#plantation capitalism

[thozhar]

Indian tea production has been in severe crisis since the mid nineties largely due to neo-liberal structural adjustments in the Indian economy. The size of the tea industry, which is second only to China and accounts for 25 percent of global tea production, has made this a huge blow to the country’s agrarian economy. The industry employs 1.26 million people on tea plantations and two million additional people indirectly. As such, the economic crisis has had an enormous impact on the lives of local residents. In Kerala where I have been conducting research, there have been eight cases of suicide and twelve deaths due to starvation on tea plantations since 2001. Along with utter poverty and famine, tea plantation workers have faced increasingly unhygienic work environments, shattered social life/community relations, and withdrawal of the welfare measures previously enjoyed. The crisis punctured the isolated environments of the plantations and precipitated neoliberal reforms that closed down production in many areas either partially or completely. While many families remained on the plantations, large numbers of workers who had lived there for more than five generations were now compelled to seek work outside. Some went with their families to either their ancestral villages or regional industrial townships such as Coimbatore and Tirupur in Tamil Nadu. These plantation workers have now joined the ranks of the massive Dalit workforce powering India’s unorganised and informal sectors. In joining that pool of workers, Tamil Dalit labourers are exposed to aspects of a caste-ridden society from which they had previously been shielded. The situation of Saraswathi, a female retired worker in her early sixties, illustrates the dilemma and struggles of the workers who moved out the plantations.

— The hidden injuries of caste: south Indian tea workers and economic crisis by Jayaseelan Raj

[nando161mando]

The pressure is mounting on Ecuador’s neoliberal government of Daniel Noboa, son of the country’s largest banana plantation owner. Workers’ unions held another large protest against electricity shortages that have resulted in months of constant blackouts.

[blueiight]

[sebastian] melmoth the wanderer v abramelin the mage

[phillyyardyvibes]

Jamaica tourism economy

Jamaica's tourism economy bears troubling similarities to a modern-day system where wages are deliberately kept low to benefit a select few. While the industry generates significant revenue, workers often face stagnant wages and limited growth opportunities, fueling a cycle where profits concentrate at the top rather than empowering the broader workforce 

[cathkaesque]

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here's a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country's GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is 'growing' and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

[chrysanthemum-aria]

okay I reblogged this earlier with a few tags but I kinda wanna talk more about how these remind me of the silent man-made forests in the Philippines

They're called "silent forests" for a reason. For context, these are big-leaf mahogany trees, trees not native to the Philippines, and is highly invasive. Because of this, the complex, intertwined relationships between flora and faune that have evolved throughout the ages are nonexistent. Not a single chirp to be heard. Mahogany leaf litter also alters soil composition, choking out any trees and plants trying to grow too.

The fact that this was an attempt at reforestation adds salt to the wound, as this could have been an opportunity to reforest any of the hundreds of vulnerable and endangered native tree species in the Philippines. Im pretty sure this is kinda old news and that there Are recent reforestation projects for said native trees, but as someome who loves birds and nature in general, this one instance makes me real sad

sources I used for my big-leaf mahogany callout post:

monoculture forests are deeply unsettling in a way that is hard to explain to people who do not spend a lot of time looking at forests

[charminglygrouped]

One of the major legacies of the British control of India was the planting of peoples of Indian origin all over the British Empire, including Britain itself. India was considered to be a reservoir of cheap labour. After African slavery was legally ended in 1833, ‘indentured’ labourers were recruited from India to work on plantations in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. This was slavery in a new guise: many laboured under conditions no less degrading than slavery. Thereafter wherever need arose, Indian labour was employed. Indians worked in the plantations and mines in Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, South Africa and Fiji. Indian labour provided the manpower to build the East African Railway. Indian sailors worked the British merchant navy. Indian soldiers not only helped to maintain the British Raj in India, but were used as cannon fodder overseas in colonial wars of conquest to extend its frontiers.

Indians were brought to Britain too. They did not come as ‘indentured’ labourers, but the principle of cheap labour applied here as well. Many Indian servants and ayahs (nannies or ladies’ maids) were brought over by British families returning from India. Indian sailors were employed by the East India Company to work on its ships. Some of these servants and sailors settled permanently in Britain.

One of the results of the policy of introducing western education in India was that, from about the middle of the nineteenth century, many Indian students began arriving in Britain, some on scholarships, to study law or medicine or to prepare for other professions. Some came to take the exami­nation for entry into the Indian civil service since this exami­nation could only be taken in London. Some Indian students settled in Britain after qualifying, to practise as doctors, lawyers or in other professions. Some Indian business firms opened branches in England. Nationalist politicians came to London, the centre of power, to argue the cause of Indian freedom. Indian princes and maharajahs visited England, not only as guests of the Crown on formal occasions, like the coronations, but also to pay their ‘respects’ to the monarch or for pleasure. London, as the metropolitan capital, attracted many visitors from India. Exhibitions of Indian arts and crafts were displayed in England too. The Asian presence in Britain therefore goes a long way back and forms a prelude to the post-independence migration of Asians to Britain.

— Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700-1947 (London: 1986), pp. 9-10.

[wonderlandwalker]

Remember | Finnick Odair x Reader

THG Masterlist / Taglist / Inbox

Summary: The capitol has taken you from him, but he won't let them keep you. You can find pt. 2 here!

Content Warnings/Tags: Violence, bullet wounds, major character injury, blood, needles, angst, fluff, no use of y/n

Word Count: 4.0k

Requested by Anon: omg I love your writing and I have an unhealthy addiction to reading angst so could you please write something about the reader being with peeta and Johanna when they where taken by the capital and her being with finnick and recovering while she’s in district 13? 🫶🫶

A/N: The way I smiled when I saw this request I swear. This one has been in the works for a little while and I thought it fit perfectly. It is angst you ask for and it is angst you shall get. I'm considering writing a part two but I'm not sure how to yet. My bad habit of not proofreading happened again and with this one especially it was way too long so if I made any major errors pls do let me know.

The Capitol.

You are currently in the Capitol.

At least that’s where you think you are. You remember being in the arena, you remember running towards the general direction you last saw Finnick, remembering the marks you had gone by in case you had to take a different route. You remember seeing Finnick's face through the plantation, you’d be able to recall those features anywhere. You remember something hitting you from behind and falling to the ground, too caught up in catching up with him to check your surroundings. You remember crying out in pain, hoping he’d hear you. But the next thing you remember is the vision of him slowly going out of focus and losing consciousness not long after. 

At least that's what you think happened.

At least you can still remember, that’s worth something right? You remember your past, and you remember the reaping that led to the arena. The flood of relief that went over you as you finally found your way back to him. You don’t know what happened to Finnick, he was there too after all, but you had needed to split up early. Maybe he had been caught off guard too. Maybe he escaped. Maybe they never even found him. Maybe with him being the idiot he could be, he was probably already on his way here, looking for you. Just like you would have done for him, and he would have called you an idiot then too.

You would get out of here one way or another, that much you knew, but you needed to remember more, you needed to remember the last look on his face, you hadn't had much time to take it in, but you remembered the furrow of his eyebrows, the same expression he always had when he was trying to concentrate, you needed to remember that.

You knew that once you did get out of here, Finnick would be furious, telling you that you had been reckless, that you shouldn't have let your guard down, shortly after telling you how worried he had been. And it would feel like coming home.

Your mind becomes hazier, and it is harder to remember. You feel your head throbbing, and you move your hand towards it until you feel it can move no further. You open your eyes slowly, trying to adjust to the bright light that covers the room. You can't see much, can't move your head much.

You remember the rendezvous point you had talked about. You remember the quick “don't get yourself in trouble” and the kiss he gave you right before you parted ways.

You remember the layers of plants and trees you moved through, seeing some of them cut down, letting you know someone else had been there

But you know there is more, more that you missed. The stomped-out ashes that you ran past, you know you should have paid closer attention. But you can’t remember

You need to remember what happened. How you got here. Who got you here. If you really are in the capitol. But your mind doesn't want to cooperate anymore. The room is getting darker and darker, even though the lamp above your head is still dutifully buzzing

You wake up, you still remember where you are, or at least where you think you are. You still remember yesterday, was it yesterday? Why couldn't they just hang a clock in here? 

You look up, and you see a device set up, not too far from where you're lying down. You try to get a better look but the light above your head is too blinding to see anything else in the room. You don’t fully understand it until a man walks into the room with a video camera in his hand and an expression on his face that seems just a tad too happy. 

The camera starts blinking a red light, signalling you that it has started recording. The man has a sort of laser that he presses into your lower stomach, it doesn't breach your skin but it hurts like it does. It takes all your energy not to show him the satisfaction of it.

“Come on now darling, work with me a little.” He says after a while, changing the setting on the laser. The last bit of your energy is gone, and you can't keep the screaming from escaping any longer. It echoes off the white walls around you and when you hear yourself, you barely even recognize it. He seems satisfied with the result and finally puts the laser down. You look down but don't see any burn marks or indication of what has just happened.

He comes closer and you can see he is holding a sort of crowbar, but you're not sure why. You remember how you always left one outside your window in the districts, in case the wind had shut it and you needed to sneak back in. You remember Finnick finding out, giving you a serious, disappointed look, but not telling you to stop.

Before you can think of anything else, the bar hits you with full force, right above the spot he was previously focused on. You didn't expect it, and it knocks the little breath you had left out of your lungs. He hits again, not in the same spot, but close, he is very clearly aiming for your ribs. The switching between high-tech and old-school weapons has you puzzled, but you can't deny the result either of them has.

After a while, he stops, and with the added difficulty and pain that now comes with breathing, you are more than certain he just bruised a few of your ribs.

He walks back, taking the camera in his hands. He aims it at your face and you close your eyes to try and collect yourself as much as your current state allows. Your hair is a tangled mess and you are rather certain there is blood smushed over your face from the cuts you got in the arena. 

“Smile for the camera sweetheart.” He asks, even though it sounds more like an order than a request. You open your eyes to look at him. He is so close, and you want to drive your thumbs so far into his eye sockets you can feel the front lobe of his brain, if he even has one. But you can't do anything, no matter how much you want to fight, you are powerless here. You close your eyes again, trying to block everything out and remember.

You remember District Four, the way the light summer breeze would always carry the smell of the beach to your house, no matter how hard you had it, it always livened you up. You remember the first time Finnick tried to teach you how to surf, being so gentle with you no matter how many times you fell off it, always there to catch you again. You remember your last birthday, well, the day after, but you couldn't even complain about that. He had picked you up from your place and brought you to one of the lakes with him. He told you the story of one of his birthdays when he was younger, along with all the embarrassing details, but of course, it only endeared him further to you. You told him about the presents you got and all the people who came to wish you a happy birthday. You told him everything you could remember. You remember last seeing his face, maybe it was the last time you will have ever seen it. No. No, you remember it, but you’ll see it again, you have to.

“I’ll make sure your loverboy gets to see this, wherever he is, wouldn't want him to miss out on the fun.” 

Finn. Finnick. You remember Finnick. You remember when you returned from your first games. The black eye and broken arm you came home with. You remember how he lost it when they didn't immediately treat you for it. He would now either throw a fit over it for everyone to see or be so stoic in his thoughts even Johanna would get a little concerned.

You see the man standing up, walking to the table, and picking up something new. A syringe, it's a syringe. He walks over and pushes it into your upper arm, and before you know it, your vision turns black again.

You remember waking up to gunshots, and you panic. But after a few seconds, you figure out they’re not near you. There is, however, someone in the room with you, it's the same man again. He looks a little panicked, but you can’t figure out why just yet. The gunshots are becoming louder, and closer, and he seems more startled now. His arms drop to his sides from what he was doing and his eyes widen. Screams are echoing and you can hear footsteps.

You remember that pattern of paddling feet, and you recognize the second pair of steps too, but you can't remember much else.

The man gets closer to you, placing his hand over your mouth, pulling out a gun with his free hand and telling you to stay quiet. You never understood why people say that, it means he has something to lose, and you want to scream out, but your voice doesn't remember how to.

It's even closer now, right outside the door, and you can hear talking. You remember his voice. How he always asked you so sweetly how your day had been, the way he whispered sweet nothings in your ear as you fell asleep. 

You hear the door jiggle, and it makes you want to scream out for him, but your sore throat won't let you. For a moment you think that is it, you had your chance, and you let it go by. He’ll move along the hallway to the other doors and leave you here. But then you hear another gunshot, and they must have shot the lock, because right after you hear someone running into the door with an echoing thump as it breaks open. 

The man next to you had his gun pointed at the door, and he changes it to point at you instead. 

You were right, by the gods you had never been so thankful to have been right. Finnick walks in, and you can see the colour drain from his face as he does so. 

The man standing next to you is starting to get nervous, you can see the sweat starting to drip down his face. He must realize he has been matched, because there are more people by Finnicks side. But the man still has his gun pointed at you, and this isn't over just yet.

You can't keep your eyes open anymore, and when you close them, you remember. You remember your first kiss with Finnick, how nervous he had been at the time. He had been shaking a little and told you he was embarrassed by how much you got to him, but it only endeared him further to you.  He yells at the man to let go of the gun, he sounds nervous again.

But he doesn't let go, he decides to shoot. 

You hear the bullet leaving the gun, and for a single moment, you think it's over. The last thing you’ll ever see is Finnick, but he’s not himself. He’s upset, and even though you know he’s not upset with you, it still tugs at you. Except when you feel the bullet piercing through your skin, that's exactly what you realise. You can still feel it. He didn't shoot you right in the heart, he didn't shoot towards your head, he shot you in the abdomen. You’re not sure why, not sure why he didn't kill you, but you will never know, because not even a second passes as you hear a second gunshot, and he falls to the floor.

You can't seem to remember how to open your eyes, but you can hear Finnick rushing over and right as he reaches you, you fall. You fall into his arms and the memory of it gives you hope. Something comes in contact with your stomach, and the agony of it makes you want to scream out. You can feel him lifting you, and the shift of your body makes the bullet move, making you want to scream again. And if you remembered how to, you would have.

You know he’s talking to someone, but it sounds more like buzzing to you. You can only make out certain parts of the conversation, something about needing to leave, something about infections, and something about an aircraft. 

You can hear him talking again, and this time it’s directed at you. There’s a strain in his voice, and it sounds like he’s crying. It makes you want to comfort him, but you don’t remember how to.

“Please darling, just open your eyes."

But you’re afraid, youre afraid that if you open them, everything will turn out to be nothing but a dream, and he won’t be here anymore. But even if this is a dream, you need to see him. Even if it will turn into a haunted memory, you need to see his eyes looking back at you. It takes you some effort, but you open your eyes, looking at him. You can see tears flooding his face, you can see his lips moving, silent pleas coming from them for you to stay awake. He’s telling you how good of a job you’re doing, he's telling you to hold on. He promises that he won’t let anything bad happen to you ever again and that he won’t let go of you anymore.

You remember how he cried when you were reaped for the 75th games, and how you had told him everything would be okay, how you had comforted him, but you don't have the energy to comfort him this time. You remember hearing his sobbing, his shaking voice when you close your eyes again, not being able to keep them open any longer, even if you wanted to.

You wake up again, and for a moment you think it had indeed all been a dream, that you were right back where you had started, But then you remember the bullet in your stomach. You look down and see a bandage over it, even though it’s already soaked in blood. They must have taken it out. 

You try and concentrate, and you can hear Finnick talking to someone. “Just tell me, I know it’s bad but I need to know.” “Finnick, it won’t make a difference.” The person he’s talking to sounds desperate, and you remember how stubborn he could be when it came to you. 

But you don’t remember more, because your head starts to feel light again and you give in to the feeling.

When you wake up again, you manage to open your eyes, and you can see someone sitting in a chair next to the bed you're in. He’s slumped over, his face half pressed into the mattress and half into your stomach, both of his hands are holding onto one of yours. It hurts a little, but you don't mind, because it reminds you, even when you look away, that he is still there. You remember the way he always softly snores, and the way he wiggles his nose when your hair falls over it.

You think you're connected to a monitor, because something is beeping in the same rhythm you can feel your heart beating, and it gives you a headache. So you close your eyes again, and once again, you give in to the feeling of sleep that looms over you.

Since you had been brought to District 13, he has barely left your side. He keeps putting cold washcloths on your forehead to try and break your fever. It won't help, and he knows it, but no one has the heart to stop him. 

You haven't shown a single sign of life since they had found you. It was unsettling, the silence that filled the room, none of your usual laughter and banter there to replace it. 

It’s only when Finnick's head shoots up that the others notice it as well. The steady beeping that has been imposing the silence in this room for weeks picking up its pace. The beating continues to go faster and faster, your body shaking up from the bed in almost the same rhythm. But right before anyone can do anything about it, it stops. It all seems to stop, you stop moving, and the monitor stops beating.

He starts giving you chest compressions, and someone rushes into the room holding a small bottle, they fill a syringe with the clear liquid and inject it into your arm. Within a few seconds, your heart starts beating again. But it’s only after a minute of the monitor showing him a steady heartrate that he stops his actions.

It’s dark in the room when Finnick wakes up, and if it wasn't for the soft light and the beeping of the monitor, he would've thought he was dreaming, but it seems the reality won’t let him escape. He struggles not to fall back asleep, and every few minutes he does, but every time he wakes up startled again, scared that you’ll be gone if he doesn't open his eyes every once in a while. It was easy to see the toll it had taken on him. His posture was slouched, his face less well-groomed than usual. But no one could blame him, because they could see the way he looked at you, as if you were the sun and your dimmed light turned his world dark. 

He knows the chance you can hear him is small, but he feels the urge to talk to you nonetheless. 

“I don't think I can hold this in any longer. I remember some studies that have shown people in comas do hear what's going on around them, but maybe it’s for the best that you don’t, because you would never say yes.”

He continues but he feels his voice choke up, and he runs a hand through your hair to calm himself down, his other hand still holding onto yours.

“We talked about it once, I still remember every single word you said. You came at me with all your logical reasons for why it would be a bad idea. But what you never understood is that when it comes to you, I'm not able to think rationally, because my love for you will overpower anything else.” He chuckles softly as he recalls the memory he’s about to tell you next.

“I remember when I opened up to you for the first time. I had always held things to myself, but you were so calm as I talked to you. I thought for sure I had screwed it up somehow then. Everyone always tells me now how happy you make me, and they're right. Ever since you came into my life there has not been a single moment when the thought of you did not bring me joy, even when we fought my memories of you could still somehow bring a smile to my face. 

I remember when they showed me the video, they hadn't wanted me to see it, but you know how stubborn I can be when it comes to you. I saw you, I saw the way in which they were hurting you. And I started yelling, ironically enough in that moment, you were the only one that could have calmed me down. I remember yelling at them, fighting with them not to wait any longer, that they couldn't let you wait any longer, they had to have me sedating until they came to a conclusion."

He reaches into the pocket of his trousers, taking a small ring. It was his mother's ring, he had found it a while back and had carried it with him ever since. He had thought of moments to give it to you, but every time there was one, every time he was about to ask you, something had happened, something had interrupted him. But there was no one interrupting him this time. “I have thought about asking you this every time I see you, and I can't hold it in any longer. So when you wake up, not if you wake up, because I know you will. I know you will wake up because you have to. So when you wake up, will you marry me.” A little part of him had thought you'd wake up, that you’d answer him. Even if you said no, it would still be better than what's happening right now, because he didn't care if you'd say no, if you’d say you weren't ready, because nothing could be worse than the silence that followed him. And so he slid the ring onto your finger delicately, as if you were to disappear if he wasn't careful. He put the ring on your hand because he knew that even if it wasn't today, and it wasn't tomorrow, someday you would marry him, and he wouldn't let you slip away.

At first, he thought he was imagining it, sleep deprivation and desperation playing a trick on his mind. But then he saw it again, in the beams of morning light he could see your hand moving, as if it was trying to grasp onto something, trying to pull you back into this world. It woke him up in an instant. But it was all followed so fast, the way your eyes slowly opened, squinting at the light. Before you had even awoken for a second, he moved from where he had been right beside you in order to hug you. And he was about to get lost in the thought of your moving lips, tears falling down his eyes, about to get lost in a kiss full of built-up pain and desperation when he noticed, something was wrong. Your eyebrows were knitted together and the corners of your mouth turned down just a little. He looked at your expression, your body language, something was wrong. You looked vulnerable, you looked like you wanted to protect yourself from someone.

It was only when he looked into your eyes that he truly understood something was very wrong.

Your eyes looked as if you were in pain, but it wasn't a look of any physical pain, it looked as if something was endangering you, but he couldn't understand what it was. He slowly moved so as not to startle you and asked you “Darling, what’s wrong” And at first you didn’t respond, but when he kept looking at you, expecting him to answer you, you started to speak. “Am I supposed to remember you?” 

He immediately flinched back at the statement, his shoulder sunk and his eyes dimmed. Someone told him it wasn't uncommon for brain injuries to cause short-term memory loss after a coma.

So slowly, and surely, he made it work. But it was crumbling him down every time you didn't remember the unconscious acts of affection, so foreign to you now. A quick touch on your arm as he walked towards you made you flinch slightly as if his hand had been on fire. The subtle smiles he gave you when entering a room were now met with you looking down. The way that even though you were physically here, you really weren't. 

He promised himself, he vowed to himself that he would make you remember. That no matter how long it took, he would wait for you. He would wait for you to remember, make you remember. Because he had very quickly learned that he couldn’t live without you anymore.

Part 2: Trying to Forget

[probablyasocialecologist]

In her fascinating study of the dense networks of entanglement, contradiction, and conflict in Indonesia’s forests, many of which are today being razed for palm oil plantations, anthropologist Anna Tsing encourages us to recognize that capitalism advances through the friction between its universal logic of accumulation and the particular cultures, lifeways, and structures of power in each locale. Contrary to the dreams of a “friction-free” capitalism promised by billionaire, philanthropist, and self-styled intellectual Bill Gates, capitalism is defined by conflict and tension. Gates is only the latest of a long line of capitalist thinkers to dream that the free market, if allowed to flourish without regulation, will create a smooth world where the hardworking and talented, no matter their origins or station in life, could compete to succeed, and that this competitive striving would have beneficial effects for global society at large: greater wealth and greater innovation. Even many critics of capitalism fall prey to the myth of frictionlessness in their attempts to explain the nefarious clockwork of this demonic machine that metabolizes people and the earth not only into profit, but into the energy that fuels system’s endless reproduction and expansion. Tsing’s insistence that we look to the friction encourages us to recognize that what moves this machine forward (and halts its “progress”) is the friction that stems from forms of complicity and resistance, acquiescence and refusal that define every point where the abstract system of capitalism encounters the material realities of the entangled earth and its people.

Max Haiven, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire

[psychotrenny]

Yeah China had one of the most monetised economies in the world for centuries. Previously (since about the 12th century) the Yuan dynasty and their Ming successors had issued paper fiat currency but run-away inflation led to the Ming abandoning that idea during the 15th century and began replacing them with Silver coins. Silver had always been relatively rare in Eastern Eurasia compared to the West (where as meanwhile gold was relatively common) and about the time reintroduction of silver coins really started ramping was when the global maritime trading network of Europe really got established. There was massive demand in Europe for all manner of Chinese goods (silks and other fabrics, porcelain, tea) and the Spanish became very reliant on imports from other parts of Europe they paid for with their Silver coins. So the you had Europeans (both the Spanish themselves trading through the Philippines and other Europeans who used coins they had earlier acquired from the Spanish) very willing and able to meet the massive and expanding demand for silver China was experiencing at the time. However a lot of European sovereigns were worried about the impacts that the draining of their silver reserves would have and desperately tried to find some other less valuable good they could trade for Chinese products. By the 18th century the British had found their answer in Opium (grown in their Indian colonies on largely former cotton fields after the growth of the Egyptian and USamerican cotton industries drove them out of business) and this trade was so lucrative they were willing to go to war to maintain it. But even as the flow of silver into China eased up the volumes of Pesos that remained in circulation were sufficient to maintain their position as a widely accepted currency into the 201th century

One of my favorite little facts about history is that the Mexican peso was functionally the everyday unit of currency in China in the 19th and early 20th century. Silver was one of the few western commodities that Chinese merchants were willing to trade in at rates that made shipping it to China (an expensive, arduous process) profitable; this trade became so voluminous by the 19th century that large everyday transactions even far away from port cities were conducted in pesos, in large part because Mexico's large domestic silver supply and existing transpacific trade links meant that the currency was stable (a known quantity to merchants in a time and place where relatively pure silver coins were otherwise uncommon) and readily available for use in trade

[nando161mando]

[blueiight]

ldpdl, ethnicity, and the false monolith of blackness

there's this false tendency to think amc louis being made black is pandering, or a means of removing louis from his oh-so-detailed /sarcasm/ background in the books. i also find that people tend to not even understand what show louis's ethnic background is, despite rolin jones the showrunner and even the fictional louis both coalescing around this multigenerational explanation of the gens de couleur in new orleans, and how jim crow disempowered them.

I came around to his ethnicity a sort of interesting way which is through Lestat. [ … ] I was like lets give him a legitimate a third attempt at figuring how to be with somebody for the rest of his life and how to not repeat your mistakes. [ … ] I started from there so it had to be someone with some money cause he had to be with his own folks and I thought he wanted someone who could fight back and who could be a challenge and would force him to restrain himself. And nobody at AMC was interested in 7 seasons of the regretful plantation owner, so we made Louis come from a lineage that did have a plantation and did own slaves.

rolin jones in the s1 post-finale episode of the podcast names how he came to this understanding of louis's character. lestat, after failing to make a bride of his mother, and a concubine of nicki, was seeking for someone of a similar background, or the most approximate equivalent. he would not have been interested in louis if louis was an anglophone baptist black man descended from upper-south arrivals into new orleans, nor would he have been interested in louis if louis was a poor black creole honestly s1 does not give a good reading of claudia's ethnic bg in new orleans, but since she cannot understand french, we can presume shes either a poor creole removed from her cultural background with her vampiric adoption narrative in mind, or was also of an anglophone baptist black background like claudia was. louis coming from this fallen sort of gentry, the free gens de couleur, similar to that of the tvl lestat who came from this barren aristocracy dating back to the crusades, was key to lestat's long-term goals with louis.

Capital accrued from plantations of sugar and the blood of men who looked like my great grandfather but did not have his standing. But then decades of Jim Crow and the electrified light of a new century had vanquished any idea of a free man of color. - AMC IWTV 1x01

louis was of the first generations of the gens de couleur to be born, raised into, and face the institutional and personal ramifications of being viewed as black in america. this fuels much of the character's rage as he moves through storyville, trying to continue the similar modality of exploitation to the contrary of pretty baby with brooke shields, majority of the brothel circuit was statistically black girls + women being sexually pawned off to white men but ultimately failing to do so bc of the anglophone white american class that now rules over him. [tom anderson, alderman fenwick, finn o’shea starting out as louis’s subordinate then ending w/ him entering whiteness by having a sporting house throwing torches at louis’s brothel in s1e3]

By 1850, the free population of color, beset by the hostility of white supremacy, was economically diminished and residentially segregated. The Americanization of Louisiana, and in particular New Orleans, was completed before the state became the sixth to secede from the Union in 1861 in the struggle over the perpetuation of slavery. [link] The Democratic redeemers who came to power in 1877 lost no time in redefining the Negro's "place" in Louisiana life. They immediately restored the color line in the New Orleans public schools and offered silent support to de facto segregation practices in places of public accommodation. With the assistance of two landmark decisions by the United States Supreme Court, the redeemers soon dismantled the egalitarian legal apparatus put together piece by piece under the Radicals. Finally in 1890 they began to write their "final solution" into Louisiana law with a series of "separate but equal" statutes. Soon New Orleans Negroes were again segregated in virtually every public pursuit. [link]

[fatehbaz]

Originally I had attached these tags about British imperial forestry to a post about United States treatment of forests, Indigenous peoples, and land administration from 1900-ish to 1935-ish, during a transition period when clear-cutting logging was threatening profit so the US turned to a German- and British-influenced "sustained yield" forestry paradigm:

And in response, someone added:

In the midst of the first Empire Forestry Conference of scientists, academics, and administrators in 1920, the chairman of the Forestry Commission of Britain, Lord Lovat, said that forests were "grown for use and not for mere ornament ... Forests are national assets only so far as they supply the raw material for industrial development."

Rajan (in Modernizing Nature) directly quotes professor of forestry at Oxford, R.S. Troup, who had been influential in the Indian forest service; at the same forestry conference in 1920, Troup promoted sustained yield like this: "Conservation was a 'wise and necessary measure' but it was 'only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire'. The ultimate ideal was economic management [...], which regarded forests as capital assets, fixed annual yields in such a manner as to exploit 'to the full interest on this capital [...]' and aimed for equal annual yields so as to sustain the market and provide regular supplies of timber to industry."

One of the big - and easily accessible/readable - summaries of the shift to sustained yield and rise of US and British administrators embracing "economic management" of forests:

Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Economic Development, 1800-1950. S. Ravi Rajan. 2006.

Concise look at the trajectory from East India Company and Royal Navy timber reserves; to British foresters training in Germany and/or in German traditions (including sustained yield) before joining as officers in the powerful British-Indian land administration bureaucracy; to US scientists being trained by those British administrators; to 1920s/1930s Empire Forestry Conferences promoting industry while identifying forests as essential to power.

---

This has also been covered by:

Vinita Damodaran, Richard Grove, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Jonathan Saha, Gregory Barton, Rohan D'Souza.

More summaries of the situation (shorter length, accessible):

"Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism? European Forestry, Colonial Forests and the Agenda of Forest Management in the British Empire, 1800-1900". S. Ravi Rajan, In: Nature and Orient: Essays on Environmental History of South and South East Asia, 1998.

"'Dominion over palm and pine': the British Empire forestry conferences, 1920-1947". J.M. Powell, Journal of Historical Geography, Volume 33, Issue 4, October 2007.

Elsewhere, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley described it like this: 'These forest reserves [...] did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather "a more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing new landscapes [...]."' While Sharae Deckard adds: '[T]he subversive potential of the "green" critique [...] was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods [...].'

---

And the book:

Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire, Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand.

Edited by Damodaran and D'Souza, with work from conferences hosted by Grove, in 19 chapters including:

"Worlds Apart? The Scottish Forestry Tradition and the Development of Forestry in India" (K. Jan Ootheok); "Redeeming Wood by Destroying the Forest: Shola, Plantations and Colonial Conservancy on the Nilgiris in the Nineteenth Century" (Deborah Sutton); "Nature's Tea Bounty: Plant Colonialism and 'Garden' Capitalism in the British Empire" (Jayeeta Sharma); "Industrialized Rainforests: The Ecological Transformation of the Sri Lankan Highlands, 1815-1900"; "Forestry and Social Engineering in the Miombo Woodlands of South-Eastern Tanganyika" (Thaddeus Sunseri)

---

Rajan also points out (again in Modernizing Nature):

"[An] extremely important aspect to the repackaging [of forestry science and management] [...] [and] a critical principle that stands out here is that of sustained yield, or sustainability (Nachhaltigekeit). This concept was fundamental [...]. By the turn of the [twentieth] century a large pan-colonial [British-United States] scientific community was in existence, trained in the German and French tradition of forestry [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of [British] India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' [...]. Dietrich Brandis [...], considered the founder of Indian forestry [...] married Rachel Marshman, who was [...] also the sister of the wife of General Havelock, a close friend of Lord Dalhouse, the then governor-general of India. On Havelock's recommendation, Brandis was put in charge of the forests of [...] Burma [...] and was subsequently appointed inspector-general of forests of India. [...] He also trained prospective foresters of the forest department of the USA, including Gifford Pinchot. [...] Chancellor Bismarck gave the visiting British Prime Minister Gladstone an oak sapling [...]. Prussia prided itself on helping devise [...] modern forest management. [...] [T]he Forestry Commision [...], [or] [t]he Imperial Visionaries, as they became known, believed that an increase in primary production in the tropical dependent empire would result in the growth of the British economy. [...] They deemed their own job to be serving the imperial economy."

---

And also:

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. GA Barton, 2002.

"Colonialism and Green Science: History of Colonial Scientific Forestry in South India, 1820-1920". VM Ravikumar Vejendala, Indian Journal of History of Science, 47:2, pages 241-259, 2012.

"Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History." Vinitia Damodaran and Richard Grove, in Nature's End: History and the Environment, 2009.

"The Reconfiguration of Scientific Career Networks in the Late Colonial Period: The Case of Food and Agriculture Organization and the British Colonial Forestry Service" by Jennifer Gold, and "A Network Approach to the Origins of Forestry Education in India, 1855-1885" by Brett M. Bennett. Both chapters are form Science and Empire, 2011.

Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Joseph Morgan Hidge, in Series in Ecology and History, 2007.

Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia. Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, 2005. And also: "Peninsular Malaysia in the context of natural history and colonial science." Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, 2009.

"Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 1". Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Lee Peluso, Environment and History 12, no. 1, pages 31-64, February 2006.

[genderkoolaid]

I think feminism is the historic movement that seeks to reorganize care on a planetary scale, in a way that really meets people's needs, as opposed to the needs of the state and capital, wherein a private household becomes the factory manufacturing a binary between production and reproduction, between the waged and the unwaged spheres, and, by extension, what we think of as men and women. That division of labor is really foundational to how we define, for instance, sex workers and people who historically were ungendered and unmothered—for instance, black women in the plantation context, where they worked side by side with men. We are ongoingly incapable of treating the gender of people in those groups as commensurate with the gender of, you know, the unwaged middle-class white mother. This partitioning is what informs a phobic response to those who sell what we think of as sacred bodily labor. [...] The partitioning is actually doing the state's work for it by policing the boundary between dignified, uncontaminated womanhood and prostituted, victimized womanhood. That's a foundational contradiction internal to feminism that has been being worked out for over 150 years.

— Sophie Lewis in "A feminist utopianism" by Tracy Clark-Flory

[mesetacadre]

are these groups part of the proletariat?

farmers

priests/nuns

retail salesmen

strippers

people who invest in stock

taco truck owner

actors and singers

Priests, salesmen, sex workers, and actors/singers are all workers. Priests sell their labor-power to the church they're a part of, traditionally for extremely low wages as well. Salesperson is just one function a worker can have within a retail workplace, sex workers sell their labor-power to a capitalist as well. Actors and singers, and more generally people in the entertainment industry sell their labor-power in exchange for a salary. As I explained in the post I assume you're asking about, in some cases that salary is so high that it enables some workers to acquire private property and become part of the bourgeoisie themselves. In any case, the basic economic relationship is still that of a proletariat's

"Taco truck owner" has it in the name, they own a small amount of private property, and sometimes 1 or 2 workers. Investing in stock requires capital, and stock itself is also capital.

As for farmers, it depends on what exactly you mean. Historically, although nowadays it is practically extinct, the peasantry as a class were a holdover from feudal production, an exploited class distinct from the proletariat. Their production was individualized, as opposed to socialized in the case of proletarian production. They often produced only for themselves and some type of lord who owned the land. They were largely adjacent to the proletariat, but some aspects of their economic relations also sometimes placed them closer to the petty-bourgeoisie.

Most farmers nowadays are large landowners who own large amounts of machinery and employ specialized workers, while others (in the imperial core) are still landowners but they instead rely on cheap labor by migrant workers, sometimes undocumented ones, allowing for practically slavery conditions. These agricultural workers are proletarian, distinct from their historical ancestors of feudalism, in that they only earn a salary, and don't own their tools nor their land. Their production is also almost exclusively geared towards the national and international market, it's not individualized production. This is even more marked in the imperialist relations that govern the monoculture plantations of the global south.

[vague-humanoid]

Welcome to Abolition Week 2024. 

This year, our focus is Empire, its endless expansion, and the carceral technologies that make it possible. We have invited incarcerated and other systems-impacted writers to explore how the combined forces of Western imperialism and plantation legacies produce carceral logics globally, creating the conditions that fuel genocidal arrangements in the US South, Palestine, and other parts of the world. 

Our intimate connection to the South allows us to hold sharpened perspectives on the many ways that carcerality and antiblackness are integral to the white supremacist capitalist imperialism at the very heart of Empire. Therefore, we are always interested in the things that connect us, the ties that bind us together in solidarity in the shadow of that dark heart. 

We read about how the corpses left decomposing in the streets of Sudan have changed the migration patterns of eagles, and we can't help but remember that sharks altered their migration routes during the Transatlantic slave trade, trailing the ships and feasting on the flesh of the stolen Africans thrown overboard. We condemn the welcoming of Israeli police by the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program to train US police in the same tactics used against Palestinians on the other side of the world, and we recall that Georgia also houses the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC)—once known as the School of the Americas—where Latin American dictators, soldiers, and police are trained to quell resistance against US imperialism in their countries through human rights abuses. We witness the organized effort to roll back child labor laws across the US—particularly in the South—with children discovered working long hours around dangerous machinery in Alabama and Mississippi, and we cannot forget the many thousands of children mining Cobalt for the lithium-ion batteries in our gadgets under "modern-day slavery" in the Congo. 

The afterlives of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide can be glimpsed in deadly exchange programs and torturous conditions, not only in the shared counterinsurgency tactics of global policing forces and military institutions but also in the shared cultures of repression necessary to accumulate capital and, by extension, imperial expansion. Book bans, repeals of LGBTQIA+ rights, police violence, anti-protest policies on university campuses and in their surrounding communities, abortion bans, the erosion of public health infrastructure, and exacerbating environmental degradation are all rooted in past epochs that, when revealed, remind us that the sun never sets on imperial violence. 

Because of these connections and many others, the pieces in this series intentionally defy the logic of borders—and, by extension, containment—as writers consider the endless nature of Empire and its sinister violence.