Extractivism and Nation Building in the Long Nineteenth Century

Organizer: Cristina Carnemolla

Co-Organizer: Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez

The term extractivism describes an economic model based on the circulation of non-renewable "natural" resources to world market metropolises from territories regarded as peripheral. As a practice and category of analysis, it is often associated with Latin America. In the past two decades, Marxist (Gago, Mezzadra) and decolonial scholars (Gudynas, Escobar), working closely with social movements, have offered powerful frameworks to understand and challenge extractivism in the region. They have underlined the importance of epistemologies and ontologies grounded on a radically different relation to the territory, such as the Andean suma kawsay, to transition out of the hegemonic extractivist model. They also have conceptualized extractivism as a double exploitation of nature and labor that can be reproduced or challenged in language (Hoyos). As processes of dispossession intensify under neoliberalism (Harvey), scholars and activists working in other regions of the world are increasingly developing distinctive critiques of extractivism to account for the social, economic, and ecological consequences of mining, deforestation, monocultures, and other forms of capital accumulation (Ayelazuno, Panico). Most of the critical scholarship on extractivism focuses on the neoliberal era. However, the "extractive view," the colonial gaze that imagines territories as a collection of potential commodities (Barris-Gómez), has a longer history. Despite foundational works like Mary Pratt's Imperial Eyes, nineteenth-century narratives of extractivism remain relatively unexplored. 

This session thus fills this gap by investigating extractivism in the long nineteenth century in a dialogue with two sets of scholarship with which it is rarely paired: critical finance studies and nation-building studies. By turning to a period that is rarely studied in this scholarship, we welcome papers that open new avenues for understanding extractivism in former regions of the Spanish empire during and in the aftermath of a decades-long collapse that started with the Spanish American Revolutions and culminated in 1898. This includes the old metropolises as well as its numerous ex-colonies in Latin America, the Caribbean, (the south of) Italy, and the Philippines. We are interested in papers that explore how the nation-states that emerged from this imperial collapse  re-imagined and created new extractivist practices entangled in globalist designs. Fostering a comparative approach, we seek presentations that explore an expanded understanding of extractivism that considers discursive practices as constitutive of these economic patterns. We envision a dialogue among presenters on extractivism not only in a narrow sense as the export of so-called raw commodities but also as a distinctive gaze that is (re)produced in epistemic, aesthetic, and narratological practices in the post-Borbonic era.