CHAPTER TWO
Although the figure of the climate migrant as a potential security problem increasingly appears across continents—in public depictions of weather disasters from the Horn of Africa to Central America, from island nations in the Indian Ocean to the U.S. Gulf Coast—some of the key migration pathways established for the era of the so-called great acceleration in fossil fuel emissions emerged after the 1973 Gulf oil crisis transformed international relations and finance. This chapter tells the story of oil’s restructuring of geopolitics with an eye to the ways that the resulting shifts in labor migration routes across Asia played a role in developing racialized structures of labor in advance of intensified and rapid climate changes. In the process, the chapter argues for a materialist understanding of the links between environmental and economic bases of migration, and offers a method for tracing the interrelation of oil, capitalism, state policies, and human migration as an alternative to the often deterministic or even apocalyptic visions of environmental change in climate migration discourse. As such, in order to understand the relation of climate change and migration, I ask the reader to follow key developments in international relations and political economy, which are fundamental to understanding the racial character of oil’s role in twenty-first-century migration patterns. Based on this chapter’s analysis of racial capitalism and the migration flows it produces, subsequent chapters will return to a critique of racialized discourses about climate migration in Bangladesh and climate war in Syria.
The Gulf oil shock is one of the critical historical events that will help us center the history of oil in the development of contemporary racial capitalism’s violent economic and environmental effects. This event involved a sudden spike in the price of oil on the international market and is one of the better-known episodes in the world history of the energy economy. When oil-producing countries placed a brief embargo on oil exports in 1973 in protest of northern support for Israel in the October War, the resulting petroleum shortages in the United States and the price spike on the world market transformed the structure of international finance and reoriented political relationships among oil-producing states, oil-dependent southern nations, and oil-consuming economic powers such as Japan and the United States. However, it is not generally mentioned by scholars of economic history or political economy that this oil shock—conventionally framed as an economic shift, a geopolitical crisis, and, more recently, a sign of destructive carbon consumption—had a specifically racial character, and that its influence on development strategies and transnational labor relationships was significant to the development of contemporary crises over migration. Building on theories of racial capitalism that track how race is structurally reproduced in the rescaling and expansion of different forms of capitalist networking, I argue in this chapter that race plays important roles in the history of Gulf oil, not only through direct racism in the labor structure of the oil fields but also in the manner in which oil-based finance and development has generated new forms of migration in Asian nations that have become central to international systems of capitalist production and trade. Such migration commonly works along two pathways: (1) from agriculture-dependent rural or coastal areas to cities, and (2) from poorer countries in South and Southeast Asia to wealthier ones in West Asia. The development of the South Asia–Persian Gulf migration corridor, discussed further in chapter 3, is one of the main historical outgrowths of this transformation—a development that has expanded a racially stratified and gender-segmented labor market in the Gulf states, following the logics of earlier colonial mass labor accumulation strategies, such as the British and Dutch “coolie” trades. In the process, the geographic bases for the development of Asian diasporas in the Gulf states and for some of the Asian populations moving northward in the so-called European migrant crisis were generated through oil’s restructuring of inter-Asian capitalism. Weather disasters today often move migrants along the pathways established by oil in such migration corridors, even as changing geographies of oil extraction and new forms of climate adaptation and green capitalism create the potential for shifting or multiplying these routes.
In sum, this chapter argues that by employing frameworks from critical migration studies and racial capitalism research to revisit the history of Gulf oil development, it is possible to understand the story of the rise of neoliberalism as planetary capitalist logic and its evolving configuration of racialized migration politics. In the process, my analysis focuses on how the oil shock put the world economy on a path toward the three interrelated crises of deepening international debt, growing transborder migration, and intensifying anthropogenic climate change by the early twenty-first century. These transformations were felt most deeply among agrarian populations in debt-dependent poor countries, who were pushed into neoliberal development strategies that today contribute to significant displacement conceived as “climate migration.”
By tracking the relation of race, oil, and environmental change, we can also come to understand some key transformations among the geopolitical formations connecting West and South Asia to northern states that have historically dominated international political and financial systems. We can begin to see how the neoliberal phase of racial capitalism—as a system reliant on the simultaneous externalization of carbon emissions and internalization of oil as an asset valued on its financial as well as physical capacities—has enabled a seemingly contradictory transformation of U.S. power in the world system. While U.S. wealth and power has been decentered internationally by U.S. dependencies on Gulf oil and Asian manufacturing—each of which produce massive new migrations within and across borders—the linkage of oil to the dollar in international trade has enabled the proliferation of debt-financed military expansion and international arms trade, which continue to reproduce U.S. military hegemony and state securitization, thus advancing the so-called war on terror alongside new initiatives in environmental security. As such, this chapter builds on existing scholarship that attempts to capture how “US wars in Asia, US racial capitalism, and US empire” have been deeply entangled in the making of contemporary geopolitics despite the fact that they remain “underrecognized parts of the genealogy of the contemporary condition.”1 Further, the chapter offers an alternative to mainstream journalism, policy, and security discourse on the figure of the climate refugee, arguing that the imperial relations of oil generate forms of racial displacement and vulnerability to violence, reflecting the productive role of surplus Asian labor in the maintenance of capitalism’s systemic inequalities.
This chapter thus contributes to scholarship on race and migration by offering an account of the racial character of the energy system that has fueled neoliberalism, in the process connecting inter-Asian economic and labor shifts to longer histories of race and to the fates of marginalized peoples across the South. As research on racial capitalism originated in Black studies scholarship that worked to interpret the history of capitalism by attending to the Atlantic plantation complex, this chapter works to bridge earlier studies focusing on capital’s accumulation of Black labor, with attention to the geographic shifts that make Asian countries central to labor, trade, and financial systems in the current moment. This requires a comparative framework that brings together the perspectives of Black studies, Asian studies, and Asian diaspora studies in order to understand both how the foundational anti-Black racism of capitalist expansion provides models for more recent systems of migrant labor exploitation and how today’s inter-Asian geographies of capitalism proliferate forms of racialized displacement and disposability for many Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples affected by climate change and international debt. This second aspect of racial capitalism is especially important, because even as large numbers of displaced agrarian people are recruited into neoliberal labor flows, many minorities and vulnerable workers have been relegated “superfluous,” reflecting the attempts by wealthy countries to dislodge Black and other marginalized workers from the “labor-‘light’ economy of twenty-first century racial capitalism.”2
Theorizing Racial Capitalism
Before we can understand how debt, oil, and inter-Asian migration are integrated into the racial logics of capitalism in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to understand how the intersection of race and capitalism has thus far been understood in the long time span of colonialism’s development of transcontinental power dynamics. Studies of this relationship are not new, as they have long preoccupied scholars in a number of fields. Black studies research on the relationship of race and capitalism has a long lineage in the twentieth century, dating from early studies on the relationship of capitalism to slavery, war, and segregation to more recent works on prisons, policing, and urban capitalism.3 A growing body of scholarship on the relationships of race, capitalism, and colonialism in critical race and ethnic studies and in North American Indigenous studies has developed new and important accounts of how expropriation of land and the spread of enslaved labor have been central to capitalism’s systematic reproduction and geographic expansion.4 Finally, discussions of the place of colonized nations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas within the history of the rise and development of capitalism—led by dependency theorists who describe neocolonial economic formations—have produced important debates about how colonial divisions in the international system affect sociological theories about capital.5 Even if these latter studies focusing on the Global South do not explicitly invoke race as a key term for study, they deal with how categories of analysis of class and capitalism are implicitly racialized and conditioned by an international division of labor that works to exploit formerly colonized nations through the structures of trade, extraction, and development.
These three literatures engage with some of the more technical debates over how capitalism operates as a system and how marginalized groups of workers are situated within that system. Attempting to move beyond polemical positions that stress the structural significance of class over race or that position racism as a prior condition of feudal production that capitalism progressively supersedes, they add complexity to Marxist accounts of the theory of capitalist value by attending to how original accumulation in the forms of appropriation of Indigenous land, systematization of enslaved labor, and imperial conquest of resources was massively expanded in the Atlantic world with the rise of the industrial economy. Capitalism thus fueled racialization, which was central to its operating logics. Slavery and colonization were not simply premodern or feudal arrangements but were systematically expanded as colonial states developed extractive enterprise linking intensified control of land to intensified control of labor. Although the breadth of the literature on race and capitalism allows for different emphases and lines of argument, as well as for accounts that integrate attention to the significance of gender and sex in the reproduction of colonial capitalism,6 one key takeaway is a growing emphasis on how racial differentiation is structurally significant to capitalism rather than an abstraction that might be transcended through establishment of more equal economic relations.
I thus use the term “racial capitalism” advisedly to refer to how the development of transnational capitalist networks of production, labor, trade, consumption, energy, and finance structurally relies on the racialization of human national, religious, linguistic, and ethnic differentiation as a condition of systemic expansion or consolidation. In his foundational study of racial capitalism and challenges to it emerging from the Black radical tradition, Cedric Robinson argues that the rise of the capitalist system—first within medieval Europe and later across the Atlantic during colonial expansion of the plantation economy beginning in the sixteenth century—required the consolidation of social identities as groups of merchants and traders attempted to reproduce profits by establishing competitive distance trades in raw materials, agricultural products, manufactured goods, and enslaved peoples. There was an ethnic character to such processes in which trade helped to consolidate geographic identities, for as trade grew and helped to fuel processes of labor migration, industrialization, and urbanization in Europe, at least two forms of human differentiation became embedded in the systemic expansion of capital: (1) the accumulation of labor was regularly a matter of conquering or recruiting subaltern populations whose geographic origins, language, religious practice, or ethnic difference from those who organized industry and trade made them more easily exploitable, and (2) the scaling up of industry and trade helped to generalize the character of human differentiation from localized ethnic groupings to abstracted differences attributable to national and, by the eighteenth century, continental racial groups.7 Such abstractions of group kinship through race were embedded in the overseas corporate ventures of the colonization of the Americas, which linked the seizure of bonded African labor, the development of European trading networks, and the violent appropriation of Indigenous land.8 For Robinson, the fundamentals of racial differentiation thus preexisted the rise of capitalism and the development of post-Enlightenment scientific racism. As merchants developed connections between agricultural zones, urbanizing production centers, and seats of monarchal or state authority in the early modern period, Robinson argues, they developed more cohesive commercial identities that scaled up from city to nation-state and, eventually, continent-wide racial designations.9
Key to Robinson’s argument is the reversal of the assumption that class is the structural basis of social identities across space, while race is an abstracted, epiphenomenal category that arises as a result of class relations; in such a model emphasizing the division of the economic base from cultural superstructure, class forms the universal categories of human social differentiation, while race refers to particular contexts in which laboring classes are pitted against one another in the relations of production. Such a model suggests that the categories of race tend to mask the totalizing economic prerogatives of the globalizing division of labor. In contrast to such an approach to race, the theory of racial capitalism argues that racial differences are reproduced precisely because they are the means for structural expansion and consolidation, including through the connections generated among the control of labor, the colonization of land, militarism, and the centralization of power in the racial state.10 For Robinson, “the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”11
Valuing “Black Gold”: Extracting Gulf Oil’s Racial Logics
If race was significant to the organization of labor and the accumulation of resources in the development of capitalism, it remained explicit in the labor structures of Gulf oil throughout its history. Consider one of the most notable examples: the racial stratifications in U.S. and British oil firms that controlled Gulf oil in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. James Terry Duce, at the time an executive of the U.S.-owned Aramco oil company, described to the U.S. State Department the firm’s 1949 deportation of Pakistani workers from its Saudi oil fields as necessary, since the workers followed “the Communist line, particularly as regards evils of capitalism and racial discrimination.”12 In America’s Kingdom, Robert Vitalis examines the history of Aramco’s development of a system of racially segregated work camps, separating white U.S. Americans, Italians, South Asians, and Arabs in the Saudi oil fields. Echoing a preexisting segregationist U.S. rhetoric that linked aspirations for civil rights and Black liberation to hidden communist agendas,13 Duce exhibits how control of race was central to the control of oil in the early phases of U.S.-run development of the world’s largest oil reserves in Saudi Arabia.
In retrospect, Duce’s statement also anticipates a more recent development: the use of deportation schemes in the 2010s by the Gulf states, most notably Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to build domestic labor force participation. As part of Saudi Arabia’s Nitaqat or “Saudization” labor policy, hundreds of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, and other Asian workers have been deported in order to make room for companies to meet rising quotas of Saudi workers.14 This followed public reporting and convictions related to a series of labor actions carried out by Indian migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates’ construction sector.15 A reversal of policies that for decades had used non-Arab migrant populations as a buffer against nationalist and Islamist challenges to authoritarian monarchal states in the Gulf, Saudization targets noncitizen South Asian migrant workers—now seen as potentially rebellious and anti-national—for geographic exclusion. In so doing, the new policy encourages the growing trend of such workers to transit beyond the Gulf to North Africa and Europe. Such policies of national immigrant exclusion are central to historical developments in racial capitalism, which initially exploited and segregated Black workers; according to Mae Ngai, the restriction of immigrants by national origin was a later strategy of white supremacist statecraft apparent in early U.S. immigration law.16 For Iyko Day, such exclusionary measures build on a larger history of racialized labor management—attempts to control laboring bodies following the economic demand for the presence of those bodies—whether accomplished as domestic segregation and secondary citizenship or international segregation and border control.17
The comparison of Aramco and the Saudi state’s attempts to expel South Asian workers, however, can only be stretched so far. In the six decades of intervening history, the size of the expatriate workforce in the Gulf—dominated by migrants from a handful of Asian countries whose state policies emphasize remittance economies and human capital export (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines)—has grown dramatically, reflecting that racially stratified labor generated by oil involves not only the physical extraction of fossil fuel in the oil fields but the manner in which oil profits finance massive development projects, fueling demand for millions of skilled and unskilled contract laborers in such fields as construction, health care, computing, and domestic labor. Although mass immigration is sometimes depicted as part of the “resource curse” that produces various governance problems for major oil-producing countries, the accumulation of migrant labor in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and other oil producers in and around the Persian Gulf has long been an explicit strategy that appeared to serve state interests: South Asian workers, especially Muslim ones, were viewed as docile, alienable from family structures, disconnected from nationalist or Islamist political movements in the region, and controllable by work contract. The combination of spatial alienation and lack of citizenship makes immigrant laborers in the Gulf subject to specific forms of control that exacerbate exploitation. Under the kafala system governing contract migration in the Gulf states, foreign workers are required to obtain a contract from a sponsor, who often holds the passport of the worker and commonly exerts control over the worker’s movements and schedules. Physical abuse, sexual assault, and backbreaking labor have been widely reported, echoing abuses in earlier systems of colonial contract labor, such as the British and Dutch indenture systems that took place following the end of the Atlantic slave trade.18
The ways in which the compromised citizenship status of migrant laborers in the Gulf is exploited is only part of the story of the integration of the Gulf oil economy into the racial circuits of labor and capital on a planetary scale. The basis for the colonial accumulation of oil wealth in the region began with the geological transformation of desert into a site of colonial power politics. Such control was not exerted in a manner that simply reflected a desire by colonial states to accumulate oil, suggested in accounts by both historians and activists on the left in attributing the economic motive of expanding access to cheap oil under U.S. and British adventurism in Iran, Iraq, and surrounding countries.19 As Timothy Mitchell argues in Carbon Democracy, control of oil’s profit potential involved the overriding desire by oil firms (initially U.S., British, and Dutch firms and subsequently state-owned oil companies in Iran and the Gulf) to carve up geographic concessions in order to create vertical monopoly control of underground reserves, thereby limiting oil extraction and artificially inflating its price.20 Thus, in the transformation of desert from a colonial frontier configured as wasteland into a settled extractive enterprise, oil prospecting exhibited a financial logic based on a particular management of the temporality of extraction relative to supply: long-term profit was best realized when large underground oil reserves could be extracted, refined, and distributed at a slow pace that avoided descent into competitive oversupply. The colonial oil oligopoly thus exhibited competition for the control of geographic concession areas while generally militating against open competition to flood international markets. The overriding desire was control of land in a system that would require minimal investment by ensuring limited production.
Such an organization of oil lands involved a kind of franchise colonial model that structured valorization of oil in terms of intricate geographic divisions linked to the emerging structures of colonial states. This carries some important consequences for how we might conceptualize the relationships between oil, colonial geography, and race. Traditionally, settler colonial enterprises that emerged when the British sought to export surplus populations from the British Isles to the white settler colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) were justified based on a liberal vision that dismissed Indigenous land use as savage and underproductive, whereas settler plantations were understood to more efficiently produce greater commodity surplus, rapidly raising the standard of living at a national scale. Critically reflecting on such colonial notions of progress among liberal political thinkers, geographers Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy characterize “waste” as the political other of capitalist “value.” Noting that John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith—each of whom articulated colonial notions of political economy and liberal government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—placed significant emphasis on the idea that colonial enterprise was morally justified in appropriating “waste” lands to make rational human use of resources, Gidwani and Reddy characterize the significance of waste as simultaneously “the unenclosed common, the external frontier, and the ethical horizon of civil society” where “the transformation of ‘waste’—idle land and nature’s bounty—into something useful” comes to define “political modernity.”21 In a key passage of his 1776 book on national wealth, Adam Smith describes settler progress as such: “The colony of a civilised nation which takes possession either of a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society.”22
If liberal political economy in the contexts of British North American settler colonialism and the franchise operations of the British Raj configured the question of waste around issues of agrarian production—the extent to which land was considered efficiently used to sustain commodity agriculture23—the history of colonial oil exploration by British, Dutch, and U.S. corporate interests in the Gulf involved a somewhat different lineage of speculation and corporate rivalry. In the desert, the focus was on mining concessions for oil exports rather than on using the labor of a colonized population to enhance wasted lands. Beginning with Anglo-Persian Oil’s discovery of oil in northwestern Persia in 1908, northern oil interests set up a system of concessions for exploration in different areas of the Gulf region that involved negotiation with local leaders. Within this context, the House of Saud began bringing in foreign technical advisors for oil exploration after World War I, when Ibn Saud was one of several local autocrats vying for control of Arabia. Although at the time geologists thought there were little prospects for discovering oil in the region, the major oil companies fought over exploration concessions, and American engineers working in Arabia and Bahrain eventually located oil in the 1930s. In 1938, oil was first struck at the Damman oil fields, which would become the world’s largest proven reserves.
Unlike the agricultural basis of North American settler colonialism—which involved a tandem process of land expropriation and labor appropriation that, for Iyko Day following Patrick Wolfe, united native elimination (the separation of Indigenous peoples from their land through genocide, removal, and assimilation policies) with labor exclusion (the juridical and racial separation of alienated laboring classes imported for the development of colonized land)24—the colonial oil franchise depended on a much smaller colonial footprint in order to develop large profits on the international markets. Unlike farmed commodities, there was not a large requirement of labor to apply to the land in order to make it productive. Instead of mixing human and animal labor with land and solar energies as in seasonal agricultural production, oil extraction harnessed deep geological processes that created a flow of energy that could fuel industrial development on a wide scale based on relatively small infrastructures of extraction. Oil enabled a kind of time travel in which the fossilized bodies of long-dead nonhuman species are processed by the earth over the deep time of geological change, then extracted by humans and combusted in the present to speed communication and infrastructural mobilities. Although one might reasonably argue that neoliberal mobility isn’t strictly dependent on oil given the role of coal and other energy sources, it is notable that oil is extracted, drilled, stored, stolen, and moved in a patchwork of infrastructures, enabling long-distance ground and oceanic shipping on a planetary scale even as it is embedded in complex forms of statecraft, decentralized militarisms, piracies, and underground forms of speculation and profit.25 This more-than-human time travel across uneven geographies of profit and environmental destruction enabled by oil allowed both the oil firm itself and the extractive drilling enterprise to mobilize flexibly, even though oil production did require the importation of small reserves of skilled labor to manage drilling, refining, and exporting infrastructures.
What type of colonial racial form did this produce given that low labor input enabled large energy output and thus large profitability? Answering this question involves tracing the relationship of oil to processes of state formation in the region and beyond, with particular attention to how oil was embedded in the transformations of the international order in the interwar period. To begin, the technologies that govern the underground extraction of oil as well as its distribution (through pipelines, large ocean tankers, and so on) involve smaller laboring populations and are relatively closed off to worker control. Mitchell notes that although this makes workers’ efforts to exercise power over production more limited than in the case of coal (miners could easily disrupt extraction at the origin), there remain choke points in shipping and pipelines that can be used as sites of collective attempts to wrench control from the oil firm.26 Regardless of the fact that a certain potential for labor unrest remained, the low relative concentration of labor in the oil sector conformed well with the fact that British and other colonial powers no longer sought to use white settler population expansion as a safety valve for the disposal of convicts and other domestic populations configured as surplus.27 Nonetheless, there was organized opposition to control of oil by outside powers in the decades leading up to the discovery of large oil fields in Arabia in the 1930s. According to Mitchell, oil firms operating in the Gulf had to contract for concessions in ways that tied their fortunes to the development of autocratic state structures in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and elsewhere in the region. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the effort to link different regions formerly under Ottoman control by the House of Saud involved alliance with social movements in the region, particularly the conservative muwahhidun, whose revivalism involved imposing forms of religious monotheism, abjuring idol worship, and criticizing nomadic social practices of desert tribes. As Ibn Saud allied with this movement, he also entered into contracts with first British and then U.S. oil authorities, whose influence was opposed by the muwahhidun. Nonetheless, after crushing the muwahhidun uprising in 1927, Ibn Saud was able to strike a deal with them to maintain their support as long as his profits from agreements with Standard Oil could be partly invested in religious education at home and abroad.28 According to this history, the resulting alliance between U.S. and British colonial oil firms, the emergent Saudi state, and evangelist religious movements in Arabia thus reflected a client patronage system that emerged around oil in the region, tying carbon production to both emergent ethnoreligious identity and the generation of dependent states that purported to represent localized forms of governance and morality.
Once oil operations were embedded under these agreements, oil companies began importing transnational labor forces. Although the initial concessions generally included clauses giving preference to Arab workers, by the 1920s, following the end of the Indian indenture system, British companies especially began to recruit Indian workers to Iraq and Kuwait; by the end of the 1940s, approximately 7,768 workers categorized as “Indian” were employed across Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Qatar.29 Tightly controlling unionization and labor protest, Aramco established a racially stratified labor force in the oil camps, with white, Indian, and Arab workers paid on a declining scale for similar work. Such was still the widespread practice in British and U.S. firms even after the purported shifts in public views of racism and eugenics after World War II. Strikes within the Aramco camps both challenged racially unequal wages and argued for broader democratic reforms to the state, but were later crushed with assistance from the Saudi government. In this sense, the form of the state, the labor system, and maintenance of colonial concessions generated a racialized notion of the relation of sovereignty to oil, with oil profits becoming at least partially subject to the process of articulating Islamic identity with the identity of the state, and those same profits in turn contributing to state control of both political resistance and worker solidarity. As such, Mitchell’s argument in Carbon Democracy that “racism” could not dictate the organization of colonial oil monopolies because it had become “an embarrassing system of social and political organization” fails to capture the manner in which the reorganization of the former Ottoman-controlled lands of Arabia in the era of oil discoveries involved the reorganization of ethnic identities and the beginnings of a new racially stratified labor system in the Gulf as part and parcel of oil-funded statecraft.30
The Petrodollar as Imperial Currency
From this vantage on West Asia’s role in the beginnings of a new racial capitalist circuit of oil production, it is possible to articulate further how oil fueled neocolonial transformations in labor and finance beyond the region itself. Such developments became central to the restructuring of capitalism on a planetary scale in the postwar era. West Asian oil production, South Asian migrant labor, and East Asian manufacturing played conjoined roles in transforming the logics of U.S. power. Before expanding to that story, a caveat about the role of Asia in twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism is in order. I endeavor to not invoke orientalist depictions of Asia or Asian economies in a generic form that replicates colonial mappings of the continent as a frontier of capitalist markets, a space of failed or authoritarian states, or a region of geopolitical domination for the United States, Europe, and Russia. Nor do I wish to replicate some accounts of the rise of China in the global economy that have begun to romanticize its displacement of the United States as a world power.31 It is necessary to recall that “Asia” remains an overburdened signifier, subject to the breadth of colonial mapping and the agendas of area studies research that reproduces it as an arena of difference and intervention. For the purposes of this book, it is necessary to consider how particular Asian states played a pivotal role in the restructuring of the international system after the collapse of the British empire and the rise of U.S. power in the international system following World War II, enabling certain inter-Asian economic connections that are crucial for understanding the transition of colonial capitalism into a highly financialized, dollar-based form dependent on transoceanic shipping of commodities fueled by oil. Thus, specific Asian countries—as oil-producing states, suppliers of labor, client states buttressing U.S. militarism, and developers of carbon-fueled manufacturing and trade logistics—have played key roles in the intertwined neoliberal economic crises and carbon-driven ecological crises of the past half century.
The story of how oil transformed inter-Asian migration pathways, creating the networks and corridors traversed by many of today’s so-called climate migrants, begins with the sudden and decisive transfer of petrodollar wealth from the United States, Japan, and Europe to the Gulf states in the early 1970s. On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon ended the post–World War II Bretton Woods regime of monetary policy when he announced that U.S. dollars would no longer be exchangeable for gold. Nixon claimed this move would “protect the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary stability around the world” against foreign speculators. In reality, Nixon’s action followed several years of movements among European governments, which had begun a run on U.S. government debt due in large part to massive overexpenditures on the Vietnam War. By 1971, states led by Germany and Switzerland began to pull out of the Bretton Woods framework, floating their currencies and revealing the relative weakness of the dollar. In response, Nixon framed his own withdrawal from the gold standard as a priority to maintain national economic strength and global financial stability:
Who gains from these crises? Not the workingman, not the investor, not the real producers of wealth. The gainers are the international money speculators. Because they thrive on crises, they help to create them. In recent weeks, the speculators have been waging an all-out war on the American dollar.… Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation.… If you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans, who buy American made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today. The effect of this action in other words will be to stabilize the dollar.32
Contradicting Nixon’s speculation, a prolonged economic crisis followed, as the currencies of several wealthy countries plunged, inflation rose, and the financial system witnessed prolonged instability in currency and commodity markets. Because dollars were the trading currency for international oil transactions, the depreciation of the dollar sunk revenues for oil producers. In response to Nixon’s action, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) established a policy to fix oil prices to gold. But the real transformation in oil wealth came two years later, when Arab oil producers of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced an oil embargo against the United States and its allies for their support of Israel in the 1973 October War. Over five months, OAPEC exerted export controls and production cuts that quadrupled the price of oil on the world market. The resulting sudden influx of oil dollars to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Libya, and other oil-producing states radically transformed many of the region’s economies. Investment by Gulf states increased tenfold over the course of the decade. In Saudi Arabia, growth leapt to an unprecedented average annual rate of 27.8 percent.33
As oil-rich countries experienced unprecedented oil profits and rapid growth in the 1970s, massive state investment in infrastructure created a division among the non-aligned/third world countries. The spike in oil prices and resulting global inflation devastated most formerly colonized states, as their economies—many of which lacked diversification and relied heavily on natural resource extraction—were dependent on oil-fueled foreign imports of basic goods. As the oil boom miraculously sustained U.S. financial and military supremacy in the international system, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and imperial donor states stepped in to “rescue” cash-strapped third world countries with predatory loans that required these countries to abandon welfarist and socialist state projects and accept trade liberalization. As the United States and Europe enforced payment on these debts (in essence using sovereign coercion to force the world’s poor to bail out the bad loans of northern banks), many of the poorest countries attempted to diversify from their monoculture dependencies on extractive resource exploitation by growing neocolonial industries such as tourism or by granting concessions of national sovereignty to transnational capital, often through the establishment of tax-exempt export-processing zones and new land arrangements allowing private corporate ownership of extractive enterprise. The subsequent development of the anti-globalization movement—announced with major protests at World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund meetings in the early 2000s—brought international media attention to the decades-long impacts of these southern debt traps, which effectively precluded social investment and massively increased economic inequality in many of the world’s poorest agriculture- and mineral-dependent states. In such locations, there was in the final case increased pressure to export migrants as a source of access to foreign capital remittances and thus to develop the Global South as the prime mover of “human capital” in the world system.
This produced ripple effects globally, as much of the Global South became dependent on oil-fueled shipping, export manufacturing, remittances, and the importation of dollars while the rich countries deindustrialized, moving toward service-centered economies. In the process, Asian nations with large “surplus” laboring populations expanded outmigration. For South Asia, which had already been the source of significant numbers of colonial and “brain drain” migrants in prior eras, there was a turn in outmigration destinations from Europe and the British settler colonies (the United States, Canada, and Australia) toward the Gulf states, which sought large numbers of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi workers initially for unskilled construction and industrial labor and later for other categories of domestic and service labor. Not only did the rapid economic expansion of the Gulf states following the oil price spikes of 1973–74 and 1979 generate the largest Asian labor migration corridor in history (eventually expanding across South and Southeast Asia, as I discuss in chapter 3), but it led to the development of production, trade, and financial networks that would sustain United States imperial power through the global economic crisis of the 1970s.
The formation of OPEC and the attempt of oil-rich countries to disrupt the control of oil by the Seven Sisters cartel (Anglo-Iranian Oil, Gulf Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil–California, Standard Oil–New Jersey, Standard Oil–New York, and Texaco—now BP, Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil) was part of a larger attempt by the decolonizing states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to develop sovereignty over economies that, due to colonial extraction practices, tended to depend highly on a single commodity. Nonetheless, the coordinated efforts of OPEC were narrowly limited to economic questions and, especially under the influence of Saudi policy, accommodated oil price planning to the broader prerogatives of the United States. Attempts to develop state sovereignty over oil in the Gulf in the 1970s thus failed to develop a broader third world project of cooperation among southern elites, instead exacerbating divisions between oil-rich states and agriculture- or mining-dependent states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.34 Yet as Iran and Gulf Arab states increasingly took control of extractive enterprises, oil became a potent commodity for state-led development schemes and an important tool for forging third world alliances and frictions.
If the oil boycott was ostensibly an effort by majority-Arab states to counter U.S.-funded Israeli settler colonialism in and beyond Palestine, the actual effects of the policy occurred broadly in the international system rather than affecting U.S. policy in Israel. First, by asserting pan-Arab sovereignty over oil in a narrowly economic fashion, the oil producers created a division among third world states that had been agitating in the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement for coordinated action to ensure profitable prices on key natural resource exports. Instead, oil exporters engaged in a much narrower action that massively increased their own extraction profits at the expense of the many oil-importing southern countries. Prospects for a leftist alliance among southern elites to challenge some of the neocolonial inequalities of the international economic order have never recovered, and even OPEC has persistently struggled to maintain discipline on production quotas among its own members, threatening to unravel the monopolistic exploitation of oil profits established earlier by the concession system of the colonial oil firms.35 Second, despite producing a supply crisis that briefly affected the U.S. consumer market, the recycling of Gulf petrodollars back to the United States (as Gulf states moved profits to U.S. banks and began importing more goods, including arms) ultimately helped to sustain the dollar and to secure the central place of the United States in international finance. There is no indication that the end of the dollar standard was a strategic financial strategy of the Nixon administration to maintain U.S. hegemony after Vietnam; however, the oil shock allowed the United States to reconsolidate a central role in international finance based on the establishment of the dollar as reserve currency for international trade. The limitations of a state-centered, elite version of national decolonization practiced in the Non-Aligned Movement were made clear in this moment of crisis. The outcome of these moves by the United States and the Gulf oil producers created a massive transfer of wealth to the Gulf, which would in turn buttress use of the dollar as the world’s international reserve currency—a development that breathed life back into U.S. finance even as the U.S. manufacturing base shrunk and U.S. monetary policy weathered a series of crises around diminishing exports and inflation.36 Despite the role Vietnam War debt played in helping to precipitate the global economic crisis of the 1970s, U.S. government debts could continue to be sustained due to the maintenance of the dollar as reserve currency. This debt exceptionalism—which finances the massive U.S. military footprint and other deficit spending—continues into the present, as the United States remains the only country whose balance of payment deficits does not substantially affect its currency or capacity for financing.37
These transformations in finance wrought by oil came at a time when the United States and much of Europe were deindustrializing, manufacturing bases were shrinking, and wartime military Keynesianism was being supplanted by privatization, massively shrinking working-class employment. The impact on Black and Latinx workers in the United States was acutely devastating, as they were less insulated by seniority and increasingly subject to unacknowledged forms of employment discrimination. As Asian manufacturing expanded during this contraction for Europe and the United States, massive waves of rural-to-urban migration accompanied the new industry. Although xenophobic discourses about job loss tend to suggest that Asians took jobs from whites, the human costs of adaptation to transnational regimes of production were massive, as state attempts to organize production to enhance capitalist development involved land dispossession and large-scale migration.38 If the oil shock led to large development projects in the Gulf that required new sources of labor, it also accelerated the reorganization of manufacturing accelerating new migration pathways from rural to urban areas across Asia. Although on a world scale, this coincided with the feminization of industrial labor, seen as more flexible by states and corporations alike, in the Gulf region, such migration followed a longer historical pattern in which male migrants departed first and women gained a small but growing share of the flows over time, particularly as demand for domestic and care laborers grew.39
Finally, much of the petrodollar surplus went to banks in the North, bailing them out of unsustainable debts and reinforcing a shift toward predatory lending to southern countries hobbled by inflation. Overall, as Gulf states received the largest postindependence transfer of wealth across borders,40 non-oil-producing states widely experienced recession and were ultimately forced into debt traps under the neoliberal conditions of the Washington Consensus, which erroneously suggested that “globalization” lifted all boats, including the global poor. Southern states (including Bangladesh) that accepted loans from outside donors were required to shrink the size of the state and to accept trade liberalization. Thus the dream of realizing national sovereignty over oil among southern elites helped contribute to the nightmare of neoliberalism’s entrenchment of economic inequalities and dependencies across borders. Not only did the Arab oil boycott sustain U.S. empire through its deepest financial crisis, but it helped to hobble the socialist or welfarist ambitions of countless nations attempting to redress the domestic and international inequalities created by colonialism, making them more dependent on market liberalization and export-oriented development.
For these reasons, some commentators argue that “empire” is no longer the proper term to describe the inequalities of the international system; a system of rentier finance capitalism may deposit profits in highly unequal ways across the Global South rather than concentrating power only in the North.41 But it is important to not jump too quickly to view the rise of the Gulf petrostates or East Asian industrialized economies as usurping U.S. empire, given their deep dependencies on U.S. consumer markets and dollar-denominated finance. While small ruling minorities win much of the economic gains due to oil profits, manufacturing profits, and speculative finance in Asia, urbanization and migration processes fuel forms of ethnic differentiation and conflict as well as continued precarity for those engaged in subsistence agriculture and small enterprise in the rural peripheries. Meanwhile, the maintenance of both dollar supremacy and the massive U.S. military footprint by cycling oil and dollars through the Gulf states helps to maintain an exceptional position for the United States in the geopolitical order. Although the dependence of several of the Gulf oil producers on the United States for rentier growth has come under duress since 9/11 and the expansion of unconventional oil production to diversify U.S. imports, the shifting of the oil supply has not significantly undercut the global demand for Gulf oil among a variety of importing states. One outgrowth of this situation is that regional powers led by Saudi Arabia—now the world’s largest arms importer—use their dollar reserves to purchase weapons, fueling the arms race in the region and contributing to the entrenchment of conflict within and between states.42 This has been most notable in Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of a war and humanitarian disaster in Yemen, but it has also been a longer-term trend in the region as U.S. and Russian interventions, Arab Spring protests, and regional conflict spur monarchal states to securitize against regional and global powers.
As such, the consolidation of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency following the 1973 oil embargo may not exactly constitute a preplanned strategy of empire, but it does present a case in which U.S. officials and Gulf states worked in concert in ways that used oil to buttress U.S. power in the world system, which resulted in massive forms of war-driven displacement and racialized contests over migration in the present. This represents a de facto continuation of U.S. empire through the crisis of the 1970s by establishing financial dependencies between the United States and rising Asian economies.43 This power did not mainly take the geographic form of direct colonial domination of different Asian nations by the United States but rather emerged from the financial implications of oil’s establishment of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which allowed massive borrowing for military ventures, the expansion of arms importation for cash-rich Gulf states, and the development of Indian Ocean and Pacific shipping routes, which enabled the rise of East Asian manufacturing. This last point became crucial as oil shipments from the Gulf to East Asian states, along with domestic increases in coal consumption, helped to fuel the transnational system of manufacturing for products ranging from small electronics to automobiles, textiles, and a variety of consumer goods. In the process, migration became a key adaptation strategy for several Asian nations facing the overlapping economic shifts of oil-driven inflation, population growth, structural adjustment, and, in some cases, rapid currency devaluation. Thus, the use of oil extraction to create a path for oil-rich countries to speed development in the 1970s enhanced economic divisions between the nonaligned countries as South and West Asia were incorporated into oil-fueled circuits of globalizing trade.
Debt, Development, and Displacement
Robinson’s account of racial capitalism was attentive to shifts in the scale of migration, moving from the accumulation of labor across the Mediterranean in southern Europe during the rise of capitalism to the mass kidnapping and commoditization of enslaved labor in the Atlantic trade. Robinson establishes that spatial alienation is one of the key forces driving the systemic reproduction of racial differentiation and management as capital shifts human populations that come into contact through circuits of exchange and migration. Moving beyond Robinson’s contexts, we witness increases in the total number of international migrants during the neoliberal era, coincident with the spread of industry, the reorganization of agrarian lands under large enterprise, and the establishment of export-oriented manufacturing. New waves of migration from South to North emerged following the end of World War II, following changes in citizenship rules in the colonial powers and the economic transformations of national independence in many areas of Asia and Africa between the 1940s and 1980. In the neoliberal historical juncture since the oil shock, there was an increase in both transborder and internal migration as basic features of economic life in many countries, compounded by the intensifying wealth inequalities, resource scarcity, and immigration restrictions in the North. Based on UN estimates, international migration increased from 79 million annual migrants in 1960 to 250 million in 2015, by which time approximately 60 million of those were defined as refugees. The two major spikes occurred in 1989 and 2015, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Syrian war generating mass displacement. Although in sheer numbers the United States and Germany currently remain the receiving countries with the largest population of international migrants, there has been marked growth in South-South migration, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are numbers three and six, respectively, on the list of top receiving countries. Other countries around West Asia—including Iraq and Lebanon—have experienced major migration flows as a result of post-9/11 wars.44 Approximately half of the current transnational migrants originate in Asia.45 One of the main shifts that happens with larger-scale migration, especially migration of agrarian populations, is urbanization and the creation of multiethnic cities. Whereas in 1950, 30 percent of the world’s population was concentrated in cities, by 2008 this number had surpassed 50 percent. In China alone, the boom in manufacturing and urban-led development created what is likely the largest and fastest urbanization process in history, with the urban proportion of the population rising from 36 percent in 2000 to 50 percent in 2010 (comprising some 670 million people).46 In South Asia, extreme poverty remains a key driving factor for rural-to-urban migration, and this migration tends toward the feminization of the labor force, which is preferred by transnational industry.47 Because the proportion of the population dwelling in cities remains the lowest in Asia and Africa, these are the regions experiencing mass agrarian displacement and the most rapid urbanization trends with the fastest-growing cities.48 The rise in various forms of xenophobic targeting of Asian and African immigrants outside their countries of origin has become commonplace, most spectacularly witnessed in the racist media reporting during the so-called European migrant crisis of 2015.49 Population growth remains an extremely unequal phenomenon, as speculation in land and urban housing continues unabated while poor migrants increasingly settle in large shantytowns at the urban periphery.50 As in other parts of the world, it is common for states in these regions to establish policies to discourage continued rural-to-urban migration to prevent overly rapid population growth in cities.51
It does appear that environmental pressures generated by the oil economy contributed to migration pressures. With sea level rise, extreme heat, particulate pollution, and increased flooding affecting large population centers across Asia, the vulnerability to weather-driven displacement and environmental toxicity has had a measurable impact on premature death rates and crop failure.52 Although coal may have played an outsize role in historical carbon emissions, oil’s role in the era of neoliberalism rapidly expanded emissions and, more significantly, tied those emissions to the systemic production of growth by creating the mobilities required for distance trades. One estimate suggests that two-thirds of carbon emissions over the last two centuries have been generated by the oil complex.53 So although coal is more readily substitutable by renewables in national energy infrastructures, oil is more deeply embedded across different technologies, including in shipping and other critical arenas of logistics that fuel transnationalization. Oil systemically reproduces dependence on itself, energizing circuits of migration through both the inequities and the environmental disasters it generates, particularly for coastal and agrarian populations.
In retrospect, the conjoined economic and environmental costs of neoliberalism were often minimized in English-language media focusing on globalization in the 1990s. Failing to account for the uneven geographies of accumulation and dispossession that came with the mass population movements and urban transformations of neoliberal economic globalization, U.S. and European journalists and economists writing after the fall of the Soviet Union often characterized globalization as benign or positive in its effects on human development. Such pronouncements worked in concert with triumphalist declarations of “the end of history” that began to frame the new postsocialist era for both the former Eastern bloc and nominally socialist states in Asia.54 Such expressions of the free-market ideology ignored at least four key facets of the neoliberal transformation that are important for understanding migration in the age of climate crisis: (1) the expanded economic dependency and deprivation wrought by the debt crisis affecting poorer countries, (2) the use of migration as a solution to the mass pauperization of the poor, (3) the externalization of the violent effects of amplified fossil fuel consumption into the biosphere, and (4) the centering of oil in international finance. Carbon-fueled forms of capitalist networking were pivotal in producing the myths of global integration and modernity even as growing structural racism suggested the underside to this form of uneven development. For Ruth Wilson Gilmore, given “the deepening divide between the hyper-mobile and the friction-fixed” across the international division of labor, globalization must be understood as a phenomenon in which “racism fatally articulates with other power-difference couplings such that its effects can be amplified beyond a place even if its structures remain particular and local.”55 This would be true even for populations that migrate due to political, economic, or environmental pressures—those that experience severe economic and mobility constraint after being spatially alienated from kin networks and resources at home.
The rise of the anti-corporate globalization movement as a challenge to neoliberal structural adjustment by 1999, the worldwide mobilizations against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and a series of movements challenging market authoritarians in the 2011 Arab uprisings and their aftermath have clarified the error of Thomas Friedman’s assessment that globalization had rendered the world “flat.”56 If worldwide and national levels of economic inequality have soared to record highs during this period as a result of rabid speculation and rentier capitalism, neither neoclassical nor Marxist accounts of financialization since the 1970s have specified the racial logic of this political economy. There is no post-Fordist capitalism (or capitalism in general) that is not a racial capitalism. In contrast to some Marxist analyses that define neoliberalism primarily as an austerity-based financial logic coincident with the shrinking role of the state and of fixed assets in the calculus of value, theorists of racial capitalism today assert that “accumulation by dispossession” is foundational to emergent logics of finance.57 A key element of these logics has been the proliferation of debt as a manner of securitizing the militarized extraction of labor and land. Irreducible to processes of elimination and exclusion aimed respectively at expropriating native land and accumulating migrant labor, finance’s racial logic involves corralling commodities, labor, and assets into ever more speculative and securitized instruments to promote circulation. Because the logic of financialization tends toward expansion of debt and proliferation of speculative bubbles that recast the value and profit capacity for different commodities, fixed assets, and enterprises, it has been transformative in intensifying the effects of enclosures and other racial regimes of property that displace poor people, rendering growing populations as surplus.58
Thus, in their reflection on the U.S. subprime housing crisis as an outgrowth of a racial geopolitics of debt, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Paula Chakravartty pose the problem of racial capitalism in a debt-fueled era of financialization as follows:
How could the predatory targeting of economically dispossessed communities and the subsequent bailout of the nation’s largest investment banks, instantly and volubly, be recast as a problem caused by the racial other (“illegal immigrants” and “state-dependent minorities”)? … Our interest is in situating the racial moment of the financial crisis in the last three decades of neoliberal backlash waged across the postcolonial (global) South. As a starting point for our discussion we assume that these recent histories are themselves embedded in the colonial and racial matrix of capitalist accumulation of land (conquest and settlement), exploitation of labor (slavery, indentured labor, forced migration), appropriation of resources, and ultimately the very meaning of debt.59
In this statement, da Silva and Chakravartty build on Robinson’s earlier account of racial capitalism. For Robinson, “The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”60 Given that da Silva and Chakravartty figure racial capitalism as a process that attributes moral failure not just to persons but also to places, crises of environmental extraction might also be understood as processes that transmute logics of space into time: places where migrants are concentrated, especially in coastal and other climate-affected regions, might appear as falling behind in development and in need of interventions that bring them up to speed with carbon-fueled production and urbanization processes. Even while oil maintains its high price on the international market, buoyed by continuing transborder conflict in the Gulf, the literature on environmental racism shows how zones of environmental precarity and toxicity concentrate the violences of dispossession and debt. Discussions of the intersection of environmental racism and racial capitalism have focused recently on the example of Flint, Michigan, where the loss of Black union jobs and economic decline cleared the way for a revanchist political formation to take control of the city’s utilities, eventually leading to the mass lead poisoning of the majority-Black population.61
This is also evident in the ways that climate adaptation discourses consider threatened agrarian livelihoods as disappearing sites where migration itself is supposedly a needed development strategy. For example, Kasia Paprocki documents how the embrace of shrimp aquaculture as a development strategy in the Khulna district of Bangladesh’s southern coastal zone reflects both that banks and NGOs have embraced large landholders’ desire to remove agrarian populations and that they have begun a process of speculating that urbanization will become a solution to this displacement. Naming this process of purported climate adaptation as “anticipatory ruination,” Paprocki emphasizes that organizations like the World Bank latch on to such schemes based on long-standing assumptions that urbanization is the path to development and that “development-induced migration should be seen as a (now-necessary) opportunity, instead of a threat.”62 The temporal management of environmental crisis results in a situation in which migration is configured, in advance, as a pathway to national development, reinforcing existing demands to displace agrarian populations and to expropriate land in the name of modernization. In chapter 3, we will witness how this plays out in the Bangladeshi state’s promotion of climate refugee discourse as a way to potentially bolster emigration-driven remittance growth.
Toward a Green Capitalism?
If contemporary racial capitalism thrives on speculation of future value, why doesn’t the system correct itself and more properly value oil as a declining asset, given the push for renewable energy and the likely scenario of technological transitions away from fossil fuels? The very public push by the Saudi crown for a high valuation of Saudi Aramco’s initial public offering gives a glimpse of why oil continued to command a high price even after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a lengthy campaign seeking a $2 trillion valuation for Aramco in public trading, financial analysts remained skeptical, and the Saudis were unable to launch the IPO on their terms on one of the major stock exchanges. The situation was further complicated by backlash against the Saudi government’s assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as well as heightened tensions with Iran, and the Saudis decided to offer Aramco shares on their own national exchange with an initial valuation of $1.7 trillion. Within weeks of trading, however, the stock price rose over 10 percent and topped $2 trillion, buoyed by investors from around the Gulf region. Leveraging the world’s largest publicly traded company, the monarchy generated over $25 billion in profit by selling just 1.5 percent of its shares. The purported goal was for the state to invest in a number of economic initiatives to diversify the economy away from fossil fuels.63 Alongside the Nitaqat policy, this step could point toward a future in which Saudi Arabia moves away from oil and migration dependency and toward new forms of national development. However, claims about how the Saudis will spend their oil profits remain open to evaluation as the kingdom continues to place massive investments in war.
The relatively high price commanded for oil—which is itself buoyed by the petrodollar financial circuit and the regional arms race—reflects the continued manner in which growth, development, militarism, and international trade are closely correlated to fossil fuel use in the present. This is not only so for rich oil producers in the Gulf; it remains the case for poor oil-importing, export-oriented neoliberal states in Asia. As such, it is not just investors who maintain that oil is central to contemporary global capitalism but also international development experts, who have attempted in recent years to develop more environment-based models for wealth measurement.
If oil was one of the primary drivers of a new, financialized regime of inequalities in the U.S.-dominated world system of neoliberalism, intergovernmental and nonprofit development agencies, alongside U.S. and European aid programs, have been the primary forces generating public responses to these inequalities. International development discourses have long framed poor countries as failing to achieve the benefits of modern capitalism because of governance and education failures. Despite the lengthy history in which colonial extraction worked to create colonized states as agrarian or extractive peripheries, and despite the way that the oil shock and neoliberal policies have in the past half century exacerbated the economic dependency of poor countries on outside capital, this framing of southern countries as outside the time of modern capital remains; contemporary racial capitalism is spatially capacious, but its logics are deeply invested in managing the time of the purportedly underdeveloped nations. Although Frantz Fanon, in “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” long ago warned of the neocolonial economic dependency that emerges from the relation of the newly independent state to transnational capital,64 development discourses continue to pathologize southern states and work to reinforce conditions in which internal migration (from rural to urban areas) and external migration (to wealthier countries in search of remittances) remain a key pathway to achieving a higher degree of “development.” In fact, attempts to integrate environmental factors and attention to climate-driven migration into such calculations of underdevelopment may in fact deepen international wealth inequalities by attributing speculative value to southern environmental systems—value that remains unrealized as actual capital to the agrarian poor or even to the neoliberal state. Paradoxically, the message of national wealth estimates based on natural capital is not that natural capital valuation will help these countries hold natural capital in reserve to prevent further environmental harm but that these countries must transform surplus natural capital in order to remedy deficits in produced capital—especially infrastructure and human capital—which may include exportable migrant labor. Thus, in working to conform the space of climate-affected regions to the temporal management of development as a national process of obtaining wealth, neoliberal development discourses and strategies continue to reinforce migration as they incorporate new thinking about environmental problems.
In the 2018 report The Changing Wealth of Nations: Building a Sustainable Future, a group of economists writing for the World Bank describes how capitalist development depletes the environment of a country. In this process, natural resources are converted into either produced or human capital. In their narrative, the economists develop a parallel concept of natural capital, which involves estimating the wealth potential of environmental systems in a particular country. Notably, in the description that appends natural capital to a developmental narrative about increased national wealth, oil-producing countries in the Gulf region become an exception, since they are able to attain high-income status without depleting the resource base:
The share of natural capital gradually declines as countries graduate from low- to middle- and high-income status. Human capital reaches 70 percent of wealth in high income OECD countries (and natural capital only 3 percent)—not by reducing the amount of natural capital but by adding more produced capital, especially human capital. This makes sense because economies can only move beyond subsistence production of food and shelter to manufacturing and services with the addition of human capital, infrastructure, and other produced capital. The exception is high-income non-OECD countries, dominated by the high-income oil and gas producers of the Middle East, where natural capital remains a large component of wealth.65
The Gulf oil economy here remains an exceptional case: it is the one site of extractive enterprise that remains profitable enough that entire national economies with levels of per-capita wealth greater than those of the United States and Europe can be sustained with a primary dependence on the “natural capital” of carbon resources rather than labor, euphemized as “human capital.” Outside these contexts of massive oil supply, natural capital is an object primed for conversion to human capital. And to the extent that poor countries fail to achieve development, their failure to effectively convert natural capital into sustainable produced or human capital reflects governance failure. Confirming long-standing criticisms from the anti-globalization movement, such forms of wealth measurement—which could overvalue the wealth of poor nations based on unrealized capital of the environment, justifying lower aid levels—reinforce the existing privatization and extraction models that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have long used to hobble attempts at socialist or welfarist development across the Global South.
Reinforcing the vision of natural capital–intensive states as unproductive and outside the time of modernity, such wealth calculation strategies fail to challenge the hegemony of the petrodollar and sustain the international division of debt access. Meanwhile, the temporal management of race—presuming peripheral “wastelands” subject to climate disaster as ripe for redevelopment without their current populations—proceeds apace despite environmentalist efforts to reorient capitalist views of time based on the deep time of environmental change. Studies coming out of traditions of political ecology and green Marxism have placed the crises of capitalism within ecological systems, refiguring the role of what Marx called primary or primitive accumulation within broader relations of extraction and systemic control of planetary metabolic processes. Thus for Jason Moore, the society–nature distinction was one that instituted a progressive narrative of civilization, rendering some humans as relegated to nature against the prerogatives of development.66
And yet even as we grant that environmental violences require us to pursue forms of thought and politics that look beyond the human, it should come as no surprise that projects to transcend anthropocentric ethical and political frameworks present new horizons of accumulation. This is an argument that critics of ecotourism and biotechnology have been making for some time. Over the past decade, neoliberal economists—especially those working in the development field—have developed detailed instruments and analyses for thinking natural and economic processes in tandem. Attempts to quantify natural capital—such as the university-NGO partnership the Natural Capital Project, the UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting, and the OECD’s Green Growth indicators—are in the process of developing increasingly complex models for valuing natural resources not just as tangible assets but also as agents of productivity. Yet the recognition of the economic force of natural resources and processes does not in itself involve an assumption of economic agency. Indeed, they may reinforce the racialization of vulnerable environments—and of development itself—for poor people increasingly affected by climate change and other environmental disasters. The lesson is not that these populations are emerging as new climate migrants but that the very forms of knowledge used to narrate their diminishing present and unlivable future entrench the suppositions of underdevelopment that make the long histories of extractive colonialism and oil-fueled neoliberalism generative of mass environmental racism.