Laleh Khalili’s Extractive Capitalism examines how the extractive industries like oil and mining have enriched corporations and governments while fuelling inequality, exploiting workers and causing environmental damage. This is a short yet potent critique of ruthless resource extraction and its far-reaching consequences, writes Stewart Lansley.
There are at least two distinct interpretations of the term “extractive capitalism”. The first of these refers to the commercial mining, transportation and marketing of primary commodities from oil to iron ore across the globe. The second refers to an economic and business model, long applied by big corporations and financiers both domestically and globally, that is heavily geared to personal enrichment. This is achieved by corporate and financial mechanisms aimed at extracting an excessive share of the gains from economic activity. Laleh Khalili’s book is about the former, but it also reveals a significant overlap between the two.
Pumping oil, mining resources and shipping commodities, all immensely profitable industries across history, have long been a key driver of the global economy [but are] are riddled with ‘lucrative speculation, still low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control.’
Mining corporations and conglomerates have, over centuries, been a key source of appropriation as well as of high levels of inequality – both within countries and across the globe. As the author describes in the case of oil and sand, “[t]heir commodification and trade hold mirrors to global inequalities and ecological plunder… Extractive capitalism is about how the commodification of prosaic everyday things affects lives here, now and half a world away”.
Pumping oil, mining resources and shipping commodities, all immensely profitable industries across history, have long been a key driver of the global economy. Khalili is Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter, and a leading expert on the oil industry and Middle Eastern politics. Her work reveals how these industries – in some ways the backbone of globalisation – are riddled with “lucrative speculation, still low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control.” They have also been a key source of the vast and growing pool of mobile financial resources controlled by corporations, asset management companies and sovereign wealth funds, that has been the product of extractive capitalism, in both senses of the term.
The history of mining is a story of strong-arm tactics […] by western governments and giant corporations mostly against countries of the Global South.
The book lays out in stark (albeit brief) form, the mostly negative fall-out from crony corporate business practices in these raw material industries, past and present. The examples used cover conquest and colonisation, the destruction of livelihoods along with pumped up profit margins, and the role of state coercion. The history of the extraction of and trade in both oil and sand is “rife with manipulations, extortions, and abuse”. Mining for sand has stripped the rivers of Myanmar and Cambodia of their riverbeds and sandbanks, destroying ecosystems in the process. The book also cites cases of protest movements against these industries. These include the 2016-17 mass campaign of opposition mostly by indigenous women, and eventually unsuccessful, against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline which crossed the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Another was the controversial natural Gaslink pipeline from the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific Coast, designed to ship natural gas to international markets. Despite multiple blockades that hindered construction, the pipeline was eventually completed in 2024.
The history of mining is a story of strong-arm tactics – through trade boycotts and violent intervention to open and hidden cartels, offshore tax havens, and corrupt financial dealing – by western governments and giant corporations mostly against countries of the Global South. Leading characters include some of the world’s richest tycoons. There’s the 19th century oil baron and the world’s first billionaire, John D Rockefeller, dubbed one of America’s “robber barons” for his exploitative tactics. His Standard Oil empire was eventually broken up by the anti-trust legislation introduced by President Theodore Roosevelt: “We had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy” wrote Roosevelt in 1913, “and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.” The surviving companies from the break-up of Standard Oil remerged as the new giants, from ExxonMobil to Chevron, which continued to dominate petroleum supply over the next century.
A potent summary of centuries of extraction of the world’s natural resources and raw materials, and of mass corporate and individual wealth accumulation generated by ruthless business tactics.
And then there’s Aristotle Onassis, the unscrupulous Greek tycoon who cornered the market in oil tankers, enabling his ‘astonishing rise through the prosperous ranks of global tycoons’. And much later, the Russian oligarchs who were handed Russia’s natural riches through the cut-price sell-off of giant state industrial, energy and banking assets in the chaos and corruption of the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. None of them – from Roman Abramovich to Alisher Usmanov – had built or managed the companies they effectively seized.
This is a concise account. While short books are to be welcomed, this means a limited coverage of a complex history of predatory corporate and state behaviour. The book draws on earlier essays published elsewhere including The London Review of Books and Jacobin. It takes several detours not fully relevant to the book’s overall theme. These include a brief discussion of “woke capital” and of China’s “Belt and Road” infrastructural programmes in Africa and Asia. There is also a short account of the colonial interest in the strategic Chagos Islands, thrust into the spotlight by the UK’s decision to hand the archipelago back to Mauritius.
Despite its brevity, this is a potent summary of centuries of extraction of the world’s natural resources and raw materials, and of mass corporate and individual wealth accumulation generated by ruthless business tactics. Some parts of this mass industry have been under pressure from the drive for renewable energy. But with some political leaders and high-profile companies, including behemoths like BP and Shell, rowing back on their commitment to renewables, we are a long way from the end of this story.
- This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.
- Featured image: Image Milos Bicanski / Climate Visuals. License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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- Note: This article gives the views of the reviewer, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
