Did the threat of war trigger the extraction-coercion cycle? In this chapter I use a panel of Latin America from 1830 to 1913 to test the effects of looming international threats on domestic taxation and internal conflict. It is believed that due to the availability of foreign loans and taxable imports, states in the region did not have to engage in extraction from the local population, nor did they have to coerce individuals to comply with such policies. I summarize this argument in the form of testable hypotheses and point to factors—naval blockades and sovereign debt defaults—that might have hindered access to such external resources. I then focus on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and how they affected revenues, tariff levels, foreign loans, civil wars, coups, etc. My analyses show MIDs had a negative effect on tariffs and revenue and diminished the likelihood of a new loan—all results that contest the established conventional wisdom. Conversely, MIDs are associated to currency depreciation—a domestic-oriented inflationary tax—and domestic conflict—in particular, civil wars and coups. The chapter shows war did trigger the extraction-coercion cycle.

Was war intense and frequent enough in Latin America to cause state formation? How should we evaluate the capability of these states in the nineteenth century? This chapter presents a background of how war formed the colonial state in Latin America and features some cross-regional comparisons between Europe and Latin America which give context to the rest of the book. After showing how warfare in Europe and in the Americas led to the institutionalization of the colonial state, I focus on entire century between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI to show that Latin America faced comparatively frequent and severe warfare during this period. I then show that the territorial effects of warfare were similar in both regions and that the modes of financing war were also comparable and similarly conducive to state building. Put together, these pieces of evidence demonstrate through simple descriptive comparisons that the idea of a relatively peaceful Latin America populated by weak states, although a valid overall characterization of the region in the twentieth century, collapses when our focus is the nineteenth century.

In several Latin American countries, the state has to consult impacted Indigenous communities before approving new hydrocarbon and mining development, in accordance with regulations that govern these “prior consultation” processes. However, when navigated by extractivist states, these formal norms have blocked the very participation they were intended to encourage and have facilitated state disregard of both Indigenous territorial rights and the environmental destruction caused by large-scale development. These unanticipated outcomes stem from the measures the state must take to determine whether a hydrocarbon or mining project directly impacts an Indigenous community and therefore requires prior consultation. To make this determination, the state must define lands to which Indigenous communities hold rights, and the area impacted by the proposed development. State agencies that are eager to approve new extraction have overlooked – and in some cases actively dismissed – both the impacts of mining and hydrocarbons, and the geographical reach of Indigenous authority, in contexts in which communities claim, but lack title to damaged lands. This chapter demonstrates how prior consultation has encouraged the state to overlook, and even actively deny, Indigenous territorial rights and environmental impacts of extraction through analysis of three important Indigenous mining and hydrocarbon conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru.

The 1860s marked a key moment in the history of extraction and the rise of extraction-based life, a social order premised on the removal of subsurface resources and, especially, on the coal economy. This decade saw the explosion of an economic discourse around coal exhaustion in Britain, thanks to the publication of William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines[GK21] (1865), and the expansion of overseas imperial extraction projects following, for example, the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1869) in South Africa. In this chapter, I explore the role of extraction in the 1860s’ most characteristic genre: sensation fiction. After an overview of the chronotope of exhaustion and how it manifests in fiction, I turn to two sensation novels premised on extractive plots: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [GK22](1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone [GK23](1868). Together they suggest the extent to which British national life was, by the 1860s, already imagined to be fully dependent on extraterritorial mineral inputs.

This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.

Use of unconventional gas (natural gas extracted from unconventional resources such as coal seams or shale rock) has expanded dramatically in Australia over the last few decades following advances in extraction technology. Since 1996, Queensland has rapidly expanded its use of coal seam gas (CSG) for liquid natural gas exports and domestic supply. This expansion means that CSG now represents one of the biggest sources of gas in eastern Australia. In New South Wales, the Narrabri Gas project was given final approval in 2020 and has the potential to provide up to 200 terajoules of gas a day for domestic use for 20 years (half of NSW demand). The Northern Territory and Western Australia also have significant resources. In the Northern Territory, exploratory titles for shale gas expansion over vast tracts of land in the Beetaloo Basin have been granted, and the federal government has issued nearly $50 million in federal grants and partial approvals for commencement of works. Approval for the Beetaloo Basin was subject to recommendations from the 2018 inquiry into shale gas in the Northern Territory.

Chapter 2, Figures of Extraction: Representations of Mining in Ghana and Zambia, examines how postcolonial masculinity is reconfigured according to Africa–China relations. I home in on what I call “figures of extraction” by examining representations of mining – literal mineral alluvium – in two pieces of genre fiction. One main stake is to unpack the sensationalist discourse surrounding Africa–China relations that depicts the dynamic as a Manichean struggle between an African hero and Chinese villain. Another is to show how Chinese investment triggers the colonial trauma of European colonialism, even as the Chinese presence is configured in critically different ways. I demonstrate that when the dynamic is oversimplified, jingoistic nationalisms easily instrumentalize it to incite an “anti-Chinese populism” (Hess and Aidoo). This simplification often ignores the complicit role that corrupt African elites play in facilitating resource exploitation.

In this chapter, we outline some of the current lines of research on choreographic languages and provide pointers for further reading.

This chapter interrogates trends in how the natural world is taken up, governed and constituted by international law, in particular the growing marketisation of environmental governance. This chapter suggests it is fruitful to understand these contemporary forms of governance as constituted by the co-articulation of two older anthropocentric modalities of exercising power over nature: appropriative domination and stewardship. It provides a background to both these modalities, showing that though these are often understood as opposites, on a deeper level they are similar. It suggests that the ‘offset’ relation is the paradigmatic example of the co-articulation of these two modalities, as the ‘offset’ establishes a relationship between activities that damage the environment at one site and activities intended to protect, repair, or improve the environment elsewhere. This chapter situates such mechanisms as one element of a broader project to make nature legible in economic terms. In closing, this chapter considers the effects of the rise of ‘green governmentality’ and maps the terrain against which struggles for different nature/human relations take place.

In the last chapter, we discussed the first method (RFLP) used in DNA typing. This procedure targeted relatively long DNA fragments (VNTRs) containing many repeated units of a base pair sequence. We ended by noting that they were not amenable to automation and therefore not destined for widespread forensic applications. However, by the early 1990s, many factors coalesced to set the stage for a leap in DNA typing capabilities. For example, the forensic and legal community had adjusted to DNA evidence, and analysts had moved from serological techniques such as ABO to genetic typing utilizing multiple DNA markers. Additionally, researchers in molecular biology, including in genomic sequencing, had identified many shorter repeat sequences that exhibited variation among individuals in a population.

Within a context of cultural- and land-based Indigenous resurgence, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, theorists, and activists have made the settler-state and extraction economy of Canada a flashpoint of the global climate emergency. Indigenous peoples often exist on the front lines of climate change, finding their lives and livelihoods threatened by the effects of rising temperatures even as they have been excluded from many of the benefits afforded by carbon-intensive economies. This chapter examines how Indigenous writers place climate change within a long, ongoing history of colonial resource appropriations, ecological loss, and violent suppression of Indigenous bodies and cultures in Canada. The chapter also addresses the diverse ways they respond to its challenges, including: crafting texts and practices of political dissent, solidarity-building, and land reoccupation; grounding present experiences in enduring stories of Indigenous response to environmental and political change; and refashioning genres such as science fiction, horror, or post-apocalyptic imaginaries to explore Indigenous futurisms in a climate-altered world. Above all, Indigenous writers make clear that climate change cannot be extricated from decolonisation and matters of sovereignty. The restoration of Indigenous lands and land-based ways of knowing is the starting point for the pursuit of climate justice.

In this chapter, I reconceptualize the twin concepts of “comparison” and “case,” by rethinking what political scientists often call a “single-case study.” I propose that much of the disciplinary ambivalence about so-called single-case studies is a product of a misconception regarding their nature, and that this methodological label is a misnomer for such studies. Drawing on my own research, I propose the term “site” rather than “case.” A site is a conjunctural intersection of various and heterogeneous processes, relations, and scales of political activity, some relatively enduring and some relatively ephemeral. The constitutive multiplicity of a site and the detailed empirical engagement it enables offer both inspiration and leverage for analytical claims. Conceptualizing the objects of our research as sites mitigates against the social scientific tendency to regard ongoing social processes in reified, monolithic, and static terms. In-depth empirical engagement with research sites draws our analytic attention to the social processes that provisionally result in spatial boundedness, enduring institutionalization, and individual and group identity formation – or, on the contrary, the events and processes that disrupt, modify, innovate, and transform them.

This chapter investigates the multiple ways that coal and oil generate story, revealing humanity’s abiding intimacy with unearthed matter throughout history. Spotlighting the influential term “petrofiction” coined by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (from Latin petra, meaning “rock”), it introduces authors, critics, and activists whose works interrogate fossil fuels’ lively and lethal geological agency. Recent tales of coal and oil often portray conjunctions between embodiment and environment that are unhealthy, chronic, and entrenched; furthermore, these detriments are predominantly borne by the poor, Indigenous peoples, and communities of color. Both Ida Stewart’s poem naming the many degradations caused by mountaintop removal mining (Gloss)and Ann Pancake’s novel narrating the failed containment of coal slurry impoundment dams (Strange as This Weather Has Been) confront the toxic enmeshment of human beings in the Appalachian coalfields. Petrocritical approaches magnify harms of coal and oil and point out their pivotal role in ongoing climate crises. Petrocriticism also suggests that paying attention to human and nonhuman voices inflected by coal and oil supplies the energy needed for ecological remediation, and for more just, and more inhabitable, futures.

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century black radical David Walker’s preoccupation with resource extraction and the history of New World slavery in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker’s account of the history of colonization and enslavement as a matrix of dehumanization, violence, resource extraction, and capital accumulation highlights the importance of understanding the long history of extraction as more than just an effect and driver of capitalist appropriation, expropriation, and accumulation, and brings into focus the global and racialized dimensions of that history, which disrupt the standard teleology of capitalism’s appropriation of resources.

Chapter 2 examines questions of governance in colonial contexts. It considers how conceptions about governance of corporations bear similarities to approaches to colonial governance by colonial powers. The thin European staffing that is typical during colonialism, emphasis on reducing costs and covering colonial costs with local taxes, and focus on extraction draw attention to ways in which colonial corporate governance reflected decision-making and investment choices more appropriate for short-term corporate decision-making than long term decisions about entire societies that might impact millions of people. The internal construction of colonial governance and the often- problematic bifurcation between English law and customary law in British colonial contexts is also explored.

This chapter offers some empirical support to a main claim in the book, namely that the capacity of the English state was higher than that of France, by examining the typical indicator of capacity, taxation. It focuses particularly on the fiscal burden of the nobility, to show that it was relatively heavy, especially if debt is also considered. Once compelled to contribute to taxation, the English nobility had greater incentives to participate in the institution where it was negotiated, as well as to accept its extension over the broader population. By contrast, the fate of the French Estates-General moved in tandem with the taxation of the nobility; when noble fiscal privileges were consolidated, the institution declined. The chapter also provides comparative data of both fiscal and military extraction, to support the claim of greater infrastructural capacity of the English crown.