is useful for understanding how the destruction of people and ecosystems by states and corporations intersect throughout the history of capitalism, with evidence that many contemporary genocides are driven by ecocide and efforts to expand raw material resource withdrawals controlled by the capitalist treadmill of production. This perspective is then applied to the case of Nigeria to illustrate how the oil-related treadmill of production and the history of governance in Nigeria facilitated eco-genocide, or the genocide of Native Nigerians through ecological destruction over the past half century. Our argument links concepts and theory from environmental sociology, state-corporate crime research, green criminology, ecological Marxism, human rights scholarship and various other literatures addressing ecocide and genocide. We describe how the capitalist treadmill of production, as a specific phase in the history of capitalism, continues the historical tendencies toward ecocide-genocide generated by colonial capitalism, and how the interaction between state and corporate behaviour facilitates expanded production and profit making through accelerated rates of ecological withdrawal which then promotes ecologically induced genocide.

History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonization in South Australia and New Zealand

AbstractThis article takes a fresh look at the history of private colonial enterprise in order to show how companies influenced British settlement and emigration to South Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s, thus connecting the settler revolution to global capitalism. Bringing into a single analytical frame the history of company colonization in the antipodes and its Atlantic predecessor, it examines how and why the actors involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand invoked North American precedent to justify their early nineteenth-century colonial ventures. The article shows how the legitimating narratives employed by the colonial reformers performed two key functions. On the one hand, they supplied a historical and discursive tradition that authorized chartered enterprise in the antipodes. On the other hand, they furnished legal arguments that purportedly justified the appropriation of Aboriginal Australian and Māori tribal land. In illuminating how language and time shaped the world-making prophesies of these colonial capitalists, the article aims to extend recent work on corporations in global context.

The Gender and Racial Construction of the Working Class: Temporary Mobility of Mexican Women Workers to the US and Canada

Labour precariousness, notably manifested in the loss of formal jobs, stagnation of wages and labour uncertainty, has increased on a global scale. Previous explanations for precariousness have focused on flexible models of production, yet this approach has tended to overlook the fact that precariousness forms a part of modern colonial capitalism and gender identity. Based on the results of an empirical, ground-breaking ethnographic research, this paper analyses the stratification of productive tasks on a global scale, from the system of gender hierarchies, racialization and stratification leading to the exploitation and precariousness of workers. The arguments put forward are endorsed through the experiences of Mexican women who travel to the United States and Canada, to work temporarily in the hotel, restaurant and agriculture sectors. This analysis reveals how women workers in particular are constructed and instituted as a racialized surplus, allowing employers to legitimate labour exploitation and perpetuate social hierarchies.

The Origin of the Child Healthcare in the East Coast of Sumatra, 1900s-1940s

This article aims to explore the issue of children’s healthcare in the context of colonial expansion on the East Coast of Sumatra. At the early of the 20th century, the birth rate, children, and maternal healthcare have become important issues in discussing health conditions in plantations in East Sumatra. It was a significant shift concerning the realm of East Sumatra plantation health and medical research due to since in the pioneering time, plantation’s medical institutions merely focused on the health of adult male coolies. The phenomenon of high rate of infant mortality in the early 20th century has become a new health problem in the East Coast of Sumatra Plantation. The plantation companies convincing to take further care of the children’s health as it will give a direct effect on plantation hygiene and population growth of the region. In the East Coast of Sumatra, children’s healthcare discourse was a proxy of the colonial capitalism interest, hygiene problems, and needs of population growth.

The Kilwa Massacre: Critical Analysis for a Southern Criminology

This paper explores the 2004 Kilwa massacre in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) through a decolonial perspective, explaining how the massacre is situated within the history of colonial power and global capitalist relations. As such, the convergence of mining and political interests that created the context in which this violence was possible is examined, rather than the specific human rights abuses committed during the massacre. This approach highlights how such acts of violence are an ongoing factor of colonial and postcolonial exploitation, as well as the difficulties in holding the responsible parties accountable. This investigation shows the importance of developing a decolonial Southern criminology that contextualizes human rights abuses within local and international systems of power and locates acts of criminal violence within the broader networks of structural violence.

Infrastructures of Light: Tropicapitalism and Germaine Krull’s Camera

To understand the relationship between the camera and colonial capitalism, we must consider photography not just as a tool but as an infrastructural system, the very grounds upon which movements of goods, capital and ideas can be sustained, regulated, and interrupted. Focusing on French-Dutch-German photographer Germaine Krull, this article examines how the development of photographic infrastructures in mid-twentieth century Paris and Equatorial Africa both created and foiled networks for distributing fantasies of colonial development. Photographic infrastructures enabled the whiting out of racialized labor, the recasting of rubber, coffee and gold as the currency of freedom during WWII, and the refining of seemingly limitless resources of African light into image-objects. In the service of colonial fantasy, however, Krull’s photography was an unwittingly “dodgy” infrastructure, bringing to light a series of interruptions, decelerations and breakdowns in the resource networks purporting to insulate the French empire from the dangers of world war and propel imperial subjects and citizens into a future of colonial progress. The history of Krull’s “dodgy” photographic infrastructure therefore reveals pathways to undoing colonial capitalism from within, showing how deliberate photographic system failures might yet redirect capitalist circulations towards a politics of redistribution and non-accumulation, and an ethics of care.

식민지 자본주의의 전개와 3·1운동에 대한 시론적 검토

This article is an introductory study of the correlation between the colonial capitalism implanted by the Japanese Empire and the March 1st Movement. The body of this article approaches the foregoing correlation from three aspects: the structure of colonial capitalism, changes in daily life due to colonial capitalism, and people’s perception of capitalism. Through the hierarchical structure formed between the empire and colonial capitalism, the colony was indirectly linked to world capitalism through the colonial power, and the colonial economy was unilaterally reorganized according to the interests of the colonial power and capital. The Japanese Empire enforced policies that ignored the practices that had been passed down from ancestors and the profits of farmers, and Korean farms were incorporated into the circulation system of Japanese capitalism by force. As a result, the rural community, which was a reproduction unit of farmers and directly connected to survival, was being dismantled. Whereas Koreans had to seek only survival as isolated individuals before the March 1st Movement, they showed united power through the movement rather than being isolated. After the 1920s, Koreans began to make independent voices based on solidarity as a collective subject.

Indigenous/state relations and the “Making” of surplus populations in the mixed economy of Northern Canada

Grounded in an analysis of the mixed economy of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, this article examines the contemporary relationship between surplus populations and colonial capitalist accumulation of new spaces. The functioning of the reserve surplus population requires that the unwaged, or under-waged, want, or need, wage labour. Thus, like all capitalist relations, a reserve surplus population is predicated on the separation of workers from their means of subsistence: what Marx calls “primitive” accumulation. Traditionally the home of the Dene and Inuit, and now home to approximately equal parts Indigenous (primarily Dene, Inuit and Métis) and non-Indigenous residents, the NWT mixed economy is a set of social relations that combine subsistence and social reproduction, wherein labour is oriented toward the daily and intergenerational wellbeing of the collective rather than the profit of the individual, with capitalist production. With a focus on the diamond industry, this article traces the shifting Canadian State approach to Indigenous labour in this space across time and the state policies and extractive projects that have both “made” Indigenous labour surplus and rhetorically justified their existence through evocations of regional unemployment and imagined dependency. In so doing, the paper identifies a move from the welfare-state era, wherein the state structured northern Indigenous “dependency”, to the neoliberal era, wherein dependency became a problem to be solved through increased Indigenous incorporation into capitalist wage labour. The northern diamond mining industry, responding to both Indigenous demands for land recognition and neoliberal imperatives for lean operations, exemplifies this latter approach.

Divine servitude against the work of man: dispossessive subjects and Exoduses to and from property

ABSTRACTThe self-possessive individual of early modern colonial capitalism depended upon a limit to the self’s alienability: while one could buy and sell other humans, one could not sell or enslave oneself. This essay explores how liberal political philosophers and abolitionist hermeneuts managed Biblical sanction for voluntary enslavement (contained in Exodus 21) in order to ground and normalize liberal-capitalist institutions, such as private property and wage labor. It then shifts to an archive of black ex-slave spiritual autobiography, exploring how former slaves figured their becoming mundanely free as becoming God’s possession. Refusing liberal self-possession, these once-possessed, dispossessive subjects articulate a general critique of property relations.

The “New:” A Colonization of Non-Modern Scholars and Knowledges

AbstractWe engage in an affirmative feminist reading of the recent, predominantly Western, philosophical movement called the new materialisms—that is, we problematize the “new” while still valuing its contributions toward justice (Todd 2016; Schaeffer 2018). We put Sara Ahmed in conversation with María Lugones and Zoe Todd in order to recognize that not only have feminist scholars engaged in conversations around the material before publications of the “new” (Ahmed 2008; Lugones 2010; Todd 2016), but we also argue that the “new” creates a coloniality of non-modern knowledges that think and live some of the so-called groundbreaking ideas of the “new.” The new materialisms, then, function systematically to deny and silence the multiple and varied ways in which the concepts it engages have a prolonged and deep scholarship of theorization in both feminisms and non-modern knowledges. The significance of this, we contend, is not merely a question of semantics as (some) authors of the “new” purport—language matters. That is, language materializes the world; it affects. In engendering this philosophy as “new,” it acts, in effect, as a colonization that reinforces harmful and violent discourses of white, neoliberal, colonial capitalism (Lugones 2010) that some feminist theories seek to dismantle.

Conrad's Carbon Imaginary: Oil, Imperialism, and the Victorian Petro-Archive

This article traces the rise of modern oil culture to interlocking innovations in British fiction, political economy, natural science, and colonial capitalism. It advances a method called “transitive reading” to understand those innovations and to show how writers first conceived of oil in relation to established energy inputs such as coal. The article then reads Joseph Conrad's late masterpiece, Victory (1915), as an ambivalent artifact of the British petro-imagination. In representing the “liquidation” of overseas coal capitalism, Victory articulates a desire for freedom from carbon power, while nevertheless binding that desire to a world where petroleum or “liquid coal” was becoming increasingly constitutive of the self.

Provisioning thePosho: Labor Migration and Working-Class Food Systems on the Early-Colonial Kenyan Coast

AbstractEngaging questions about social reproduction, migrant labor, and food provisioning, this article examines the emergence of a working-class food system on the coast of Kenya during the early decades of the twentieth century. Like elsewhere in Africa, labor migrants in Kenya's port city of Mombasa and on nearby plantations were provisioned with food rations, which were part of what Patrick Harries calls a “racial paternalism” that structured many labor relations during the colonial period. The article starts in rural Kenya, but then follows labor migrants to their places of employment to examine the formation of this new food system. In upcountry rural societies, women had primarily produced and then exclusively prepared their communities’ food. However, as migrants, men received a ration (posho) of maize meal or rice as part of their pay, used their cash wages to purchase foodstuffs from nearby markets, and some plantation workers were also able to grow their own vegetables on plots allocated by their employers. After acquiring their food through these wage-labor relations, men then had to cook their meals themselves. In addition the cuisine created by labor migration was one of extreme monotony compared to what these migrants ate in their rural communities, but I also show how food became a point of conflict between management and labor. The article demonstrates how workers successfully pressured their employers to improve the quantity and quality of their rations from the 1910s to the 1920s, while also raising their wages that allowed them to purchase better food. I additionally argue that during this period an “urban” or “rural” context did not fundamentally define how migrant workers acquired their food, as those laboring in both city and countryside received these rations. However, the article concludes by examining how after 1930, economic transformations changed Mombasa's food system so that workers became almost entirely reliant on cash and credit as the way they acquired their daily meals, while paternalism continued to infuse the food systems of rural migrant laborers. In sum, this article is a local study of coastal Kenya that is also concerned with global questions about how food provisioning fits into the social reproduction of working classes in industrial and colonial capitalism.

"Master Metaphor": Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency

"Master Metaphor"Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency April Anson (bio) On October 27, 2016, Ammon Bundy and other members of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF) were acquitted of all charges stemming from their armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. While at Malheur, CCF's occupiers declared the rule of law unconstitutional, a state-of-emergency summons supported by right-wing militia groups invoking apocalyptic fears of white genocide.1 In contrast, on the same day of the acquittal verdict and with the visual drama of an apocalyptic dystopian film, a militarized police force arrested 141 water protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota—an area secured by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and by the state of emergency that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council declared in August 2016.2 Though many decried the unequal consequences of each occupation, the disparity was not an isolated occurrence, nor is it limited to rural or reservation boundaries. Rather, its incongruence continues a racialized distinction fundamental to the state of emergency itself. The state of emergency's implicit inequality is entrenched in apocalyptic appeals that rely on its logic, reinforcing the ongoing emergency of settler colonial capitalism even when they aim to disturb it. The uses and abuses of apocalyptic rhetoric are, by now, regularly acknowledged. Narratives of apocalypse too often overwhelm, immobilize, and instill a sense of futility. However, these criticisms frequently fail to consider the diverse and even divergent aspects of the literary mode. Rather than asking whether to apocalypse or not, this essay investigates by what means and to what ends. Placing the emergent subfield of catastrophe studies into conversation with political theory, this [End Page 60] essay parses the apocalyptic for problematic pivots around an emergency event. In a comparison of the 2016–17 Malheur occupation and the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, this essay finds that apocalyptic stories of single disastrous moments shelter the settler state of emergency, protecting the logic of the settler colonial capitalism's continuous creation of and dependence upon the emergency event. This comparison clarifies the master metaphor lurking in the apocalyptic state of emergency—the ways apocalyptic emergency appeals reinforce the exclusionary violence and ecological devastation they so often seek to diagnose and disrupt. Ultimately, I suggest the exigency of an event-versus-structure distinction in apocalyptic environmental storytelling. Following Indigenous and Black feminist futurisms' invocations of apocalypse, which indict the structure of the settler state(s) of emergency, I suggest that stories that both summon and see beyond the structures of settler colonial capitalism's past, present, and future ends of worlds constitute a state of emergence for an antiracist politics of storytelling in the context of climate change.3 Emergency Now In the chaos of changing climates, the racialized extinction imperatives of the state of emergency become even more literally, and literarily, evident. The disparities attending the state of emergency are frequently implied in the literary mode of apocalypse as it habitually links to crisis, catastrophe, and environmental disaster. From the Greek word apokalypsis, meaning "something revealed or uncovered," the apocalyptic mode of storytelling is often associated with a Judeo-Christian tradition that narrates revelation and judgment day, the promise of the end of the world and a new beginning for a particular people. This genealogy of apocalypse tellingly traces the same colonial and capitalist epistemologies associated with the anthropocentric Western literary tradition that Amitav Ghosh recently credited with the lead role in "our" tragic failure in the face of global climate chaos.4 Though Ghosh diagnoses this as a universal epistemological deficit he deems The Great Derangement, the insufficiency is more precisely placed within the story of catastrophe that is, according to René Girard, a formula bound to the martial logics of Western politics.5 In truth, while the apocalypse can refer to an immense variety of storytelling traditions, in the one specific to Western [End Page 61] literature, apocalypse remains exceptionally consistent with the racialized realities of the state of emergency. Fictional appeals to the apocalypse that rely on a state-of-emergency logic are wedded to the exceptionalism of the white settler state. The state of emergency is more often than not...

Tango Dancing with María Lugones

Tango Dancing with María Lugones